Hypocrisy of 'Non-Lethal' Arms - War Without Blood? Le Monde diplomatique The horror of images of deaths caused by Western armies
in military operations, designed to maintain peace and security, has
led to the development of new arms that are intended to paralyse, not
destroy. Yet for all this seductive rhetoric, so-called "non-lethal"
arms have the potential to increase the level of violence, spawning
ever more advanced
techniques of repression. And if democratic countries let their arms
manufacturers develop these techniques, they will be exported to
places less concerned about brutalising their populations.
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The use of "human shields" and civilian hostage-taking
is becoming increasingly common in modern warfare. All-out bombing is
not just politically primitive but does not help resolve complicated
internal conflicts - even if we are talking about smart, carbon fibre
bombs. A revolution in military strategy is coming in the wake of the
conflict over Kosovo (1).
Perhaps the major beneficiary of this thinking is the
Pentagon, which has benefited from President Bill Clinton's decision
to give it a gold-plated spending increase of $110bn over six years to
boost "military readiness". According to William Hartnung, senior
research fellow at the US World
Policy Institute (New York), the total United States military budget
of $260bn plus, only makes sense in terms of politics and economics,
rather than any real threat to American security. Such a sum is, he
says, "already twice as large as the combined budgets of every
conceivable US adversary, including major powers like China and Russia
and regional "rogue states" such as Iraq, North Korea and Libya"(2).
For Hartnung, the weapon-makers are shaping US foreign and military
policy. They are preparing, within the framework of a new doctrine,
weapons systems which
will break down the delineation between military and police.
With the end of the cold war we have seen a move away
from conflicts between states towards questions of national security
or external intervention. Since then US military policy makers have
been dreaming of "war without blood". The emergence of a second
generation of maiming, paralysing and immobilising weapons in the
early 1990s grew out of a collaboration between naive US science
fiction writers (such as American Quakers Chris and Janet Morris) and
high-profile futurologists (Alvin and
Heidi Toffler) with former CIA Director Ray Cline along with Colonel
John Alexander (3).
Together they developed a doctrine of "non-lethal"
warfare centred on the provision of advanced "soft-kill" weapons and
options. The US Defence Department defines these as "weapon systems
that are explicitly designed and primarily employed so as to
incapacitate personnel or materiel, while minimising fatalities,
permanent injury to personnel, and undesired damage
to property and the environment" (4). However, most advocates of the
doctrine recognise the theoretical nature of this notion and prefer to
speak of "less lethal" technologies. The collaboration of writers with
the military opened up doors into the US national nuclear weapons
laboratories at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, desperate for a new
role at the end of the cold war. The humane new doctrine of "war
without blood" had a double advantage: it relaunched research and was
at the same time a
useful public relations exercise after a series of disastrous episodes
(including the high profile beating of Rodney King, the Waco siege,
and the humiliating confrontations US troops endured in Somalia).
As US commander in chief, President Clinton is known to
be particularly susceptible to such a doctrine. His aides say he still
agonises over bringing death to innocents and remembers the name of
Layla Al Attar - a celebrated Iraqi painter who was crushed by the
first military air-strikes on Baghdad. Besides, in the information era
civilian deaths
and "collateral damage" have a big impact on public opinion.
Thus current US doctrine now says it is unrealistic to
"assume away" civilians and non-combatants on today's battlefield. The
army must be able to execute its missions in spite of and/or operating
in the midst of civilian personnel. These missions include blocking an
area; controlling
crowds; stopping vehicles and seizing individuals.
PANDORA'S BOX
The potential tools for achieving these objectives
include blunt trauma impact munitions, riot agent dispensers,
calmatives, pyrotechnic stun, electric stun, anti-traction, acoustics,
entanglement/nets; foams; barriers; directed energy, isotropic
radiators, super polymers (to create an immobilising fog) and
"non-lethal" mines.
This quest for a magic bullet weapon that does no harm
created a new arsenal of weapons more useful in developing a
media-friendly "quick fix" for the symptoms of social and political
problems than resolving their real causes. The US military freely
admit that the doctrine is not meant to replace lethal weapons with
"non-lethal" alternatives but to augment the use of deadly force in
both war and "operations other than war",
where the main targets include civilians. A dubious Pandora's box of
new weapons has emerged, designed to appear - rather than be - safe.
Because of the ubiquitous CNN factor they need to be media friendly.
Progress in this area of innovation has been swift. By 1995 the US
Joint Non-Lethal Weapons working group had tested various blunt impact
devices, chemical irritants,
disorientating technologies, entanglements and aqueous foam barriers.
By 1996 this group had evaluated entanglements and sticky foam;
modular non-lethal claymore mines; chemical riot control agents;
slippery barriers and Caltrops/Volcano mines (that explode when
someone enters a forbidden zone) and an acoustic "vortex ring" weapon.
Many of these projects have already been evolved
including sniper stopper systems such as the SDS system, commissioned
by the US Defence Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency,
which can detect muzzle blast and fire back (5). We also have M16
rifle adaption which allows it to fire 40 mm XM1006 sponge grenades
whilst retaining its lethal force
option of firing 5.56 mm bullets; a variable velocity projectile
system that enables a single munition to be used as a crowd control
blunt impact device or become a lethal sabot if a switch is pulled to
open gas vents. There is also the USAF's Saber 203 laser dazzler
system, prototypes of which were used by US Marines in Somalia in 1995
(6).
Even though most of the new less-than-lethal initiatives
are highly classified, they have spawned a string of lucrative
commercial contracts which are occasionally reported in the defence
press. However, the clearest picture of progress to date has emerged
from three recent conferences sponsored by Jane's Defence Weekly, held
in London between 1997 and 1999.
For their 1997 programme the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons
directorate had proposed six topics to government laboratories. These
included personnel sensing fuses; frangible shell casings; non-lethal
anti-materiel/materiel, "tunable" weapons; long range delivery means;
and unmanned vehicle capability. It received 63 responses. Two review
panels looked at technical and user merit, and three were selected for
funding:
* chemical diffusers, The 1998 programme included four topics:
* "tunable" non-lethal effects, At the 1997 conference, Hildi S. Libby, systems manager
for the US army's non-lethal material programme, advocated a range of
advanced technologies to "insert into existing weapons platforms". Not
surprisingly many of her
proposals centred on area denial munitions (7). The US will not sign
the land mines treaty until 2006, when "suitable" alternatives have
been developed. Libby presented options such as:
* a non-lethal antipersonnel mine, based on the design
of the M1*A1 lethal system. Little in the way of hard data exists to
determine how much of a 'sting' this device produces. Riot munitions
based on kinetic impact rounds have often caused internal organ
damage, blindness and death;
* a non-lethal 66 mm vehicle-launched payload; a
flexible response weapon that might be used in conjunction with other
systems to corral or punish a crowd;
* cannister-launched area denial systems, used for
delivering so-called non-lethal mines, malodorous devices or kinetic
systems for attacking crowds;
* a bounding anti-personnel net mine which springs up
from the ground to entangle the victim. So-called improvements already
tested include the incorporation of adhesive, pain-delivering irritant
or electroshock, or in the larger versions, razor-bladed additions
which oblige the targets
to remain completely still to avoid further lacerating injuries (8).
Both the 1997 and 1998 Jane's conferences discussed a
range of invisible weapons such as the Vortex gun (an advanced system
for delivering shock waves to the human body); acoustic bio-effect
weapons (which according to US expert William Arkin can be "merely
annoying" or "can be tuned to
produce 170 decibels and rupture organs create cavities in human
tissue and cause potentially lethal blastwave trauma".
The 1998 Jane's conference presented the "layered
defence concept" where the outer layers of the control onion are
less-lethal and the central area is deadly. Video was shown of
microwave weapons being used by troops accompanied by medical staff
who treated the comatose targets.
CONTRADICTION IN TERMS
Apart from potentially undermining the Hypocratic oath,
this work has been carried out in such secrecy that it is difficult to
evaluate claims of safety. For example, Steven Aftergood, director of
the Federation of American Scientists, has commented that high-powered
microwaves are almost uniquely intrusive. "They do not simply attack a
person's body", he says.
"Rather they reach all the way into a person's mind ... They are meant
to be disorientating or upset mental stability." Such devices heat up
and interfere with human body temperature, including so-called
bio-regulators; radio-frequency weapons that interfere with the brain
and body's own electrical circuitry; and laser systems that can either
semi-blind or induce so-called tetanising electrical shocks (that
paralyse muscles) (9). In January the European parliament called for a
ban on such weapons.
Many non-governmental organisations have voiced
opposition to non-lethal weapons arguing that they are a contradiction
in terms. Critics say that in the heat of the moment few operatives
will favour "phasers on stun" (in
Startrek parlance) if they also have a more permanent lethal option.
This risks blurring the distinction between crowd control and summary
street executions.
Apart from undermining international humanitarian law,
such weapons can be deployed in very different contexts from those
that the designers envisage. For example, the daily rate of executions
recorded in the Rwandan conflict was due to a paralysing tactic of
cutting the Achilles tendon that allowed the subsequent killing to be
done at leisure.
Sticky foam guns that glue targets to the ground,
calmative chemicals that knock out a crowd and paralysing systems that
fix people in place are devices that might paradoxically make conflict
zones even more lethal - deadly weapons could well be deployed against
sitting ducks. In
Ireland, the laboratory of the first generation of non-lethal weapons,
the use of these weapons encouraged and exacerbated the conflict (10).
Amnesty International has already reported cases where
such weapons have been used for street punishment, for example in the
US, where peaceful environmental protesters had their eyes directly
sprayed with pepper gas -- which Amnesty characterised as "tantamount
to torture". The organisation has also documented the repeated use in
Kenya of a very strong form of tear gas. Two years after it succeeded
in getting the British government to ban its exportation, Amnesty
reported that the
substance used to subdue a peaceful demonstration on 10 June 1999 was
supplied by a French company, Nobel Securite (11).
Once the repressive systems are developed, their
manufacturers will be tempted to service the market demands of the
torturing states. Amnesty has recognised this prospect and is
examining whether weapons that are inherently "abusable" should be
banned, like electro-shock and stun technology (12). The basic
question is to what extent these systems undermine international
treaties and human rights law. With its Sirus
project, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is
adopting a similar approach (13). To date, most weapons that have been
prohibited, such as poison gas, exploding bullets, blinding laser
weapons and landmines, were designed to inflict a specific injury, and
to do so consistently. According to the ICRC, it is time to impose a
general ban on all so-called non-lethal weapons that cause superfluous
injury or unnecessary suffering by specifically singling out
anatomical, biochemical
or physiological targets.
(1) See Maurice Najman, "Developing the weapons of the
21st century", and Francis Pisani, "Mars gives way to Minerva", Le
Monde diplomatique, English edition, February 1998 and August 1999
respectively.
(2) William D Hartung, "Ready for What? The New Politics
of Pentagon Spending", World Policy Journal, New York, Spring 1999:
http://worldpolicy.org/HartungW.html
(3) Formerly involved in the rather more lethal US Army
Special Phoenix programme in Vietnam - a campaign of 20,000 killings.
See Lobster, Hull, 25 June 1993.
(4) See the website of the Quantico marine college
(Virginia): http://www.concepts.quantico.usmc.mil/nonleth.htm
(5) Jason Glashow, Defense News, US, January 1996.
(6) Scott Gourley, "Soft Options", Jane's Defence
Weekly, London, 17 July 1996.
(7) Outlines: http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/NLD3/libb.pdf
(8) Alliant Tech's Fishook mine, developed in 1996, aims
for a cannister-launched area denial system to shoot out a thin wire
with fishhooks "to cover a soccer sized area". Marketing manager Tom
Bierman says that "It's intended to snag, it's not going to kill you".
Not unless your co-targets panic.
(9) The UK defence ministry's Defence Evaluation
Research Agency in Farnborough was looking at such a "freezer ray".
See "Raygun Freezes Victims Without Causing Injuries", Sunday Times,
London 9 May 1999.
(10) See Steve Wright, "An Appraisal of Technologies of
Political Control", Report to Scientific and Technological Options
Assessment, European Parliament, 1998 (http://jwa.com/stoa.atpc.htm).
(11) See Commerce of Terror, Amnesty International,
Paris, October 1999.
(12) See Amnesty International, "Arming the torturers",
Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, April 1997. Also available
from Amnesty International, International Secretariat, Arming the
Torturers, Electroshock Torture and the Spread of Stun Technology,
London 1997.
(13) ICRC, The Sirus Project, Geneva, 1997:
http/www.icrc.org
by Steve Wright
Director of the Omega Foundation
Manchester, UK.
December 1999
* spider fibre and
* non-lethal electromagnetic pulsers for stopping vehicles.
* long range projection,
* gap analysis and
* non-lethal alternatives to antipersonnel land mines.