Non-Lethal Weapons Systems

Thursday

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It has been widely reported that Public Intelligence has released a 108 page document from the U.S. Department of Defense Non-Lethal Weapons Program, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD), titled Non-Lethal Weapons (NLW) Reference Book and published in 2011. There isn’t much shocking or surprising in the document, and anyone who follows these things will recognize most of these NLWs as programs that have been under development for some time. However, the document is interesting to look through as an overview of such weapons systems, as it is heavy on pictures and descriptions and without much detail.

The document defines NLWs as:

“Weapons, devices and munitions that are explicitly designed and primarily employed to incapacitate targeted personnel or materiel immediately, while minimizing fatalities, permanent injury to personnel, and undesired damage to property in the targeted area or environment. Non-lethal weapons are intended to have reversible effects on personnel or materiel.”

JROCM 060-09, Initial Capabilities Document for Counter Personnel Joint Non-Lethal Effects and Initial Capabilities Document for Counter Materiel Joint Non-Lethal Effects

And in the “frequently asked questions” there is this nice summary:

“NLW provide another ‘option’ to the force. In past operations, the effective employment of NLW resolved escalation of force situations. Specifically, the NLW created the right ‘direct effect’ on the personnel/materiel targeted. The use of NLW has also generated positive ‘psychological effects’ on others in the area and helped to contribute to mission accomplishment. The perceptions associated with the use of NLW have been a positive and powerful influence in local communities on ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the local populace. The employment of NLW has helped reduce the loss of life and collateral damage.”

Implied but not explicitly expressed in this document is the danger of NLW being employed in such a way as to cause permanent injury or disfigurement to its targets. From the perspective of public diplomacy, the old “dead men tell no tales” adage holds: while I suspect most people would prefer to be alive even if injured to being killed, the fact remains that bodies are buried and forgotten, while an injured individual would likely enter into the 24/7 news cycle and could conceivably cause more damage to the political image of a nation-state employing NLW than outright killing of targets. The human interest angle here is impossible to avoid.

As interesting as this possibility is, it is not the most interesting thing about NLW. The most interesting thing about NLW is their paradigmatic role in the political constraints on weapons systems that are increasingly driving defense thinking. These political constraints on weapons systems are in turn a manifestation of a fundamental shift in warfighting away from major conventional engagements between peer powers to low-level, chronic unconventional and asymmetrical warfare.

Unconventional and asymmetrical warfare is the new reality for nation-states, and this poses a fundamental challenge to the nation-state system, since the nation-state itself is a consequence of the early modern socioeconomic organization of peoples in order to mobilize military forces for precisely those conventional engagements between peer powers that are now being overtaken by the events of history. There are so many aspects of this shift in warfighting that they cannot be easily summarized.

It is possible that NLW will play an increasing role in unconventional and asymmetrical warfighting (really, fighting that is no longer subject to the warfighting paradigm, to be more accurate about it), and at some time in the future NLW may well dominate military engagements. If you can simply shut down an adversary’s ships, tanks, and planes from a distance, that is both less costly and less dangerous than engaging them with live fire. Similarly, if you can stop a riot by incapacitating the crowd without killing large numbers of people, this is preferable.

One form that this continuum of violence will take is what I have previously called the weaponization of eliminationism, and by the responses of political entities to ongoing depredations kept below the threshold of atrocity.

In this context, warfighting comes to approximate peacekeeping, if not policing. This, too, is a challenge to the nation-state system, as in liberal democratic political theory the distinction between military forces and police forces has been an important one, but as police forces become more robust and military forces become less lethal, the operations of each will approximate the other, and they will tend to meet in the middle.

The pacifist’s dream of a world without war may well become true in the not-too-distant future, but a world without war will not be a world without violence. Instead of peer and near-pear powers engaging in discretely separated wars, there will be a constant backdrop of violence to most political events — a continuum of incident rather than a declaration of war — and the most effective (and most responsible) way to respond to this will be with NLW.

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