Identifying “the No. 1 perceived threat over in Afghanistan” as “the fast approaching vehicle,” he observed, “The vast majority of the vehicles over there certainly are not carrying hostile intent. But there is a percentage that does. So those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have got to make a decision whether they pull the trigger right now on a lethal system to protect themselves and those around them or just do nothing. And that’s where we think that we can help with what we now term as non-lethal systems. We can give them an option where they can apply a measure of either ‘hail and warn’ early on or a force … to gain compliance.”

Along with the emerging technologies, Tafolla said that one possible future action involves changing the name of the organization and effort.

“Certainly right now we’re called Non-Lethal Weapon Systems,” he said. “But as technology advances and as our capabilities advance, we want to take a look at whether that’s the right term we should be using. Is the mission, the vision, and the scope of the program appropriate? Should that change?

“We also want to make sure that we are addressing not only the needs out there now but also the future needs,” he added. “And with that vision we want to be able to go 20 years out.

“Eventually you would think that the program goes away,” he said. “It probably does at some point in time. But I can’t give you a time frame of when that is at this point – ten years away? Twenty years away? Thirty years away? But eventually we will have scalable systems that are out there that we will be able to ratchet up from a non-lethal effect all the way up to a lethal effect. But I’m not going to work on the lethal effects right now. That’s not what we do in the program. We will take it up to that point.”

Although the program’s “counter-materiel” efforts are capable of not only disrupting but breaking components on a materiel target, Tafolla emphasized that the intent of “counter-personnel” efforts “is not to break that lethal threshold.”

“Now I can tell you that we go by something called ‘Risk of Significant Injury’ that gives us an idea of what the risks are, so that the commanders of the forces deploying the systems know what the inherent risks are in the weapon systems and their capabilities and limitations,” he said. “That’s not to take away their decision to be able to deploy that system. They are on the ground or on the water or in the air – wherever they may be – and it’s still their decision to figure out if the risk is worth the outcome. It is incumbent upon us, however, to make sure that the systems have the effects that are desired. That’s not to say that it may not have a negative outcome where somebody is significantly injured or even killed. But if employed properly we kind of know where that threshold is.

“We never want to take away the lethal option. We should be complementary to that lethal option because we want to provide freedom of maneuver and freedom of fire. But we want to be able to segregate that target, isolate that target, and either incapacitate it or set it up for a kill shot with some other system. That’s where we’re going.

“We see non-lethal as not just a niche in counterinsurgency but certainly across the vast spectrum of military operations that may be conducted throughout the world in all combatant commanders’ theaters. And we are going to support them. We do have liaison officers with each of the COCOMs except for STRATCOM [U.S. Strategic Command] – we just don’t see a need to have one there. So we get pretty good information in and out,” he said.

“We can’t go about business the same way that we always did,” Tafolla concluded. “So we are looking at advancing the technologies that we are either working on today or that we need to be working on tomorrow and see what possibilities those open up for us.”

This interview was first published in Defense: Fall 2012 Edition.