For background on the recent cyber-terrorists reports from London, we offer the Council on Foreign Relations' 1995 report: NON-LETHAL TECHNOLOGIES Military Options and Implications Report of an Independent Task Force The long history of military operations has been marked by steady increases in the lethality of weapons. U.S. commanders and policymakers face excruciating dilemmas in decisions to use lethal force. They strive to maximize protection of their own troops and to minimize collateral casualties among noncombatants. Authoritarian regimes -- as in Iraq -- and factions in civil wars -- as in Bosnia -- may see fear of American casualties as one factor in deterring intervention against them. Terrorists, guerillas, and other irregular forces often exploit noncombatant populations by mounting attacks from their midst. Can technology, ease these dilemmas by providing acceptable, effective non-lethal capabilities to supplement conventional weapons across a broad spectrum of conflict? In major wars or similiar cases of high-level violence, can such capabilities reduce the risk to U.S. forces by, in effect, substituting technology for manpower in performing certain missions, for example, by shutting off power transmission and communications of adversaries? In situations short of traditional warfare -- for example, the humanitarian intervention in Somalia -- can non-lethal systems help provide calibrated coercion proportional to the objectives? How do they relate to the lethal systems on which U.S. forces depend? What policy issues do such technologies pose? In this report a bipartisan task force, including former Air Force and Army chiefs of staff, leading scientists, and other experts, examines these questions. The task force concludes that a number of non-lethal technologies deserve serious consideration in U.S. planning and development for future military contingencies. http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/nltech.htm (47 kb) Beware snooping, consider using the anonymizer at: http://www.anonymizer.com ----- Or, if http fails, NLT_ech to <jya@pipeline.com>