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Increasingly, U.S. military forces are engaged in a variety of operations that are unconventional in nature. Known as Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW), they include overseas intervention in civil and ethnic conflicts, peacekeeping operations, humanitarian relief, covert operations, and hostage rescue. Legal, treaty, policy and economic considerations demand that future engagements, where possible, minimize U.S. casualties while limiting collateral civilian casualties and collateral damage to civilian objects. As seen in Iraq, crowd control and insurgent extraction is as likely a task for the armed forces as is destroying enemy armor and infantry forces.

Non-lethal weapons not only fill a gap on the tactical level, but also on the strategic level. They expand the number of options available to commanders confronting situations in which the use of deadly force is not the preferred response. Plus, they can act as a force multiplier and deterrent when used in concert with lethal applications of force and contribute to preventing an escalation in hostilities. When properly applied, non-lethal weapons make the United States more formidable, not less so. For this reasons, there is a high interest in the research conducted here at Stellar Photonics.