Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan would like to see non-lethal alternatives to conventional ammunition, said Lt. Col. Al Kelly, commander of the 17th Infantry Brigade.
Non-lethal weapons are needed for crowd control and mob situations, he said. If a tank drives into a town and stops and crowds of children run up and start throwing rocks because they were told to, soldiers don’t want to use live fire, Kelly told a National Defense Industrial Association conference.
“There are so many people out there [in Iraq] who go about their lives like business as usual” and speed down the road in their car, Kelly said. “When a speeding car is coming at U.S. soldiers, he has to make the decision ‘do I shoot, do I not shoot’”?
In one incident in Iraq, a car started driving towards a Stryker armored vehicle and the soldiers inside fired warning shots, Kelly explained. “The car ran into the Stryker and once the vehicle stopped, the driver got out and ran towards it,” Kelly said. “He was a suicide bomber, but fortunately his bomb didn’t go off.”
Less-than-lethal weapons could be used to directly fire at the vehicle and driver without killing anyone.
“They can be used in a riot scenario to back people off your equipment so that they can’t throw a grenade in a tank, which has happened,” Kelly said.
One effective weapon is the M203 that uses foam rounds or rubber pellets, “which will knock a guy down.” Kelly said it is difficult to get because there are simply not enough.
Another one is the 12 gauge shotgun that fires what he called “dirigible rounds, kind of like a bean bag,” which are useful for crowd control, Kelly said.
The FN303 paint ball gun also works in these situations. It has a drum magazine, fired by compressed air and it comes with four different rounds. It’s used to mark buildings and cars, Kelly said. At first, “we only had four after we got to Baghdad, but then it went to almost one per vehicle, which is the real need.”
There is a growing market of all variety for non-lethal weapons, noted Dan Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Va.
Kelly said his group used a non-lethal weapon in Baghdad that was supposed to make people sick from high frequency sound waves, but he said it didn’t work.
Goure cited the active denial system as a viable option in future operations. It sends out a milimeter wave beam that heats up the first one-eighth layer of skin without causing lasting damage. It needs to be smaller for use in the field, Goure said.
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