Research Summaries

Back Quantitative Study of Injury Risk Caused by Non-Lethal Weapons

Fiscal Year 2019
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Applied Mathematics
Investigator(s) Zhou, Hong
Sponsor Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (DoD)
Summary The end of the Cold War sparked a revolution in military operations and strategy. In recent years armed gangs, militias, and terrorist cells have become more prevalent in modern asymmetric conflict and irregular warfare. In the 1950s noncombatants accounted for about one-half of all U.S. military operation casualties and the rate rose to about 80% in the 1980s. Under these unconventional environments, there is a great desire for non-lethal capabilities in order to discourage aggression, deter terrorist attack, break the cycle of violence and promote peace.
Non-lethal weapons are explicitly designed and primarily employed to incapacitate targeted personnel or material immediately, while minimizing fatalities, permanent injury to personnel, and undesired damage to property in the target environment. In order to use non-lethal weapons judiciously and effectively, it is important to be able to assess the risks or damages associated with applying various non-lethal weapons. From a mathematical point of view, predicting the outcome of an area non-lethal weapon used against a crowd can be challenging since in both achieving the desired effect and causing undesired injury, human effects play an important role and need to be taken into consideration. We would like to continue our work to build mathematical frameworks that take peculiar characteristics of non-lethal weapons into account. We will study the risk of significant injury caused by different types of non-lethal weapons in the developed models.
Keywords dose-response relation non-lethal weapons risk of significant injury
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal