The U.S. armed forces must slow the nonlethal weapons bandwagon long enough to assess their real capabilities and implications—or risk being hamstrung by public expectations about what can be accomplished without force.
Nonlethal weapons have received a lot of press in the past year. Their appeal is understandable: Americans love labor-saving devices and gadgets; they fit well with the current talk of a revolution in military affairs; and the possibility of bloodless conflict has excited the media’s imagination. Many in the Department of Defense also have climbed on board the bandwagon, and the development of nonlethal weapons has proceeded apace.
Not all of this development is a bad thing. Ultimately, many of these systems can be useful to the U.S. military. Unfortunately, there are some dangerous misconceptions and expectations concerning nonlethal weapons, and it probably is a good idea to take a step back and look at some of the potential policy problems and issues associated with these systems and their employment.
What Are Nonlethal Weapons?
According to the Draft DoD directive of 26 June 1995, nonlethal weapons—such as sticky foam, anti-traction agents, and pepper spray—are “explicitly designed and employed so as to incapacitate personnel or material, while minimizing fatalities and undesired damage to property and the environment.” All have at least some of the following characteristics:
- They use means other than gross physical destruction to keep the target from functioning.
- They have relatively reversible effects.
- They discriminate between targets and non-targets.
The purpose behind the development of nonlethal weapons was to increase the options available to U.S. forces. Specifically, nonlethal weapons were supposed to give U.S. forces the ability to:
- Discourage, delay, or prevent hostile action by prospective opponents.
- Limit escalation.
- Take military action in situations where intervention is desirable but use of lethal force would be inappropriate.
- Better protect our forces once deployed.
- Provide an effective but reversible and more humanitarian means of denying an enemy the use of some of his human and material assets.
- Reduce the post-conflict costs of rebuilding an adversary’s infrastructure.
Taken in isolation, each of these goals is laudable. It is hard to argue against reversible and humanitarian means of coercion by themselves. The acquisition of nonlethal weapons, however, will have an impact on the way we do business.
Policy Implications
Like any new concept, nonlethal weapons are supposed to improve our lot in life by giving us more options. This assumes that the new capability will not have an adverse impact on our ability to execute existing military options—but this may not be so.
Nonlethal weapons are being developed to “bridge the gap between relatively benign pressures (diplomacy, economic sanctions, military posturing) and deadly force.” Ostensibly, they would increase the options available to U.S. planners, complicate enemy decision-making processes, and give the United States greater freedom of action. In fact, the result of the development and fielding of nonlethal weapons could be to add another step in the progression of escalation with an adversary.
The very phrase “bridge the gap” implies that such a gap exists and that it has somehow limited our ability to respond. Instead of going from diplomacy to economic sanctions to military posturing to deadly force, we are creating the expectation that nonlethal means will be tried before deadly force.
To their credit, those who drew up the June 1995 DoD draft directive tried to allay this fear:
The presence of nonlethal weapons in our inventory and the options they provide will not require the United States to use only nonlethal weapons in any particular operation, or to try nonlethal weapons before resorting to lethal means. In all cases, we retain the option for the immediate use of lethal weapons when military force must be brought to bear.
This statement is wishful thinking. The development of nonlethal weapons capabilities—if continued in its present unstructured manner—cannot help but have a profound impact on the way military operations are conducted. In spite of all the rhetoric about them not limiting U.S. lethal response, they will in fact do exactly that.
The current problem with the fielding and advertising of these systems is that they raise the public’s expectations as to what can be accomplished without killing. There undoubtedly will be profound differences within DoD, the U.S. government, and the American public as to what merits lethal response and what should be handled with nonlethal weapons. It is not too farfetched to envision future situations where legislators and political groups will second-guess command decisions as to the use of lethal violence. The split in public opinion could be every bit as fractious as the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era, especially in situations involving multiple factions where each faction had political adherents and supporters within the United States.
In addition, the concept of nonlethal weapons centers on minimizing death, destruction, and suffering not only to noncombatant bystanders (which we already do very well) but to the enemy as well. This makes it a questionable deterrent. Military deterrence is an exercise in negative reinforcement for unacceptable behavior, i.e., “If you do this, we will kill you.” By advertising the use of and reliance on nonlethal weapons we are saying, in effect, “If you do this, you will be inconvenienced and maybe have to take a good bath.” This does not have the same deterrent ring to it somehow.
What then do nonlethal weapons actually give us in terms of meaningful capability? What situation would be important enough that we would commit an act of war against another nation, tribe, or political group but not important enough to do lethal violence? How often would such a situation come up? When was there a time in the past 20 years when we would not have bombed somebody, choosing to use nonlethal means instead? Is the development of nonlethal systems worth the possible policy problems they will cause?
Practical Considerations
The fielding and use of many of the proposed nonlethal weapons will bring some practical problems that deserve careful consideration.
- Delivery is still an act of war. For example, to place “slime on target” (as opposed to steel on target) a U.S. aircraft still has to violate another country’s airspace and drop a weapon. On the subject country’s radar screens, an aircraft coming to drop slime bombs looks the same as an aircraft coming to drop conventional bombs. Even if the other side knew for a fact that the incoming aircraft were carrying nonlethal weapons, it would be completely within its rights to defend its airspace with lethal means.
- The development of countermeasures. The DoD draft directive repeatedly mentions the temporary effect of nonlethal weapons. Vehicles temporarily neutralized with adhesives or super-lubricants can be cleaned off and restored to operation. Areas that are temporarily denied can be brought back into service. We then face the same threat that we faced before we used nonlethal weapons—except perhaps for increased hostility from the people we have attacked.
The use of nonlethal means to neutralize enemy equipment and facilities carries with it the requirement for surveillance, to ensure that the subject equipment stays neutralized. Using nonlethal methods then will become more resource intensive, as reconnaissance assets will have to be allocated to watch targets and missions will have to be scheduled to repeat the nonlethal attacks to maintain the desired effect.
So what does a nonlethal attack get us? An adversary prevented by a U.S. nonlethal attack from executing a military option will be just as aggrieved as one that was bombed with conventional ordnance—and just as well armed as before. A tank park hit with nonlethal means has to be watched and reattacked. A tank park hit with 2,000-pound bombs is a scrapyard.
- The boomerang effect. The nonlethal weapons described in the draft directive work best on highly mechanized, technology and equipment-dependent, first-world military forces—forces like ours. Many of our potential adversaries do not have the capability to conduct the research and to develop nonlethal technologies, but many do have the capability to produce nonlethal weapons from known and proven research and production. Other than the atomic bomb, there is not a single weapon developed by an American in this century that has not been used against the U.S. military. The more we develop nonlethal technologies, the more research we make available to our enemies—which ultimately can be used against us, often with greater effect.
A Road Map for the Future
Where do we go from here? Discontinuing all research and development of nonlethal systems clearly would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Some of these capabilities—such as information warfare—have tremendous potential for effective application. We do, however, have to get organized.
Our current approach is scattershot and unstructured; an undisciplined explosion of new ideas has replaced the structured process of identifying requirements and then designing systems to meet those requirements. The following are proposals to add structure and context to the development and fielding of these systems.
- We must do away with the term “nonlethal weapons.” This term implies that there are nonlethal weapons that will do the job as well as lethal weapons. We cannot allow this expectation to influence policy, and we especially cannot allow it to influence the use of lethal military force. These technologies will not precipitate a radical change in the way we do business or in the nature of war itself; they are simply additional tools for the toolbox. A new term such as “capabilities reducing weapons” or “temporary incapacitation/obstruction weapons” would reflect the true nature of the weapons, while removing the (unspoken but ever-present) suggestion of the possibility of nonlethal war.
- We need to identify the technologies that have an application in conventional warfare. For example, area denial weapons such as super-adhesives or super-lubricants could be used to keep the enemy away from a key facility while friendly forces move in to capture it undamaged. The friendly forces would have the capability to neutralize the adhesives or lubricants and then could make full use of the newly captured asset. The intent behind employment of these technologies would be force multiplication, as opposed to a “more humane” approach.
- We must decide which of these capabilities suit us best in terms of potential future conflicts and then balance this against the systems’ cost and projected production. Some off-the-shelf capabilities can be integrated into the inventory right away; others that are in the developmental stages may be discontinued after such a review. In conducting this analysis, we have to be hard-nosed: Is the capability a real improvement on an existing capability or is it merely less injurious (to the enemy)? For example, sticky foam has been touted as a wonder weapon in terms of riot control, but does it really do anything for us that barbed wire and tear gas cannot?
We must temper the current enthusiasm for nonlethal weapons with a realistic assessment of the capabilities we want and in which we are willing to invest. We must guard against the rhetoric produced by an uneducated media, the political establishment, unobjective supporters within DoD, and the systems manufacturers. A disturbing reality of our times is that expectation often equals fact. In spite of the hype, nonlethal weapons will not fundamentally change the way we approach conflict, but if we do not get a better grip on the way we develop and publicize these weapons, the false expectations they create could have an impact in ways we have not even begun to anticipate.
Colonel Stanton, a graduate of the College of Naval Command and Staff, is assigned as commander of U.S. Army Forces, Qatar. He served in Somalia from December 1992 to April 1993.