FEATURE ARTICLE

June 2005

Researchers Fill Data Gaps for Less-Than-Lethal Weapons

By Joe Pappalardo

Understanding the effects of non-lethal weapons is critical both to their development and the doctrine that will govern their use. Gaining that knowledge, however, is no easy chore, according to military and law enforcement experts.

Gaps now exist in the data needed to develop and evaluate non-lethal weapons, but law enforcement and military researchers are working to garner this information so that non-lethal options, can be used in place of more deadly alternatives.

At the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD), formed by the Defense Department in 1996, researchers are putting great effort into experiments to support the policymakers’ decision to produce new devices, and to spread that knowledge among other interested players.

The directorate is deciding how best to share its growing, internal database of non-lethal weapon effects across the Defense Department and other agencies.

While independent reviewers have access to all the relevant data accrued by the lab, other agencies often are left in the dark. For example, the directorate has compiled many years of data assembled on electro-muscular devices.

This is hot button for many military and law enforcement agencies since human-rights groups began questioning the safety of Taser products by compiling anecdotal evidence. “Right now, access to that database is very limited,” said the Lt. Col. Jonathan Drummond, chief of the Biobehavioral Research Branch at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Hundreds of journal articles are scoured monthly by directorate staff, and their military studies are also included. This leads to issues of security, which Drummond said currently are being considered. JNLWD currently is determining how the database can be stratified to provide access to the information without revealing classified information, he added.

“If you go too far you run into the issue of vulnerability that can allow your opponent to develop countermeasures,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Wrobel, a health-effects officer assigned to JNLWD.

New concepts are often in the greatest need of scientific investigation since they have to build their own foundations, Wrobel noted. For example, a deep pocket of research regarding thresholds of light damage exists from Cold War nuclear and laser studies, but “hearing-damage models are relatively weak … Things like auditory models have not kept pace. ”

A research plan for any new non-lethal weapon must first rely on whatever applicable experiments have been published. After that, researchers are on their own in determining the effectiveness and safety of a new product. Threshold testing—finding the point at which a non-lethal agent does permanent damage to a human—is a difficult challenge. Animal testing is often integral to this process. Also, lawyers need to be consulted to ensure new products don’t violate chemical weapons bans or established policy.

If a product does not show it can work or has a low threshold for causing permanent damage, it may be discontinued. Examples of programs that faded after generating negative human assessments include incapacitating sticky-foam and infrasound auditory devices.

Successful projects must survive years of scrutiny. One promising project, the active denial system, shoots a millimeter-wave energy beam to induce an intolerable heating sensation on a target’s skin without causing injury. That effort has taken more than a decade, as well as tens of millions of dollars, and is still in review.

End users have different criteria, Wrobel noted, pointing out that Special Forces operators hold different views of the balance between effectiveness and risk than Justice Department personnel.

The level of confidence in this information to accurately convey the effects, risks and benefits of an non-lethal weapon must be strong enough “so that a warfighter can plan off it,” Drummond said.

To do this, complex models and simulations need to be created from scratch.

There also is a new emphasis on psychological responses in crowds and individuals. Determining an individual’s reaction to a new non-lethal weapon is a challenge for medical doctors, but the dynamics of their effects on crowds is a more difficult challenge.

The directorate is actively collecting data to construct simulations of the effect anti-riot agents have on crowd behaviors. To do this, the directorate deploys small teams to special security events and large protests as observers. The teams collect data on crowds, directorate contract researcher Mary Williams told National Defense.

These teams, called “stormchasers,” try to map crowd dynamics for use in future behavioral models. For example, a well-organized crowd with leadership at the front likely will respond to non-lethal weapons, as opposed to a loosely affiliated mob.

Questionnaires also are distributed to law enforcement personnel for more raw data on crowd behaviors, information that will be fed into the computer models to create more accurate models, she said. The art of crowd simulations, and predicting the psychological effects of non-lethal weapons, “is really in its infancy,” Williams said.

The federal government is not alone in the quest to determine the operational information concerning less than lethal technologies.

A study conducted by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is crunching data from use-of-force records to get an idea of the frequency of use, effect and reliability of its arsenal of various non-lethal weapons, said Commander Charles Heal.

The department collected reports on every use of force incident between 1994 and 2004, and determined which officers were most involved.

The records, Heal said, are also a gold mine of information on the trends of non-lethal weapons use in the field. There are more than 21,000 non-lethal weapons reports in the study that include details of their effectiveness, where they were used on their targets’ body, the range, environment and descriptions of any countermeasures taken by the targets.

“The stuff we were throwing away was very useful,” Heal said. “There are lots of databases in law enforcement that are not being utilized.”

Trends discerned in the report that was released last month suggest many interesting things. Taser weapons decreased the use of other non-lethal weapons after they were adjusted for greater efficiency, Teal said.

The head and torso were the most popular targets for nearly all non-lethal weapons, including rubber bullets, which can kill with a headshot. Heal also found correlations between the small number of fatalities in Taser targets and the age, weight and history of drug use by the deceased. These data sets could become highly prized sources for non-lethal weapons researchers seeking to bring an improved item to market.

In the end, JNLWD staff only can suggest risks and benefits, not decide which product should be deployed. Asked why so much research at the directorate ends with recommendations for more research, Wrobel acknowledged their work typically breeds more work.

“It can turn into a self-licking ice cream cone, I’ll give you that,” he said. “That’s why the policymakers are paid the big bucks; they say when enough is enough.”

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