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Nonlethal weapons courses full

FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. — With the need for military crowd control on the rise in places like Iraq, U.S. officers got hands-on training Thursday in using rubber bullets, beanbag rounds and stun guns.

About a dozen command-level officers, mainly from the Army and Marines, braved temperatures in the teens at the Defense Department’s multiservice training course to get a feel for nonlethal weapons their troops can use to stop rioters, keep crowds at bay or run checkpoints.

The two-day course for commanders is part of the work done at this sprawling Army base by the group in charge of nonlethal weapons training across the military.

“We are the trainers for the trainers,” said Marine Capt. Joel Rockemann, the officer in charge of the Interservice Nonlethal Individual Weapons Instructor Course.

Rockemann said the normal course is a 10-day session for military trainers from all branches. The shortened version this week is the third one offered for command officers.

“With the kinds of security and stabilization missions we have now, you want options besides lethal force. There is a growing need,” Rockemann told reporters at an outdoor firing range.

Officers on the range fired about a dozen different kinds of nonlethal ammunition, ranging from rubber bullets and sock-like beanbags to fat, hard foam-tipped rounds fired from the M203 grenade launcher that is often attached to M16s.

They also tried out stingball grenades, which spread a hail of hard rubber pellets instead of shrapnel. The grenades can be hurled by hand or can be fired from an attachment on a standard-issue military pump shotgun.

Dummies were used for targets.

“I guarantee you these will hurt. We aim for an area around the belt buckle or the large muscle area of the legs and the aim is stop you from throwing that rock at me,” Rockemann said.

Another weapon is a rifle powered by compressed air, the FN303, that can fire various kinds of nonlethal projectiles from a cartridge of 12 in semiautomatic mode. The advantage is that it can fire more rounds faster than some of the other munition, which has to be loaded shell by shell into shotguns or grenade launchers.

Rockemann, who fought in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and stayed there about seven months, said his course is fully booked for the next three to four sessions. He said the military mission in Iraq and other fronts has increasingly become a matter of controlling crowds rather than gunning down adversaries.

“We are in hearts-and-minds mode all over the world now,” Rockemann said.