Nothing is So Strong as Gentleness

Conflicts in the past offered few alternatives to deadly force. The recent rise of innovative and sophisticated nonlethal weapons, however, is giving military forces new options. Some of the newest systems in development or soon to be deployed include an airborne Active Denial System (left), a focused-energy weapon that emits a heat ray; the Mobility Denial System (middle), which sprays a slippery gel; and the pulsed energy projectile (right), a directed-energy weapon that flash-heats its target.

When military forces face a resistive populace, the use of destructive and lethal force presents difficulties when combatants and noncombatants are indistinguishable. Our electronically linked world minutely examines all conflicts, and it is demanding a higher standard of morality in force projection. Fortunately, the United States is focusing its energies on developing, maintaining, and fielding decisive force that is life-conserving, cost-effective, and environmentally nondestructive: nonlethal weapons.

Through the creation of the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate under the executive agency of the Commandant of Marine Corps, the United States is developing nonlethal capabilities to fill a gap that has long existed between diplomacy and overwhelmingly destructive force. In so doing, it has embarked on a quest for Sun Tzu's acme of skill, to develop and project increasingly moral (and thus politically usable) force that, by reason of its precision, controllability, and constraint, can deter aggression while enhancing and ensuring a safe environment for global growth.

Projection of Force When all War Is Local

In the 21st century, terrorists and rogue entities are waging symbolic warfare against modernity. These enemies live anywhere and everywhere, connected by the Internet. They are known more by their ideology than by their race, color, creed, national origin, or geographic location. They cannot be overcome simply by our killing them; their deaths make them martyrs, and dozens or hundreds spring up to take their places.

We must prepare to counter these adversaries in all their shapes and guises locally, where we live as well as where our globalizing security needs take us. To do this, we will need to foster and use means and measures suited for where we live. Such promising means are being researched and developed by the Department of Defense under the rubric of nonlethal weapons, although to date only modest funding has been supplied.

Nonlethal weapons in support of the new era in global security strategy cannot be realized fully until nonlethal policy tools augment technological development. Clear guidance at all levels of the Defense Department must steer the way to expanded capabilities in scalable force. Nonlethal policy must be like our policy regarding operational risk management, force protection, and consequence management.

Today's bureaucratic obstacles favor our enemies. secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has stated that in many instances our forces are allowed to shoot to kill, but they are not allowed to use a nonlethal riot-control agent. Bureaucratic impediments dampen the development of nonlethal antipersonnel weapons, and range from arguably vestigial treaty limitations to institutional resistance to change. Existing chemical and laser weapon conventions have resulted in a situation that tacitly mandates killing combatants and noncombatants alike and discourages the development and fielding of many promising nonlethal options.

It is important that the fledgling effort to develop nonlethal weapons that are effective against materiel and offensive capabilities reaches maturity. It is equally important that the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate coordinates all efforts aimed at providing additional rheostatic force projection capabilities to contain conflict and destruction.

Although the single weapon that can provide any desired level of lethality does not yet exist, force projection must be able to adapt to the political realities and objectives of leaders who must take decisive action in venues where children, women, the aged and infirm, combatants, and noncombatants all are mixed, and in environments where destruction of infrastructure and cultural assets must be minimized. The mission of the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate is to offer new options to commanders and decision makers.

Breaking the Cycle of Retributive Violence

Whenever we strike lethally, we risk making those who resort to terror stronger. We play into a strategy of our adversaries, who wish to portray us as lashing out with no regard for whom or what we destroy. They use this portrayal to inflame their constituents, attract new support, and justify their calls for more extreme acts of retaliation. To win in this conflict we must break this cycle, change the rules, and set new criteria for victory based on our strengths—our regard for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As we move against terror, we must begin to signal our ultimate intent by the way we use force, lest we become terror's patsies—or worse, its mimics.

We possess undeniable overwhelming lethal capabilities. Our adversaries are counting on us to overdo it in our efforts to eradicate them, to provide them with endless rolls of martyrs with which to brainwash their young and fill their zombie ranks to overflowing. To deny this advantage and defeat this strategy, to our overwhelming lethal capacity we must add a final tier of overwhelming nonlethal capabilities to use when closing with an enemy amid innocents. We must set a goal of being decisively nonlethal if need be and destroying an adversary's ability to harm us while minimizing harm to others as we do so. By completing our menu of coercive responses, we will increase the dimensions of victory and ultimately break the senseless cycle of escalating retributive violence.

The Department of Defense is approaching a strategic inflexion point in coming to grips with the value of a significant nonlethal program in today's world. Only after reaching that point can current investments in nonlethals by the services and the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate be leveraged successfully by combatant commanders. At present, combatant commanders are limited mostly to lethal and deadly force applications, increasing greatly the potential for lethal missteps. The Department of Defense must begin to think of nonlethality in terms of capabilities for mass protection and kinetic interceptors.

Nonlethals and Northern Command

U.S. Northern Command is charged with defending our shores, borders, and infrastructure against terrorist enemies equipped with weapons of mass destruction. Northern Command has no charter, however, for the kind of other-than-lethal measures necessary to succeed against a stateside enemy attacking symbolic targets in public places. There even has been some question as to whether nonlethal weapons already developed by the Department of Defense can be provided to Northern Command.

We must provide nonlethality in toto—the policy, strategy, and implementation of containment of conflict and barbarism—to Northern Command if we are going to fight an enemy who targets the governmental, cultural, and commercial jewels of globalized societies. We must give Northern Command, and all other combatant commands, an expanded toolkit for dealing operationally with rogue attacks, whether by U.S. citizens or aliens. Northern Command, because of its sensitive area of responsibility (the continental United States), must serve as the nation's focal point for learning to fight this new war.

Joint Nonlethal Response Capability

We have a fledgling, underfunded Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate. Because it is joint, it is a stepchild to the services when those services come to budgetary decisions. Its needs are not considered as important as the needs of each service individually, so it has no strong proponents beyond those who see its value in Congress or the administration.

When the Marine Corps needed nonlethal kits of antipersonnel weapons, Marine Corps Systems Command, with little funding, provided them. Since then, few operationally focused programs have been developed; nothing new has been fielded. The original direction of Congress to "rapidly develop and field" nonlethals has been forgotten, and only a meager effort remains to support the combatant commands in defining their future mission requirements for nonlethal capabilities and responses. Instead, the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate hawks its technologies to potential users alongside all the other science and technology fiefdoms.

A well-funded and healthy joint nonlethal weapons program is an obvious necessity for a country adapting to the exigencies of projecting and protecting forces in urban theaters far from home and the requirement to create a domestic defense capability within its borders. Never has the Joint Nonlethal Directorate's mission been more relevant and needed. Adequate funding must be coupled with an active policy and emphasis on nonlethals.

Envisioning Nonlethal Weapons for Future Defense Needs

The following examples help demonstrate the need for and utility of nonlethal weapons and the importance of the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate to our future:

* In situations such as Afghanistan, where the enemy often hides in caves, tunnels, or buildings, acoustics can drive people from hiding; millimeter waves can identify the numbers and locations of people behind walls.

* To stop the free movement of known terrorists, fractal imagery and informative feature mapping can match the fractal characteristics of skulls of known terrorists against databases through surveillance equipment in toll booths, automatic teller machines, airports, and other public places.

* In situations such as Somalia and Iraq, where women and children are used as human shields, kinetic nonlethal weapons can provide the capability to attack and disable an enemy without risking death to innocents.

* Where biological weapons are stored and explosives will merely spread spores over thousands of square kilometers, munitions-delivered nanoparticles can destroy spores on contact.

* Where chemical weapons are produced and stored, directed-energy weapons that can cause heat without explosive force can destroy stores and damage production capabilities.

* Where damage to ships in ports or at sea is an issue, nonlethal vessel stoppers can immobilize approaching craft until search or identification is possible.

* Where clearing facilities of personnel is the desired result, olfactory agents can drive people from enclosed spaces; reactive nanoparticles can clear areas of chemical or biological threats; and acoustic and directed-energy weapons can clear streets or areas of crowds or combatants.

* Where crowd control is the goal, a range of kinetic nonlethal weapons is available to move and disperse crowds.

* For hijacked vessels, aircraft, trucks, trains, and tanks, and situations where vehicles themselves may be used as weapons, calmative agents, electromagnetic engine stoppers, tire- and track-destroying devices, portable arresting barriers, and capabilities that render roads, bridges, and vehicle approaches inaccessible or unnegotiable provide new options.

* For apprehension of suicide bombers or other individual combatants, dart lasers allow instant immobilization of individuals at up to 26 feet. Ranges may be expanded over time.

* Carrier munitions that are not by themselves lethal can be developed to deliver payloads at longer ranges.

* Directed-energy weapons to puncture tires and engine blocks or ignite explosive dumps and stores can be used against supply lines, depots, and individual vehicles, or to cripple selected infrastructure components with pinpoint accuracy.

* Thermal targeting can provide coordinates of incoming fire sources within milliseconds of the event, zeroing in on weapons fired from concealed positions, providing a range of options for immediate pinpoint response.

* For counterproliferation, directed-energy weapons can be used to destroy electronic fusing and detonation systems necessary for the triggering of functional nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

* Directed-energy and radio-frequency weapons can destroy enemy communications as well as the triggering mechanisms and fusings on many kinds of mortars, missiles, and sophisticated projectiles.

Make Nonlethals Part of Our Arsenals

Nonlethal weapons and capabilities threaten acquisition fiefdoms, blur lines, and threaten established bureaucratic powers. To ensure nonlethal capabilities are assimilated by all parts of the U.S. government and made available to select allies, it is important that policy makers and strategists institutionalize the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate. Because the directorate is a joint organization, it will need help from the administration in establishing its usefulness in many areas where it is seen as a potential competitor for funding.

The following recommendations, if implemented, will ensure a more timely assimilation of nonlethal capabilities at every level of government, from war gaming, planning, and training to acquisition and deployment:

* The Department of Defense must make nonlethality a priority. This must be done at the policy, planning, and strategy levels, and nonlethal capabilities must be included in all war games, plans, and exercises. Until nonlethal weapons are better known and understood, the Department of Defense must help the Join Nonlethal Weapons Directorate ensure that nonlethal weapons are included at all levels where relevant.

* Nonlethal programs deserve a presidential decision directive or executive order. The Department of Defense and other agencies involved with national security, terrorism, counterproliferation, agroterrorism, maritime and port security, and homeland defense should be directed to establish a national nonlethal capability and to develop nonlethal responses. Each combatant command, service, and department should develop a list of required nonlethal requirements and capabilities, both near and long term.

* The Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate should develop a third-party, clean-hands test capability and academic outreach program. The services should be restricted from testing and approving nonlethals. The administration should provide additional multiyear funding for the establishment of a third-party test center, coupled with a nonlethal outreach program with universities, that focuses scientists and technologists on finding nonlethal solutions. This third-party test center also should provide nonlethal testing for homeland security and homeland defense agencies.