FUTURE WAR: Non-Lethal Weapons in 21st Century Warfare.

FUTURE WAR: Non-Lethal Weapons in 21st Century Warfare By John Alexander St. Martin's, $24.95

When U.S. soldiers staged their ill-fated attempt to rescue American hostages from Iran in April 1980, word circulated in Washington that they weren't actually carrying guns. Commentators and pundits were so stunned by the notion that the God-fearing President Jimmy Carter had ordered the use of force that they assumed there must have been some other plan. Soldiers and air crews, rumor had it, were equipped with a top-secret knockout gas that would have incapacitated any Iranian resistance harmlessly. This story was received credibly in Washington establishment circles until photographs of wrecked helicopters showed machine guns mounted in their doors. It turned out that operational details for the final hours of the planned raid included diversionary bombing attacks on Iranian military targets while Air Force gunships circled the rescue site, "hosing down" the streets with 40mm cannon fire to kill anything that moved. A nonlethal raid? Not exactly.

Of course, planners for the 1980 raid might have incorporated nonlethal weapons, if they'd had them. The same goes for planners for the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the 1989 attack on Panama, the 1991 Gulf war, the 1993 Somalia and Haiti operations, the 1995 Bosnia occupation, the 1999 campaign against Serbia, and the list goes on. Military commanders can't use nonlethal weapons because they basically don't have any, other than tear gas and rubber bullets, which are useful for breaking up crowds but not in battle. Except in the movies, there is nothing remotely close to knockout gas.

John Alexander, a retired Army colonel with experiences as varied as Green Beret commands in Vietnam and a stint at the Council on Foreign Relations, hopes that will change. His Future War is a timely, intriguing book, one that advocates a broad-reaching American commitment to develop and field nonlethal weapons. Generally the book offers a serious argument, though Future War does contain so many references to science-fiction movies that it sometimes veers toward silly. Alexander, who's apparently done some Hollywood consulting, comes perilously to suggesting that if something has been in a Michael Crichton movie, that shows it can actually exist: a pointed lapse in logic for an otherwise earnest work.

Alexander thinks nonlethal arms make sense for two reasons: First because technology is making them possible, second because in decades to come it seems much more likely that Western militaries will be involved in low-grade conflicts and peacekeeping, which means operating around civilians, than engaged in traditional heavy battle. From its founding in 1945 to 1990, Alexander points out, the United Nations authorized the use of force six times; since then it has voted in favor of 61 acts of military engagement, almost all executed primarily by U.S. forces. For both humanitarian and pragmatic political reasons, nonlethal arms would be the weapons of choice for most of the kinds of actions that the United Nations authorizes.

Alexander, a great enthusiast for nonlethal arms, see? extensive promise in the idea. Since the mid-1970s, British units have broken up many riots in Northern Ireland using rubber bullets, which is a big step up from firing real bullets into crowds, as was done on Bloody Sunday in 1972. Some police departments now use the Taser, which temporarily incapacitates using electricity. During the second Somalia operation, in 1994, Marine units equipped with new laser devices found that if they simply lit up a militiaman's chest with the spooky green light of a laser sight, he'd instantly become cooperative and drop his gun. So at least a few exercises of force have been accomplished using nonlethal means.

But in the main, nonlethal arms are still unimpressive. Rubber cartridges, for example, must be fired from precisely the correct distance: too far away and they just sting, too close and they become lethal. Guns that shoot nets or bean-bags or globs of super-sticky foam have all kinds of practical limitations compared to bullets, including limited range and long reload times if you miss. Lasers can be used to dazzle or blind--the Chinese are selling developing world customers a blinding weapon with the actual name ZM87 Portal Laser Disturber--but can also be defeated by mirrors and goggles. (Sales pitches for nonlethal weapons tend to assume that they will be employed against people who are not using countermeasures, yet the history of warfare shows that almost everybody quickly adapts countermeasures.) Nonlethal "chaff" dispensers fired at Serbian transformer stations have dimmed Belgrade's electricity during the Kosovo conflict, but the effect has been temporary, whereas a few bombs targeted on power plants would have darkened the country for months.

Alexander advocates such exotic ideas as dropping canisters of super-acids on the roads being used by enemy forces, to wreck truck tires and tank treads; spraying enemy positions with super-Teflon, so that soldiers slip and fall in a 21st century Three Stooges routine; blasting opposition positions with insect pheromones, in order to attract every bug from miles around, forcing enemy soldiers to spend their time itching and scratching. You can imagine how enthusiastic you'd be about these ideas as a field commander, if your other option were simply blowing the enemy up. Future War even suggests that someday there will be biological agents that attack stuff, not people--designer bugs that would eat away at the other sides rubber or petroleum.

Well, maybe, but how much can one bug eat? The lack of any knockout gas suggests how impractical many ideas for nonlethal weapons are. Consider the one known chemical knockout technique--anesthesia. It works but requires extremely precise doses, monitoring of pulse and blood pressure and blood oxygen saturation; even a tiny slip-up kills the patient. Try to imagine any chemical that could be lobbed in artillery shells in bulk for knockout purposes. A big enough blast would be too potent, and would kill the targets; too little, and they'd whiff it without effect. Most nonlethal weaponry schemes suffer from basic drawbacks like this, and it's hard to see how they will be overcome.

That does not, of course, mean nonlethal weapons will never happen. During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was excessively optimistic about antimissile weapons, wanting to fund a complete national antimissile at a time when there wasn't a single piece of working hardware in this category. Yet although Reagan's understanding of the technology was poor, his instinct was correct--the ability to shoot down nuclear missiles would be welcome, and eventually will be developed, partly because Reagan prodded the military system into taking this idea seriously. Though there is no nonlethal weapon today, prodding the Pentagon to search for one could ultimately prove as useful as Reagan's insistence on antimissile research. Future War is right to advocate this idea, and represents a valuable reminder that the technological wizards of the American defense establishment should devote more of their considerable brainpower to that which does not kill.

GREGG EASTERBROOK, a contributing editor at The Washington Monthly, is a senior editor at The New Republic.