All these other tools, tear gas, tazers, pepper spray, mace, etc. all induce pain in one form or another. If in the wrong hands they all can be lethal. So whats so differant about a weapon that can be used from a distance, that can be used to immoblize someone.

So what could this new weapon be? Sharon Weinberger at Wired.com has a guess:
I believe he is talking about the much ballyhooed (in defense geek circles) “Tagging, Tracking and Locating” [TTL] program… These are newfangled technologies designed to track people from long distances, without the targeted people realizing they are being tracked. That can theoretically include thermal signatures, or some sort of “taggant” placed on a person. Think Will Smith in Enemy of the State. Well, not so many cameras, maybe.

Why do I think this is the technology Woodward is referring to? Well, first, because it pretty much fits the bill, in terms of the type of capability he appears to be talking about. It has involvement from a number of players, including the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and Special Operations Command. Also, the Defense Science Board has talked about this capability in similar terms, saying “the global war on terrorism cannot be won without a ‘Manhattan Project’-like TTL … program.”

The actual answer is relatively mundane and very frightening at the same time. It’s a synthetic aperture radar that can “see” through most common roofing and wall material and can create an image which looks a lot like a side-scan sonar but sharper due to the shorter wavelength. The kicker, and this is the important thing, is large/dense/angular metallic objects like heavy weapons and fragmentation bombs show up as very bright spots and are thus easy to spot. You can fly over a village and see which huts and barns contain large weapons, and once confirmed by a secondary method (boots on the ground or arial surveillance) a missile is fired and people die. Normally, they wait until there are a maxima of people in the building before firing as normally these people aren’t stupid enough to sleep in these places — this is where the loiter time of the predator comes in. There’s a lot of fancy software to filter out false targets and to keep a running inventory of the contents of homes, which for example can tell the user when weapons are being marshalled in advance of an attack. The system is also good for spotting many types of IED as traditional camoflage is useless against penetrating radar, and it can also spot enemy sentries armed with AKs or RPGs — so much so that this job is highly undesirable with the local gentry.

Another portion of this sensor fusion is integration with long-term, wide area IR monitoring. It basically shows you a trail where any human has walked — the more people who have walked the path, the brighter the color. Various visualization options are available, including one where the paths decay over time. Operationally, if you are following a gomer on the ground, and he lingers in an area which is featureless but shows multiple human tracks, then it’s likely an underground weapons cache hidden under a rock or camel shit or whatever. Then the bombs come flying in.

So far, so good. The problem is going to be that (1) the gomers will start using metal sheets in walls and roofs which make imaging less effective (but it still penetrates; how exactly is the big secret); and (2) it won’t be long before the FBI is “experimenting” with the building-penetrating radar, basically flying a grid over US cities looking for clandestine drug labs, large weapon caches, and anything else that seems deviant to them. They will create a database of homes, and create a census of how many humans live in them, how many weapons they seem to have, and whether they have a hydroponic garden in the spare bedroom. No warrant is required as there are court decisions already which say that busting pot growers based on their homes’ infrared signature is hunky-dory. Most American homes have wood/stucco walls and wood or tile roofs, which are easily penetrated by the modern systems. Note that they only need to see through *either* the walls or the roof, so it doesn’t help you if only one is shielded.

Now it’s really time to put on the tinfoil hats!