The Silent Guardian

Warning: the following took place here in Accra, but is not expressly about Accra. Is this a welcome increase in the scope of this blog’s reportage? Or am I just overstepping, wandering onto subjects about which I’m not qualified to speak at all? I apologize in advance since it’s likely to be the latter.

Tuesday night I ate dinner at Sarah’s apartment. Not, loyal readers, the Buddhic Sarah of OI fame whose profile appeared in a prior installment of this blog, but rather Sarah the recent Yale graduate and Fulbright scholar. She has a beautiful apartment in the upscale Airport Residential neighborhood of Accra that she shares with five other young ladies. We ate a delightful meal of chicken, potato pancakes, and tomato-and-bread salad, kicked back, drank wine, and generally savored the high life in all its temperature-controlled splendor.

After dinner had finished the doorbell rang and it was Ryan, one of the six US Marines stationed in Accra—guarding the embassy—and the boyfriend of one of Sarah’s roommates. We found ourselves in a conversation that somehow meandered onto the topic of non-lethal weapons. I had recently read a BBC article on the Silent Guardian (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6297149.stm), a weapon designed mostly for crowd control that has been recently unveiled by the US military. It’s a large Humvee-mounted dish that focuses a high-energy beam on a point up to 500m away. The beam penetrates clothing and the first .5mm of human skin, and produces an excruciating burning sensation which subsides immediately when the beam is removed. It leaves no physical trace. Claims about its effects have been verified by journalists who volunteered to be shot by it while it was demonstrated at an Air Force base in Georgia.

I mentioned the article to Ryan, who had not heard of the Silent Guardian but thought it sounded “cool”. He chuckled and advised me that I should never volunteer to be a test subject for a non-lethal weapon. I didn’t need much convincing.

He went on to describe the general purpose of non-lethal weapons and he mentioned a few examples that he had seen or experienced firsthand. “’Non-lethal’ just means ‘pain-compliance’,” he said—that is, distinct from impositions of force designed to incapacitate a target. When you shoot a would-be attacker in the leg (or in the head) the idea is to render him physically incapable of harming you, but the pain-compliance approach seeks to make the would-be attacker decide not to harm you. In the former, pain is a side effect; in the latter, it is a means to an end.

Consider the following from John Alexander, formerly of the US Army Special Operations and now an advocate for non-lethal weapons: “There is a misconception that war is about killing. War is about the imposition of will.”

Indeed, the US military has devised a number of creative ways to impose its will without killing: mace, tear gas, rubber bullets, and the Silent Guardian are some examples. Ryan discussed the first three, in whose application he has been trained, with clinical matter-of-factness. Mace—actually concentrated red pepper—inflicts extraordinary pain but is completely non-lethal (there have been no recorded deaths from it). The 15% concentrate used by the military is enough to cause burning “bad enough that if you had a gun you’d want to shoot yourself,” but the sensation goes away shortly after the spray is washed off. (If the spray is water-based it can be washed off with running water; but if it is oil-based it bonds to skin and you need special soap.) If it gets in your eyes it severely distorts vision but does not permanently impair it. Ryan would know, because every Marine must be a sprayee before he can be a sprayer, and so he has been shot directly in the face with the stuff and made to guess how many fingers his C.O. was holding up. Looking on the bright side, one can at least be happy that they use the low test (15%) version—100% concentrate “would melt your skin straight off.”

Tear gas is similar to mace, but is neither as strong nor as non-lethal—there have been deaths from exposure to very high concentrations of the gas. Typically, though, it is used on large crowds in open areas, while mace is usually applied at close range; its effects are comparatively mild. Ryan suggested that they ought to make a similar crowd-control device with an oscillating sprinkler mounted on a Humvee and connected to a tank of mace inside, thus combining the broad application strategy with the increased pain (read “compliance”).

Finally there are the rubber bullets or, more broadly, any projectile shot from a non-lethal launcher. This is an air-powered rifle with a .62” barrel (like a paintball gun) that shoots missile-shaped projectiles. These may be designed to burst and distribute a payload (e.g. mace or tear gas), or they may simply be made of hard rubber. The weapon is rated non-lethal for 3-150 yards so long as you don’t shoot anybody in the face. While he was on guard duty at a base in the Middle East, Ryan was stationed on a tower overlooking the chainlink fence that marked the boundary of the installation. They had been instructed to keep the fence clear; so whenever someone was too close, or leaning directly on the fence, the Marines would yell to him to move away and would eventually shoot him if he refused. Normally tower guards are armed with traditional rifles but eventually they acquired a couple of non-lethal launchers. Referring to the military leadership, he remarked, “I guess they said it was more humane.”

He mockingly emphasized the word just as people mockingly emphasize other poorly-defined or generally ridiculous terms from the vocabulary of political correctness. Ultimately his attitude was that such a nebulous concept was ill-adapted to the strict utilitarian calculus of military decision-making, and so it ought to be abandoned up front. If nothing else, this seems, to me, (brutally) honest.

But the untraceable and excruciating pain of a concentrated energy beam as a means of persuasion? This is dark magic and finds application in places where blatant military force has generally been deemed inappropriate: places where, when it is put to use despite general condemnation, the best way to fight back is to make public some record of the brutality. An unseemly demonstration or a tight-lipped suspect under interrogation? Zap and it’s a memory—and who can tell the story of the suffering under the ray? There is no scar to testify to the ordeal.

The ease with which Ryan imagined these scenarios suggested that the military has in mind uses of precisely this sort. Imagine the irony: you might be at a rally protesting the use of these weapons when you hear, from the Humvee behind the barricades, the mechanical whine of the Silent Guardian’s dish pivoting to focus on you…

But one hopes such fears won't be realized, so long as we all stay in line. Reassuring, no?