Marines Take a Tip From L.A. Riots : Somalia: Southland crowd control failures lead to non-lethal devices that may cut casualties as troops shield U.N. pullout.

From the failures of crowd control in the Los Angeles riots comes the futuristic hope for a bloodless U.N. pullout from Somalia.

Sid Heal, a muscle-strapped lieutenant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, watched law enforcement stumble and struggle to contain anarchy in the 1992 civil disturbances.

“I was not real happy with the way the riots went,” he said.

Later, the 44-year-old Heal listened as the U.S. Marine Corps seemed intent on repeating the mistakes--sailing off into a troubled post-Cold War world, armed to the teeth with the latest in firepower but only the crudest, heavy-handed doctrine for handling mobs.

Heal objected and wrote a scathing assessment to the Pentagon. Guns, he said, have limitations.

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to think of every problem as a nail,” Heal said Friday aboard the Ogden, a U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship.

Now, Heal is preparing to test his thesis and perhaps to contribute to a fundamental alteration of tactics for American troops in far-off hot spots.

Here, the sheriff’s lieutenant is a Marine Corps chief warrant officer and principal adviser in the armed forces’ biggest commitment ever to non-lethal warfare.

One of only a few reservists called to duty off Somalia, he is part of India Company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, from Camp Pendleton.

In the coming days, along with up to 2,000 other U.S. Marines, the company will land in war-torn Mogadishu to cover the evacuation of U.N. peacekeepers.

The Marines face a population where almost every man may be a gunman, where nearly every citizen is regarded as both victim and victimizer in factional civil strife, where daily life is about shooting and ducking and looting and suffering--and inflicting suffering.

Into this hardened city, India Company comes with soapsuds and taffy foam and bean bags--and just a few weeks of training.

In one regard, non-lethal warfare is a huge step for the Marines, whose credo is to attack and fight and kill.

But in another regard, it is an obvious evolution. The technology of foam and immobilizing agents the Marines are carrying has long been used in prisons and by police. And today, American troops increasingly are finding themselves cast as global police.

In this mission, the Marines want only to safeguard a retreat and get out with their own skins.

“The law enforcement environment is getting more violent. I was on the SWAT team for five years, and the missions I had were almost identical to those I get in the Marines Corps,” Held said. “On the Marine side, at the end of the Cold War, we’re picking up more humanitarian and peacekeeping and peacemaking missions. . . . Both sides have interests in solving the same problems.”

On Friday, the Marines demonstrated their experimental arsenal. As a result of advance buildup from the Pentagon, most of the attention focused on the least lethal of all--”foam” weapons.

India Company will have two types. One resembles soapsuds. Marine alchemists can lace it with pepper gas and spray it as fortification over protective rings of concertina wire. Even with wire cutters, intruders will be slowed in advancing through this “barrier foam.”

The other is “sticky foam,” sprayed from hand-held tanks not unlike those seen in the movie “Ghostbusters.” Turn on a nozzle and a one-inch stream of foam squirts forth to a range of perhaps 30 feet. Upon contact with the air, the foam expands and congeals into a taffy-glue that can hold someone fast to the ground for hours; it can take days to pull from the skin.

This sticky-foam weaponry was developed in 1992 for use in subduing prison disturbances. Some futurists have been predicting that it could become an important tool in crime fighting and crowd control.

Still, Marines are nothing if not bound to tradition. And in this task force, some find the change from bullets difficult. Which Marine, after all, wants to be the first to tell his war story about the day he foamed his foe?

“We don’t do this very well,” said one major involved in planning this week’s Somalia operation. “We bring a lot of capabilities that can complement traditional military operations. But we’re not policemen.”

*

Marines in India Company, however, seem willing to try.

For weeks they have been testing the weapons and using training scenarios in hopes of anticipating all possibilities in Mogadishu.

“We’ve used pepper spray on each other. We’ve used sticky foam. The only thing we haven’t done is fire rubber pellets at each other,” Lance Cpl. Daniel Hoemann said.

The rear guard will also have an immense amount of conventional firepower at hand, of course, from rifles and machine guns to warplanes and naval gunfire.

“There’s been skepticism all along: Why do we have to be using this stuff when we have M-16s? But the Marines have adapted real well,” said Gunnery Sgt. Michael Rodarte, who was targeted with sticky foam in Friday’s demonstration after being swaddled in protective plastic and petroleum jelly. “And at close quarters, you can still kill somebody with some of this stuff. That made these Marines feel better.”

But, said Heal, the sheriff’s lieutenant: “Less than lethal allows us to control a situation without escalating it. All we want to do is get out of here.”