The supposedly nonlethal weapon, also called "active-denial technology," has been under development throughout the 1990s at the U. S. Air Force Research Laboratory (Kirtland, N.M.), in tandem with the Marine Corps' Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate, the report said.

The weapon uses 95-GHz energy to penetrate the skin to 1/64 of an inch, and hits water molecules in the skin to produce an intense burning sensation that stops when the transmitter is switched off or when the individual moves out of the beam.

The weapon has been cited as being particularly useful for crowd control and urban conflicts, although there thought to be counter-measures (see see June 6, 2001, story). "The skin gets extremely hot, and people can't stand the pain, so they have to move — and move in the way we want them to," the more recent report quoted Col. Wade Hall of the Office of Force Transformation as saying. The weapon is set to be fitted to armored vehicles already in Iraq. This would allow the microwave beam weapon to be deployed in 2005, the report said.

U.S. Army and Marine Corps units should receive four to six vehicles equipped with the microwave weapon, dubbed "Sheriffs," by September 2005.

The system includes a millimeter-wave energy source with waveguides to direct the energy to a dish antenna measuring about 3 x 3 meters, which forms a beam that can be swept across a battlefield or hostile crowd. Beam size, whether it is a convergent, focused beam or a divergent beam, and its range, were classified, although the beam has been reported to have a range of about 1 kilometer.