THE STINK WITH YOUR NAME ON IT

Shoot Not to Kill: Noxious smells, slippery foams, lasers that temporarily blind: the U.S. military is developing a host of sci-fi-like weapons that stun or deter instead of killing. Our writer investigates-and gets shot in the back with a pain beam. (Eric Adams, May 2003, Popular Mechanics)

Lieutenant Colonel James Brown of the United States Army stepped off the Black Hawk helicopter straight into a swarm of swinging sticks. "The fight was on," he recalls. "We had to push them back and fight our way to our men." It was April 4, 2000, and Brown was the commanding officer of the Army's 709th Military Police Battalion, part of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. Several hours earlier, a squad of six MPs had searched a house in a mountain-shrouded town called Sevce. They had seized two hand grenades, as well as the grenades' owner. But as the soldiers wrestled their detainee back to their Humvees, a crowd began to gather, a crowd that soon grew to several hundred people, shouting and closing in on the soldiers. There was no way out: The townspeople blocked the streets, and others set up blockades on the edge of town and at a bridge farther down the road.

Brown got a call and raced to the scene with 17 more MPs aboard two Black Hawks. Once on the ground, he and his men, protected by body armor, pushed through the stick-wielding mob. Brown began negotiating with the crowd's leaders. Most crucially, he worked to persuade them that the suspect would be returned. But just as it seemed that they were coming to accept his word, 50 men stormed toward the helicopter that was ready to take the suspect away. They snatched him and began fighting the MPs hand to hand. Several soldiers sustained broken hands or bloodied faces.

Almost immediately, Brown was hit in the neck by a large rock; other rocks pelted members of his team. His men decided that enough was enough. They trained their weapons on the most aggressive attackers and opened fire.

The results were profound-not because of the bloody carnage, but because of the lack of it. Instead of firing hundreds of deadly .223-caliber bullets, the soldiers fired sponge-tipped rounds-40mm-wide canisters capped with green high- density foam, shot from rifle-mounted launchers. One of these hit the man who threw the rock at Brown. He screamed, threw his hands to his face, and bolted in the opposite direction. "The nonlethal rounds achieved a tremendous effect: Everyone backed up immediately and settled down," Brown recalls. "By the rules of engagement, my soldiers could have chosen to shoot people. We would have had a very bloody day, and it would have had a terrible effect on everyone in Kosovo."

Later, the U.N. mission discussed the incident with local Serbian-Kosovar leaders, who accepted responsibility for the disturbance-something that almost certainly would not have happened if it had resulted in deaths. The suspect eventually turned himself in, and the peacekeepers had no more trouble in the region. "The purpose of conflict is conflict resolution," Brown explains, "and we've found that when people are treated well in conflict, it makes a tremendous contribution to establishing order."

Welcome to the new military order, where sometimes the best defense is a good nonlethal offense. [...]

Broadly speaking, the directorate slots nonlethals into three categories, depending on their intended strategic use: counter-personnel, counter-materiel and counter-capability. Counter-personnel objectives, naturally enough, include controlling crowds, incapacitating individuals, denying areas to personnel and clearing people from buildings or battle areas. Counter-materiel systems are used to deny areas to vehicles, vessels or aircraft, and to disable or neutralize equipment. Counter-capability objectives include disabling or neutralizing facilities and systems, and denying use of weapons of mass destruction.

As you ascend this scale, from humans to systems, from soft targets to hard, there are bumps along the way at which on-the-ground reality seems likely to strain the semantic tolerances of the word nonlethal. Take, for instance, the high-tech end of the counter-materiel category, where we find supercaustic agents designed to rapidly corrode metals; depolymerizing agents that dissolve or decompose plastics; and, most impressively, the Advanced Tactical Laser, which will produce a four-inch-diameter beam of energy that can slice through a tank from a distance of 9 miles, presumably counting on the quickness of enemy soldiers to maintain its nonlethal credibility. (Indeed, in recognizing that no weapon or confrontation can be controlled well enough to justify the term nonlethal, the directorate prefers the phrase "less than lethal.")

On the counter-personnel front, the technology is only marginally more tame. Nonlethal, after all, does not mean nonviolent. Although information here remains scarce-and the directorate won't share details-the pulsed-energy projectile rivals the Active Denial System pain beam in its sci-fi promise. The weapon will fire a pulsed (in brief shotlike bursts) deuterium-fluoride laser that will produce an ionized plasma on whatever surface it hits. That in turn will cause both pain and a kinetic shock, and could literally knock people off their feet.

Another counter-personnel system, the veiling-glare laser, is designed to produce fluorescence in the human eye, inducing a whiteout effect, blinding individuals for brief periods. Acoustic devices that produce low-frequency, incapacitating sound are also being investigated as counter-personnel weapons.

Then there are the malodorants, the chemical brews that mimic revolting smells and can disperse attackers and crowds. Malodorants may send people packing a lot faster than the most expensive laser weapon imaginable. Pamela Dalton, an experimental psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, says a military group approached her organization-she would not specify which, and the directorate wouldn't confirm its interest-to study odorants likely to offend everyone, everywhere. "We focused on odors that had biological origin, reasoning that they had the best chance of being universally recognized and reviled," she explains. "Vomit odor, the odor of human excrement, urine, human sweat odor, rotting fish, decomposing bodies, burned hair."

One drawback is that the malodorants have proven ineffective against the French. (Obligatory Francophile crack of the day) Posted by Orrin Judd at May 9, 2003 6:25 PM