Music as a Weapon
“Acoustic weapons” have been in development by Department of Defense contractors since at least the 1998 creation of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Task Force, accounting for 1/3 of the Task Force’s budget in 1998-99. Thus, they are not peculiar to 21st century wars, or to the current administration. The earliest contract I know to have been let for such a weapon was on November 18, 1998, authorizing now-defunct Synetics Corporation to produce a tightly focused beam of infrasound–that is, vibration waves slower than 100 vps–meant to produce effects that range from “disabling or lethal”. In 1999, Maxwell Technologies patented a HyperSonic music System, another “highly directional device ... designed to control hostile crowds or disable hostage takers”. The same year Primex Physics International patented both the “Acoustic Blaster”, which produced “repetitive impulse waveforms” of 165dB, directable at a distance of 50 feet, for “antipersonnel applications”, and the Sequential Arc Discharge Acoustic Generator, which produces “high intensity impulsive sound waves by purely electrical means” .As far as I know, none of these have been deployed in the current wars. They have been supplanted in the non-lethal weapons arms race by a system the American Technology Corporation developed after 2000 –the Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD. Capable of projecting a “strip of music” at an average of 120 dB that will be intelligible for 500 to 1,000 meters, the LRAD is designed to hail ships, issue battlefield or crowd-control commands, or direct an “attention-getting and highly irritating deterrent tone for behavior modification”. As of March, 2006, 350 LRAD systems had been sold–to the US Navy, the Coast Guard, various commercial shippers for marine interdiction; to the US Army and Marines for use by PsyOps units, and at checkpoints and internment facilities; to the police departments of Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Santa Ana, and Broward County, Florida. According to the US Army’s 361st PsyOps company, LRAD’s are used
for clearing streets and rooftops during cordon and search, for disseminating information, and for drawing out enemy snipers who are subsequently destroyed by our own snipers.
It could also be set to “fire” short bursts of “intense acoustic energy” into crowds, to incapacitate people by causing spatial disorientation. Similar weapons deployed by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon produce the effect of “being hit by a wall of air that is painful on the ears, sometimes causing nosebleeds and leaving you shaking inside”.
Capable of directing “music through the use of an integrated and hardened MP3 player”, and of accepting “external audio devices, like a CD or MP3 player”, LRADs have been deployed with combat units since the fall of 2003. According to an ATC spokesman, they were used in Iraq in 2004 “to play both high output music and deterrent tones, evidently to great effect as a PsyOps tool, causing the insurgents to react in ways that greatly increased their vulnerability”. Most likely, LRADs were the means by which the 361st PsyOps company “prepared the battlefield” for the November 2004 siege of Fallujah by bombarding the city with music–supposedly, with Metallica’s “Hells’ Bells” and “Shoot to Thrill” among other things. PsyOps spokesman Ben Abel explained to reporter Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times, “These harassment missions work especially well in urban settings like Fallujah. The sounds just keep reverberating off the walls.” Abel added “it’s not the music so much as the sound. It is like throwing a smoke bomb. The aim is to disorient and confuse the enemy to gain a tactical advantage” . Abel made clear that although the tactic of bombarding the enemy with sound was made at the command level, the choice of music was left to soldiers in the field: “...our guys have been getting really creative in finding sounds they think would make the enemy upset...These guys have their own mini-disc players, with their own music, plus hundreds of downloaded sounds. It’s kind of personal preference how they choose the songs. We’ve got very young guys making these decisions”. On the battlefield, then, the use of music as a weapon is perceived to be incidental to the use of sound’s ability to affect a person’s spatial orientation, sense of balance, and physical coordination. It is because music is incidental that the choice of repertoire is delegated to individual PsyOps soldiers’ creativity.
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