"It feels like the skin is being ripped from your face, but the military says it’s perfectly safe."
The crowd is getting ugly. Soldiers roll up in a Hummer. Suddenly, the whole right half of your body is screaming in agony. You feel like you’ve been dipped in molten lava. You almost faint from shock and pain, but instead you stumble backwards — and then start running. To your surprise, everyone else is running too. In a few seconds, the street is completely empty. You’ve just been hit with a new nonlethal weapon that has been certified for use in Iraq — even though critics argue there may be unforeseen effects. According to documents obtained for Wired News under federal sunshine laws, the Air Force’s Active Denial System, or ADS, has been certified safe after lengthy tests by military scientists in the lab and in war games. The ADS shoots a beam of millimeters waves, which are longer in wavelength than x-rays but shorter than microwaves — 94 GHz (= 3 mm wavelength) compared to 2.45 GHz (= 12 cm wavelength) in a standard microwave oven.
The ADS was developed in complete secrecy for 10 years at a cost of $40 million [of your taxpayers dollars]. Its existence was revealed in 2001 by news reports, but most details of ADS human testing remain classified. There has been no independent checking of the military’s claims. The ADS technology is ready to deploy, and the Army requested ADS-armed Strykers for Iraq last year. But the military is well aware that any adverse publicity could finish the program, and it does not want to risk distressed victims wailing about evil new weapons on CNN.
Navy says ADS Possibly to be used for defense at Sea.
Navy ships frustrated by pirates and small-boat attackers could get a new tool to disarm such threats: a nonlethal people zapper. Fifth Fleet commander Vice Adm. Bill Gortney has put out an “urgent need statement” seeking nonlethal weapons to enable cruisers and destroyers to keep small boats at bay.
“If you’re the [commanding officer] of a DDG ... and you see these small boats coming, all you can do is shoot at them,” said Marine Maj. Gen. Tom Benes, director of expeditionary warfare for the chief of naval operations. “Nonlethal weapons give you the ability to cover that gap.”
The Active Denial System, a high-powered millimeter-wave ray that field commanders have requested for use in Iraq, is among the options, Benes said. Another is the Long Range Acoustic Device, already in limited use in the fleet, which sends warnings and ear-splitting noise in a particular direction.
Although ADS has been touted as a land-based technology, the Defense Department has concluded the system could work over water, according to officials at Raytheon, which has delivered three of the systems to the Air Force.
“We’d be ready to make a recommendation that the system would be effective if used at sea aboard ship,” said George Svitak, Raytheon’s business development director for directed energy weapons.
Pirate activity off the Horn of Africa has spiked this fall. On Oct. 29, just a day after Benes discussed Gortney’s request, 5th Fleet announced that five merchant ships off the Horn of Africa had been attacked by pirates.
As Navy Times went to press, 10 merchant vessels, carrying a total of more than 200 mariners, were being ransomed by pirates, according to the NATO Shipping Center.
The coalition ships that patrol the Gulf of Aden have been so frustrated by attacks that Gortney has advised merchant vessels to assume they’ll have to defend themselves. Not only are there too few warships to patrol the entire lawless coast of Somalia, navy captains are still unsure about which international laws govern their ability to fight pirates on the high seas and in Somali territorial waters.
Heat on the water
Developed several years ago for land usage, the Active Denial System fires a 6-foot-wide beam that creates an unbearable sensation of heat on its targets. People in its path must run.
It’s unclear whether the ray could penetrate the steel bulkhead of a surface vessel, but it could zap anyone riding in an exposed open boat, forcing them to turn away or even jump overboard to escape the beam.
Although it was designed to be used on land, the beam’s heat effects would be the same in a marine environment, Svitak said, and it would be effective at more than 800 yards. But engineers would have to design a deck mount to compensate for a ship’s pitch and roll. The Navy would have to determine where and how to mount it on a ship’s deck and whether it would be integrated into other combat systems.
(One Raytheon illustration shows the cruiser Bunker Hill zapping an attacking speedboat with an ADS mounted amidships, on the same platform as its Phalanx Close-In Weapons Systems.)
Without specific requirements, Svitak said there was no way to say how long it would take before the first warship sailed with an Active Denial System, nor how much a Navy version would cost. The Pentagon has spent more than $62 million since 1993 developing the millimeter-wave ray technology.
Another potential wrinkle with deploying the Active Denial System aboard a warship is an overall Pentagon skittishness about using it against hostile subjects. Gortney’s request is just the latest from a leader in the U.S. Central Command area. Army and Marine Corps generals have asked for ray weapons to disperse riots or guard bases, but the Pentagon has so far held off.
A Pentagon spokesman did not return Navy Times’ request for comment about the Active Denial System, including whether it could still be deployed in Iraq or other war zones.
Bringing the noise
Another nonlethal weapon is the Long Range Acoustic Device, which overwhelms its targets with sound so loud they hear it inside their heads. The LRAD is already installed aboard surface ships operating in the Middle East. Sailors can plug the LRAD into an MP3 player to broadcast pre-recorded warnings in Somali or Arabic, or take a page from riverine sailors in Iraq, who use the system to blast heavy metal music. Or they can repel small boats with a built-in klaxon.
“These Navy guys already know how to kill people — they’ve got that,” said Scott Stuckey, director of business development for American Technology Corporation, which makes the LRAD. “The key thing is to give our crews escalation-of-force equipment so they can properly and efficiently follow the rules of engagement.”
Louder than a jet engine, an LRAD can let sailors aboard a destroyer to clearly talk to small boats as far as 500 yards away, Stuckey said, and newer models can be controlled remotely from inside the skin of the ship. A sailor has to stand on deck and physically aim the version of the LRAD the Navy now uses.
New-model LRADs also include a laser dazzler, to temporarily blind attackers, and a high-tech spotlight as part of a single unit. Crew members can control the combined unit from the combat information center or set it to aim with the ship’s radar or infrared sensors.
Surface ships pick up at least one LRAD when they enter the 5th Fleet area of operations, which includes the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa, then drop it off when they leave. There are about 45 LRADs in the Navy’s inventory, Stuckey said, but the service has a contract with an option to buy around 270. For roughly $4 million, the Navy could buy all those devices, enough to outfit each surface ship, port and starboard.
Stuckey said the LRAD is but one tool of many that can create a larger “security tent” around ships. He points out that LRAD is not a sailor’s “final solution,” and that hearing protection worn by a pirate “simply reduces that intensity like a bulletproof vest does with small arms fire.”
Therefore, one could argue that the ADS could be the next “escalation of force” tool.
