Less-Lethal Weapons, Lethal Bureaucracy

Despite the obvious need for less-lethal weapons in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has inexcusably dragged its heels when it comes to actually fielding the systems -- this despite the technology being perfectly ready.

The saga of the much-vaunted and much-delayed Active Denial System "heat ray" is just one example. The Air Force has consigned that device to a seemingly endless series of tests. The Marines, for their part, have doggedly refused to get even the simplest less-than-lethal weapons to where they're needed: on Iraq's chaotic streets.

In January, the Tampa Tribune broke the story of bureaucratic resistance to repeated requests from deployed Marines for handheld laser "dazzlers" meant for temporarily blinding drivers trying to rush checkpoints (pictured). 50 Iraqis died, allegedly, from the dazzler-lack. I expand on that story in the latest issue of Defense Technology International:

The first II MEF filed a “Universal Needs Statement” for a dazzler in May 2005, specifically asking for 400 CHP[-brand dazzlers] and marking the request “urgent,” meaning it wanted them within three months. “Marine Forces … have recently experienced a string of lethal encounters and casualties induced from Marines firing flares at approaching vehicles to warn them to stop or slow down,” the statement read. “That [tactic] has caused one fatality and one fatality from the Iraqi civilian population.”

Such needs statements, as their name implies, are just expressions of a need – and any Marine can write them. They do not entail a formal requirement; that must come from MCCDC. And when MCCDC got II MEF’s needs statement, it effectively sat on it, sending the CHP into a yearlong period of testing that I MEF personnel say was unnecessary, since the CHP had already been used by law enforcement personnel in the U.S. and even by one secretive (and undisclosed) military force in Iraq. It took 18 months and a duplicate request from I MEF citing 50 Iraqis killed, plus a minor “procurement coup” on the part of the MEF, to get MCCDC to send any dazzlers to Iraq in January. But these were $10,000 Green Beam Designator-IIICs manufactured by B.E. Meyers & Company based in Washington State. ...

But it’s not that the GBD-III is totally incapable of performing the mission. The major difference between it and the CHP is that the latter is slightly more powerful. I MEF’s main complaints are that Marines couldn’t get dazzlers at all for years. And when they finally did get some, by forcing the issue through a limited purchase using their own money, the Systems Command-supplied dazzlers were of a type that no one specifically requested. In other words, the procurement bureaucracy just wasn’t cooperating with the warfighters.

-- David Axe, cross-posted at War is Boring