In February 1995, Marine Corps Lieutenant General Anthony C. Zinni, then commander of I Marine Expeditionary Force, came ashore in Mogadishu, Somalia, as commander of Operation United Shield. His mission was to oversee a safe and controlled withdrawal, to ships offshore, of U.N. forces deployed to that anarchic, war-ravaged country, and his goal was to accomplish this mission with the fewest casualties to both allied forces and the Somalis. From the beginning, General Zinni made clear to both his commanders in Washington and Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid that while he was prepared to use all manner of weapons and men at his disposal, he preferred diplomacy and negotiation.
The principal threat on the streets of Mogadishu was posed by the rioting Somalis, who, though usually either unarmed or lightly equipped, were furious at the presence of an invading army and wanted a share of the credit for "driving the Americans back into the sea." As in most riot situations, the individuals themselves were not dangerous, but when gathered together and whipped into a rage by a catalytic personality, they turned into a deadly mob. Children sometimes swarmed the Marine patrols, inhibiting their movement and shouting out their presence to more-violent neighbors.
To counter such threats, General Zinni brought with him a small cadre of trainers in nonlethal weapons, led by Sid Heal, a Marine Reserve officer who, as a Los Angeles Sheriff's lieutenant and expert in crowd control, had helped coordinate the law enforcement response to the Rodney King riots. The general also brought a range of nonlethal weaponry—hand-thrown diversionary devices; pepper spray; tear gas; nonlethal shotgun rounds of foam rubber, wood, and bean bags; 40-mm nonlethal grenades that spray small rubber pellets, foam blocks, or wood blocks; "caltrops" road spikes; sticky foam; and riot batons, shields, face masks, and flexible handcuffs—to give his Marines every conceivable option short of lethal force for controlling crowds and for protecting themselves.
This was the first comprehensive deployment of nonlethal weapons in a peacekeeping operation. (The U.S. Army had put such systems to limited use in Haiti and earlier in Somalia.) It worked. When the U.S. Marines took over port security and riot control from the ill-equipped and undertrained Pakistani contingent, the Somalis immediately became less belligerent and the withdrawal proceeded smoothly, with no friendly casualties. Eleven Somalis who presented lethal threats were killed by Marine snipers and infantry; lethal and nonlethal force were used concurrently. General Zinni later commented:
There's a role for (nonlethals) in operations other than war because we need to be able to control certain situations that do not require deadly force. And we need more options ... this gives us a lot more flexibility and capability. I don't think a lot of people realize how complex (Mogadishu) was and the potential for it to go bad.
The Morass of Washington
Following the success of United Shield and an intense lobbying effort by Marine Corps advocates, in 1996 the Corps was named executive agent within DoD for nonlethal weapons. Tasked with planning and leadership duties for the program, the Marines prepared to run with the ball. Unfortunately, they were not given any money. Senator Robert Smith (R-NH), then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Acquisition and Technology, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary William Perry on behalf of nine congressmen in April of that year:
The intent of Congress in authorizing this funding was to provide an Executive Agent ... with the responsibility and authority to develop and deploy nonlethal weapons as expeditiously and efficiently as possible . . . we are troubled by the expressed intent of the Defense Department to disregard this guidance.
From this rocky start, the nonlethal weapons program has devolved into a convoluted, bureaucratic miasma of good intentions and poor execution. DoD has kept the Marine Corps Commandant as executive agent, and the program now falls under the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology. A joint nonlethal weapons program integrated product team, led by a general officer with five other flag and general officers as voting members, directs the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) located at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. Unfortunately, the program has not moved forward appreciably and has failed in its mission: rapidly putting new, improved, and effective nonlethal weapon systems into the hands of soldiers and Marines who need them.
The Problem
Low-tech Gear. Nonlethal weapons are the future of successful military operations other than war, and soldiers and Marines therefore must have the best systems available. Marine expeditionary units, afloat on board U.S. Navy ships and prepared to go into any environment, currently outfit a 200-man company with a "nonlethal capability set" of the most low-tech gear imaginable, including high-power flashlights, riot face shields, shin guards, bullhorns, pepper spray canisters, and road spikes. The Marines who are to use this equipment are trained in only a perfunctory manner, and they are actually artillerymen who are thrown into the breach if needed. The current list of equipment is almost identical to the equipment list for the first deployment of nonlethal capability sets in 1996. The U.S. Army uses a nearly identical equipment list. These low-tech weapons do work, as shown in Mogadishu. But they are not enough, and the ground commanders still do not have the full range of force they need.
Prison guards and policemen know how quickly a riot can turn deadly if friendly forces do not retain the initiative and use the full range of force available to them. As the Marine Commandant has said,
Today, world events mandate a need to project nonlethal force across all levels of war to enable our warfighters and leaders to effectively deal with a host of traditional as well as nontraditional threats. Now more than ever, the minimal level of public tolerance for collateral damage and loss of human life, coupled with the tendency for the typical adversary to exploit our rules of engagement to his benefit, necessitates an effective and flexible application of force through nonlethal weapons.
Combat. Nonlethal weapons technology gives military commanders at the tactical level a new paradigm in the application of force. Where before force was viewed as either on or off, now ground troops have a "rheostatic" option in which direct action can be dialed up or down.
Sending young troops into hostile situations more poorly equipped than an average policeman ultimately will lead to catastrophe. These forces are focused on accomplishing the mission, and if that mission is peacekeeping or peace enforcement, they must have the proper tools. The ability to take down an agitator, a catalyst who can drive others from protest to murderous rage, is crucial. Street fighting is ugly business, and civilians can be caught in the crossfire or even used as bait or shields. Americans cannot kill those whom they have come to protect, or those who are caught, innocent, among murderous men, or those who do not know better. They must, however, be able to neutralize or kill those presenting a lethal threat.
This cognitive dissonance adds to the chaos of urban warfare, as the U.S. Army Rangers discovered in Mogadishu on 3-4 October 1993:
Lieutenant Perino watched Somali children walking up the street toward his men, pointing out their positions for a shooter hidden around a corner further down. His men threw flashbang grenades and the children scattered.
Nelson saw a Somali with a gun lying prone on the street between two kneeling women. The shooter had the barrel of his weapon between the women's legs, and there were four children actually sitting on him. He was completely shielded in noncombatants, taking full cynical advantage of the Americans' decency .... So Nelson threw a flashbang, and the group fled so fast the man left his gun in the dirt.
Television. The American public, now used to bloodless and heroic overseas humanitarian efforts, will be more likely to support a military operation other than war in which all civilians are dispersed to their homes peacefully. Representative David Obey, ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, put it plainly: "[In peacekeeping operations] the United States wants zero degree of risk and zero degree of pain and confusion." Shooting into a crowd is the surest way to fail in a peacekeeping, peace-making, or peace-enforcement mission. Legitimacy often is the center of gravity for these operations; adversaries do not need to prevail in a conflict to win if the public sees them as victims. Peacekeepers can win a conflict but lose in the court of public opinion.
The Solutions
More Money and More Aggressive Thinking. More money, more high-level interest, more outside-the-box thinking, and more innovative research will get the nonlethal weapons program out of the starting blocks. The United States nonlethal weapon program is funded at approximately $25 million annually, a fraction of the money needed. Invention, testing, acquisition, and procurement must be focused on putting something in the hands of the war fighters as quickly as possible. As of early 2002, the JNLWD had only six acquisition programs in process, and only one is truly innovative: a modified Claymore mine, mounted either on the ground or on board a vehicle and dispersing .32-caliber rubber balls in a blast pattern out to about 50 feet. The other five are either variants of failed programs from the past (such as the oft-ridiculed "sticky foam") or versions of existing systems (66-mm vehicle-launched nonlethal grenade, vehicle inhibitors)
The JNLWD schedule for the fall of 2001 showed 38 events between August and October—36 meetings, presentations, briefings, and expositions, and just 2 actual testings of weapon systems. The most recent JNLWD demonstration of new technology was the third iteration of an exposition on "force protection," held in May 2001. The term force protection has become the catch-all for military weapon systems and programs no one knows what to do with; its unfortunate subliminal message of a defensive rather than aggressive, offensive mind-set is part of the problem. Such a fat-to-muscle ratio must be inverted. More funding must be combined with clearer thinking about what these weapons can do and how to get them into use.
New Programs, Executed Quickly. The first Non-Lethal Weapons User's Conference, held 12-13 July 1996, advocated the development and procurement of lasers, microwaves, and multisensory incapacitators. None of these systems has been procured. Rather, DoD has chosen to "study" the issue: three times in the past five years, money has gone to a new program of "human factors testing," the most recent at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas. This approach has stolen momentum, money, and initiative from work to deploy these systems. It's time to work to put these systems on the street.
The use of lasers has long been a source of controversy. These weapons carry their own U.N. protocol, and this is where diplomatic intervention, similar to that used in the recent land mine controversy, is needed. Lasers do not have to kill; lethal directed-energy weapons are vastly different from pocket-sized laser pointers, for example, but both are based on the same technology. The amplification and energy behind a laser drives its practical use; lower energy means a less harmful weapon.
The advanced tactical laser (ATL) is a small laser that uses a chemical reaction, instead of an electrical charge, for energy. The ATL is expected to cost $180 million through 2005. A small chemical laser beam would injure but not kill a human being, and it also could be used to destroy enemy antennas or disrupt communications. Dazzling lasers can temporarily blind and momentarily incapacitate, giving friendly forces time to detain an agitator or simply taking the fight out of an aggressive rioter.
Ground-based microwaves have a very specific military application: the immediate, dramatic infliction of enormous abdominal discomfort. A microwave weapon would have immediate utility in the crowd-control regime, and could be used in full-scale combat to incapacitate enemy troops. A microwave weapon also would carry a fear factor many times more powerful than any actual effects it might have on individuals, creating an aura of intimidation around the U.S. forces alone on unfriendly streets. Such a force multiplier cannot be discounted.
Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed air-- dropped microwave weapons, bombs that explode and release an electromagnetic pulse. The Air Force has developed directed-energy weapons meant for use on unmanned aircraft and precision-guided munitions. These nonlethal weapons are capable of shutting down computers, communications, antennas, and power grids, and the technology behind them is simple. A microwave pulse weapon is simply a ground-mounted version of such a system.
Analogous to microwave weapons, infrasound incapacitators and acoustic inhibitors (also known at multisensory incapacitators) work by battering a mob with high-pitched sound, causing temporary hearing loss, ear pain, and acute discomfort in the thorax. In addition, the sound turns the initiative against a vocal mob, disrupting their communications and rendering them individuals once again. This is another weapon system that is on the boards and has been prototyped.
The U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps performed cotesting of nonlethal systems mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during 101st Airborne exercises at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, during the fall of 1996. These systems included noisemakers (to add confusion to a crowd trying to organize), pepper spray bomblets, and gimbaled cameras for surveillance and identification of troublemakers. Although the systems proved effective and affordable, they have not been tried again. The Air Force has developed air-dropped and UAV-mounted directed-energy systems, but these systems need not fall only in the UAV realm—helicopters, with their long loiter time, maneuverability, and pinpoint accuracy are the perfect platform for mounting many nonlethal munitions. Employment of such systems would pay huge dividends in the military operations other than war arena.
Nonlethal weapons are the future of peacekeeping. Forces on the ground must be given all the tools to succeed, and nonlethal systems allow the commander to expand the continuum of force to obtain or retain the tactical initiative. This innovation is crucial. Nonlethal weapons must be pursued quickly and aggressively.
Major Coerr serves with 3d ANGLICO in Long Beach, California. Trained as an AH-1W Cobra pilot, he was nonlethal weapons action officer for 1 Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton from 1996 to 1998. He holds a bachelor’s in political science from Duke and a master’s from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.