The Kansas City Star February 18, 2007
New weapons shoot to hurt, not to kill
From high-energy people zappers to foam rubber bullets, devices will help U.S. troops in future conflicts.
By Scott Cannon
FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. | So much firepower. So little damage. Which is exactly the idea.
One rifle shot after the next hit targets at the Army firing range. Grenade blasts rumbled the Ozarks countryside, their fragments ripping through the air in every direction. Shotguns were racked, and one smoking round after the next blasted forward.
Yet for all the abuse taken by rubber silhouettes standing in for aggressors, those hanging targets barely shimmied.
Everything that had been fired their way last week was designed not to kill, but merely to sting. Royal blue foam rubber-and-plastic projectiles that look like the marriage of a racquetball and a vacuum cleaner attachment. Black foam-rubber discs the size of a small stack of poker chips. Hard rubber balls that could pass for blueberries. Torpedo-shaped rubber you could hide in your palm. Beanbags.
Think Nerf gone nasty.
“The great thing is you can come up to somebody after they’ve been shot with this stuff and say, ‘Sorry, you’re going to feel lousy for a week,’ ” said Marine Capt. Joel Rockemann. “At least they’re alive to talk to.”
The captain is among those running the Interservice Nonlethal Individual Weapons Instructor Course at this base, teaching troops to train others to fire weapons intended just to hurt, not kill.
Still focused primarily on how to kill an enemy, the Pentagon has begun in recent years to look for ways merely to shoo him or her away.
The annual budget for the Defense Department’s small but growing nonlethal weapons program is still less than the cost of a single new jet fighter.
Even as the American military becomes ever more involved in missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, where the objective is less about killing lots of soldiers and more about achieving a peace, the use of less-than-deadly munitions is not yet commonplace.
Still, technology and doctrine are pushing the nonlethal weapons forward in the arsenal of U.S. troops.
Last month the Pentagon put on a demonstration of a new high-energy people zapper that leaves your flesh untouched but makes you feel as if your skin had caught fire. There’s exploration of a sort of liquid banana peel that would make enemy feet and vehicles slide helplessly out of control. Some high-tech loudspeakers are being used not only to warn off intruders from great distances, but also to project deafening sounds as they approach.
Chinese scientists have speculated about biotechnology weapons that would make people pitifully clumsy, maddeningly forgetful or pitifully docile.
All the nonlethal weapons –– both the merely imagined and the already deployed –– suggest an evolving use of the military that recognizes options other than killing.
“Not every concept that someone thinks up will be practical, and not everything that is developed can fit in every situation,” said Steven Aftergood, an analyst for the Federation of American Scientists. “But there are plenty of reasons you might want to stop short of killing a person who you see as a threat.”
In early 1995, Marine Lt. Gen. Anthony Zinni had to protect United Nations forces pulling out of Somalia and found that the American military had few practical options besides conventional, and deadly, bullets and bombs.
He became a highly placed advocate for hurt-but-don’t-kill alternatives, and by the summer of 1997 the Pentagon had launched the Joint Non-lethal Weapons Directorate.
Much of what’s come from the effort teams old ideas borrowed from law enforcement –– like using rubber bullets to control crowds –– with existing military weapons like the M-16 rifle or grenade launchers.
But the jewel so far is the so-called Active Denial System, or ADS, that uses an electromagnetic radio-frequency beam of millimeter waves to create the sensation of burning skin on its target. To date, just one exists, mounted on a hybrid electric Humvee and available only for demonstration purposes.
It shoots a beam more than 500 yards that penetrates the skin just 1/64th of an inch to reach pain receptors, but disappears almost instantly once the invisible beam is shut off.
Other imagined tools include the development of technological black ice — an ultraslippery material that would steal traction for all but ally troops who have a counteracting chemical integrated in the soles of their boots and the tires on their trucks. The Pentagon is exploring “optical distractors,” the use of lasers to, if not blind someone, at least subject them to such intense glare that they can’t see what you want to obscure. Already, pinpoint long-range loudspeakers are being used to warn intruders to keep their distance from U.S. ships, and in 2005 a civilian cruise ship used deafening volume to ward off a pirate attack off the coast of east Africa.
The hope for the military is that at Iraqi checkpoints or in dealing with Afghan crowds, having options that fall between passivity and lethality could create a better outcome.
One problem is hitting that sweet spot that falls between too much force and too little. Something with too much punch might create real injury or death and stir bad blood with a civilian population. Something too mild –– a weapon that is painful but not strong enough to ward the person off –– might be worse than nothing at all.
Consider the rubber bullet. A person wearing enough padding can withstand the impact. So increase the wallop delivered by an ostensibly nonlethal bullet –– put a metal ball inside the rubber –– and the weapon becomes potentially deadly to the unprotected.
“We’re searching for universality,” said Army Maj. William McMillan, assigned to the nonlethal weapons program and on hand at Fort Leonard Wood last week to help train about a dozen command-level officers. “What can be hard is finding something that has the same effect on somebody who’s 5 feet 6 and 95 pounds and a guy who’s 6 feet 4 and 240 pounds.”
For that reason, McMillan and others well versed in nonlethal weapons like Tasers because their electrical shock is proven to take down just about anybody — although isolated deaths have been linked to the use of devices by police.
Something that doesn’t kill but hurts could be a tool of torture. Susan LeVine, the principal deputy at the Joint Non-lethal Weapons Directorate, said precautions are being developed along with the weapons.
“There are numerous safeguards, hardware and software to guard against accidental misuse,” she said. On the new ADS, for instance, the beam can be turned on only for a few seconds at a time to guard against submitting a target to the pain for longer than necessary.
“Someone who is very wise and experienced needs to figure out when to use and not use these things,” said Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. “Still, the bottom line is it’s better to have more options than fewer.”
Aftergood and other analysts said the nonlethal arsenal is still a rather thin repertoire, evidence that the Pentagon has yet to invest heavily either in money or doctrine in a use of force that its troops increasingly need to be ready for.
“You don’t see people voting with their feet and using this stuff much,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. “That will change if commanders start seeing it proven effective out in the real world.”
© Copyright 2007, Kansas City Star
