This quotation from early on in the report is quite representative:

The growing frequency and significance of operations amid populations suggests a regular—rather than rare—need for U.S. military forces to be able to gain control of situations, perform their tasks, and protect themselves without using deadly force. Although nonlethal options have long been essential in law-enforcement missions, in which ensuring public safety with minimum violence is stock-in-trade, they have been regarded by the military as having only limited utility in only exceptional circumstances. … Although foreign insurgents present dangers exceeding those that police face in American cities, U.S. military forces could remedy a major shortcoming they face in COIN and other important missions if they had nonlethal capabilities that could produce a range of effects and the skills to use them. Such options would offer typical small units more flexibility, self-sufficiency, and speed; less risk of making mistakes with wide political repercussions; and better odds of accomplishing their missions.

As the report also makes clear, the distinction between lethal and non-lethal is itself too crude, as it implies that everything below the threshold of lethality can be grouped together. This simplistic notion is pushed aside in the report, which instead argues for a continuum of non-lethal to lethal force, and with the understanding that even if a weapon does not kill, its unintelligent use can still have devastating consequences for a force operating with transient legitimacy and limited public support:

“Pain, shock, or injury may turn a crowd into a mob, a mob into a confrontation, or a confrontation into a cause célèbre that can fuel insurgency. Therefore, the ability to calibrate nonlethal force from none to mild to moderate to intense can be as important as simply not causing death. The need is for a continuum of force.”

The challenge is knowing and deciding which intensity of force to use when and where, so the problem is still fundamentally a human one. There is, in other words, no technological fix here, but nonetheless an appreciation that when military operations are conducted among populations whose support or at least acquiescence is necessary, it behooves the relevant armed forces to develop more options than simply ‘inactivity’ or ‘death’. It is intriguing to me that after years operating in urban environments – in Iraq, to a lesser degree in Afghanistan, but also throughout the 1990s – these issues have not attracted more attention.

You can read the rest of this report here.

As a final thought, I wonder whether it is at all coincidental that this report was commissioned by the Office of the Secretary of Defence, rather than by the Army.