So 1,000 people come to storm your house and kill you. You disable 500 of them with non-leathal weapons before they get to you. Now what?

> I know I know, I'm being naïve here, but considering the amount of technology we have today, and the budget these giant nations have, we can probably have it so that a drone can go in and fire something like "containment foam

Todays warfare, especially considering the Russian/Ukraine war and the anticipated US/China war is highly mechanized. 70t MBTs, HIMARS with rocket assisted GLSDB attacking targets 150km away, Hypersonic missiles with a 4-digit range, ICBMs with multiple smart warheads and a thousand other goodies are not exactly impressed with "foam".

Direct infantry attacks play only a relatively small role. You need to disable the enemies vehicle, their ammunition, their bunkers, their communication system, their sensor systems, their material depots ... and only then comes the infantry with a relatively low priority compared to the rest.

> to have "clean" wars

Clean wars do not work with Nations who do not uphold the UN charta ...

Less-than-lethal weapons will be used for police / peacekeeping / riot control usage or for special situations where you want to avoid a high level of civilian casualties for political, propaganda or legal reasons, but as long as there is no reliable way to permanently disable a J20 Mighty Dragon, a M1 A3/S3 Abrams or a Panzerhaubitze 2000 without getting yourself killed, bullets and their big brothers will remain the only option to enforce an end of a war.

Because no one (see Ukraine) will accept defeat just because their soldiers were disabled.

SYL

switch to lethal knowing at least 500 aren't dead? I know it's more effective to make sure a body won't move again, but we have the means and the science to reduce that number.

I get that, and see this is why I'm asking since I'm pretty ignorant about the realities of war, but shouldn't it be a solution to look into on the possibility that it exists?

Star Trek had a really good lesson along these lines. The horrors of war are why we try to avoid them through other means. Without the suffering war never ends

The Weapons were created with the intention to kill. Their lethality is feature, not a bug… They aren’t interested in finding a “fix” for this, because that goes against the entire point of war. Making them “safer” literally makes them less effective as weapons…

I know, but it'd be great if there we more options than just loss of life

Yeah, but what I’m saying is that, loss of life is the intention. That’s why these weapons are being created in the first place.

Lets talk about a strictly hypothetical war, because I would think that you have a rather romantic conception of modern war.

• Big evil country A, whose political, cultural and religious propaganda advocates genocide of less value races, invades little innocent country B.
• To prove its moral superiority it disables the outclassed forces of country B ... while building camps on where to concentrate the population of country B for tourism processing. You know, free rides to the east.
• Your choice as country B:
• "well, they foamed our troops, so we better surrender and volunteer for camp, concentrated tourism service".

or

• "Most searched internet request: how to build molotov cocktails?"

People do not give up when peacefully disabled if the enemy is not trustworthy enough. Unfortunately todays modern conflict have proven that a lot of nations are very untrustworthy when it comes to being good winners or accepting a fair defeat. War is only under very specific circumstances a sport event or a romantic comedy. In many other cases it is a desperate struggle for the survival of your country, your loved ones, your culture, your language and your right to drive on the wrong side of the road. And no country is going to stop its war for survival just because their soldiers got foamed.

What you describe is the hope for police / peacekeeping services, where other considerations like civilian casualties play a key considerations, or a very one-sided conflict. It has nothing to do with a near-peer conflict. Near-peer conflicts is about annihilation of enemy forces with firepower which today can hit a car after being fired 5000km away, kill everything due to fragments in a 200m radius and got its latest fire solution from a 5000 USD DIY drone from China.

How do you stop (permanently) a cruise missile fired 1000km away targeting a hospital? How do you stop (reliably) a main battle tank. How a typhooon class submarine with 20 ICBMs and several dozen of megaton nuclear fireworks 100m under the surface?

Our technology is not even slightly there. It is actually pretty easy to kill and destroy something. It is actually incredibly hard to safely disable something, including a human, and even todays LTL tech like gas, electro shocks or microwave cookers can easily injure and, when used on a mass scale, kill, simply because humans react very differently.

When you have solved that, then we can talk about infantry disabling warfare.

SYL

Hi, dgj212. Thanks for contributing. However, your submission was removed from /r/Futurology.

> > With the technology we have today we have seen how we can use drones to drop grenades over people's head (like in Ukraine), and I don't think I'm the only one who fears this going mainstream. I don't know about other nations, but I'm pretty sure the US and other Nations like China have resources that can be thrown at people without having to take life. I know I know, I'm being naïve here, but considering the amount of technology we have today, and the budget these giant nations have, we can probably have it so that a drone can go in and fire something like "containment foam" (worm reference-so fictional, but worth looking to making real) to incapacitate combatants. A number of weapons have been banned by the UN because it increases suffering and harm, and we now have resources that we can employ to have "clean" wars where life isn't taken or lost. If people do start employing drones with lethal armaments we can fire EMPS to deactivate them and maybe recover and recycle the drones. So I'm interested in signing a petition if it exists. > > It would probably be more costly to have "clean" wars, meaning there would be money in it, so I don't think it would be a worthless industry. > > Who knows maybe there are people working on "de-arming" militaries or non-lethal options. Hopefully we can get to a point where we can remove most guns out of circulation and have them recycled for better uses than to cause harm.

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