U.S. Military Needs a Dummy To Test Its Rayguns. Really.

Non-lethal pain guns. Still, really.

The Pentagon's electromagnetic pain weapons are about to make a new friend. It's an anthropomorphic test dummy that's gonna get blasted by everything the Pentagon's non-lethal weapons agency can throw at it.

In its latest round of small business research proposals, the Navy announced it's seeking a sensor-outfitted "human surrogate" for use in an array of non-lethal weapon tests. That includes "electromagnetic radiation in the L, S, and W-bands," noted the request for proposal. Even further, there are plans to subject the luckless mannequin to everything from noise, blast pressure, electrical currents, thermal energy, and light from flashbang grenades.

Eventually, the goal is to "quickly collect data to understand injury potential by detecting, presumably via sensor systems, the effects of various non-lethal stimuli on different parts of the human body," Alicia Owsiak, deputy chief of the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate Technology Division, tells Danger Room in a statement. The JNWLD, which manages the Pentagon's non-lethal weapons program, is coordinating the tests. "Given that the risk of injury for a non-lethal stimuli is often influenced by hit location, the test target is envisioned to be a human surrogate with respect to internal and external anatomy."