Unconventional weapons can help U.S. troops fight insurgents in Iraq.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

Despite spending more than a decade developing non-lethal weapon technology, the Defense Department is struggling to catch up with soldiers' needs in Iraq.

While researchers in the United States ponder how to advance from rubber bullets and tear gas to such cutting-edge technologies as directed energy, troops on the ground are demanding quick non-lethal alternatives for peacekeeping and crowd-control operations.

Soldiers are asking for devices that will help them separate gunmen from human shields in crowds; that sweep areas through which convoys are moving; that suppress fire from rocket-propelled grenade launchers, without killing nearby civilians, and that safely stop suicide vehicle bombers at checkpoints.

The most widely used non-lethal weapons are chemical agents, such as tear gas and pepper spray; blunt impact munitions, including rubber bullets and bean bag rounds; diversionary devices, among which are flash/bang grenades and electric shock, and anti-vehicle systems, embracing caltrops and spike strips to deflate tires.

These tools have been deployed *s part of non-lethal capability sets designed by the joint non-lethal weapons directorate in the late 1990s. The directorate was created in 1997 to support the Marine Corps' role as the agency responsible for non-lethal weapons.

When it created the non-lethal capability set concept, the directorate designed it to equip 200 people, or what was referred to as the "battalion-size" NLCS. The set includes everything from blunt-trauma weapons, dye markets, riot shields and masks to anti-vehicle capabilities, electro-muscular disruptive tools, flash-bang grenades and illumination devices.

The sets were first deployed to Kosovo, then Afghanistan and Iraq. But soldiers in Iraq have complained that their equipment sets were too bulky and difficult to transport and distribute.

Their gripes did not fall on deaf ears. The sets recently have been reconfigured to platoon size to equip 30 soldiers, Mireille Pincay-Rodrigues, the project officer for non-lethal weapons within the Army's close combat systems program at Picatinny, N.J., told National Defense.

Her office is responsible for fielding the Army's non-lethal capabilities sets. "This reconfiguration resulted from feedback from the field regarding the bulkiness of the battalion-size set--13 boxes--and the time it took to unpack, assemble and distribute the riot control equipment," she said.

The platoon-size set will be delivered in one large...