Rank War: Cracking Open the Lid On Militarized Stink Bombs

For all the visible horror and concussive din of combat, smell is war’s lingering sting. Burning vehicles, fuel, and flesh. Fresh, spent cordite. Salt water. Opium. Sewage.

War reeks. And no matter that so much of war is being robotized to the threshold of autonomy – if smells can sometimes act as forceful memory triggers, it’s not surprisingly to hear of armed forces looking to stink as a tool of deception, dispersion, or fear. This time it’s Iran, who recently announced a new “strategic project of the armed forces,” a weapon designed to “camouflage the smell of gunpowder” as it pumps out odors over vast swaths of land. They’re calling it “Deceit Perfume”. According to the state-run Fars news agency the agreeable-smelling stuff will come in four flavors – fresh air, rain, seaside (for the navy) and tea – that Iranian troops will be able to pick from to poof over missions calling for the ’olfactory cover-up.

It’s not just Iran. A handful of Tier 1 militaries, notably the U.S. and Israel, are whipping up stink juices capable of fooling an enemy into letting his guard down, or of exploiting his so-called smell-fear link. The threat of deceptive and/or hostile stink attacks lingers so thick that the U.S. Army and Marines run simulations – flash exposures to putrid stuff like odors-melting plastics and rotting flesh – to prep troops for a world “where the smells may be encountered for real”.

But stench warfare actually isn’t all that new. Militaries have been tinkering with the idea for years. It’s often been a case of flipping something like a perfume into something truly rank – glorified non-lethal stink bombs, really, designed to sting the nostrils enough so as to overwhlem those on the receiving end. The “non-lethal” designation is crucial: In a world governed largely by the Chemical Weapons Convention, malodorants pass the sniff test, as it were. Stink bombs really don’t cause any grave bodily injury, and they certainly can’t kill, at least not as they stand today. It’s the intense and disorienting fog that rolls in with both foreign and foul stenches that not only strokes the amygdala, starting an “unthinking fear reaction” in sprayees. (This is what jolts the target into flight, into getting the hell away from the putrid deterrent, and quick.) That malodorants aren’t lethal generates a sustained interest from defense departments, especially the Pentagon, that argue that their stink bombs of war check out with the CWC (whether that country is party to CWC guidelines, or not) while still effectively splitting up rowdy herds or smearing enemies.

For the U.S., at least, not much has ever really come of heavy investment in stink tech. The whole thing has missed far more than it has hit. Some would argue it’s been a near total failure. Even still, there’s a whole sordid history behind the trial-by-stink of some of the shittier-smelling of these malodorants, no matter who sprayed and who got sprayed. Wafting these militarized stink bombs can give us a sense as to whether the stench wars will continue billowing over the horizon, or not.

German officers led back after talk with Allied Officers (via)

Or, defeat by humiliation. It’s what Pam Dalton, a cognitive psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, compares to “the worst garbage dumpster left in the street for a long time in the middle of the hottest summer ever.” Arguably the worst smelling scent weapon ever cooked up, Who Me? was a sulfurous malodorant developed during World War II by the American Office of Strategic Services. The U.S. doled the stuff, which smelled like feces, in portable atomizers to those French Resistance fighters whose day-to-day had them in close range of German officers. A quick, sly spritz and the Reich would be left smelling like crap.

“This, of course, would totally embarrass the officer,” Dalton told SFGate. “And Germany would then lose the war.”

Who Me? totally bombed. The crucial failing was its ingredients, which were were so volatile and hard to handle that sprayers would usually end up just as drenched as sprayees. To think, the bifold foulness of shit and humiliation hung over Paris for two weeks.

(via)

Fast forward about three decades, when the U.S. Army took a brief interest in stink grenades. According to Dalton, the cognitive psychologist, the Army used to fill hallowed out chicken eggs with “rancid-smelling” chemicals. Trialing these malodorants was a mere matter of Hail Mary-ing the eggy shitballs at enlisted men. As you’d expect, the ploy never made it to prime time.

Skunk water is one of the Israeli Defense Force’s true workhorses. The awful stuff could well be long-hosing from armored IDF vehicles this second, fouling clashes along the West Bank, where Palestinians simply call it “shit”. And for good reason – Reuters says that Skunk smacks of something fiercely akin to “taking a chunk of rotting corpse from a stagnant sewer, placing it in a blender and spraying the filthy liquid in your face.”

Israel first deployed Skunk in 2008. Think of it as an organic shitshake of baking soda, yeast, and various secret other ingredients, all brewed up by a private Israeli firm. The Israelis say the “high-pressured, non-lethal liquid” poses no health concerns, and that blasting rioters with the “intolerable smell” is an effective means of thinning protests “without inflicting long-term harm.” Curiously, Israel is one of eight countries that’s not a signatory of the CWC.

TK (via)

America, of course, is party to the CWC. Which explains the DoD’s cautious approach to some of the malodorants it’s got in late-stage R&D. Take XM1063 (.pdf). The project, as New Scientist reported, aims to perfect “a malodorant round for 155-millimetre artillery.” In other words, XM1063 would essentially fan stink “bomblets” (cute) over a wide area.

The project is paused at the moment, sure. But its developer, the West Falls Church, VA, based defense firm General Dynamics, has reportedly put the thing through enough test firings that XM1063 could conceivably go live. The U.S. military (maybe) appears ready to eventually greenlight the stink bomb, too, saying that it’s found a loophole in the CWC, which forbids using chemical agents in war. Officials argue that “temporarily disabling compounds” are struck down by the CWC if they spike sprayees’ trigeminal nerves, which have no hand in scent, but play a good deal in face, cheek and jaw sensations. The CWC classifies these malodorants as RCAs, or riot-control agents. Something like XM1063, the U.S. contends, might check out.

“If a particular malodorant is disseminated with a concentration that does not activate the trigeminal nerve,” Kelly Hughes, a representative for the DoD’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program, told New Scientist, “it may not require designation as an RCA under the CWC.”

Who knows if that rationale will check out. And while it’s likewise unclear whether Iran, who’s party to the CWC, and its fresh-brewed “Deceit Perfume” will be left gagging (if the new weapon really exists – this is Iran, after all), what’s reasonably certain is that the deceptive, clinging, fear-inducing, “psychologically toxic” mist of stink weapons won’t be dissipating anytime soon. Who knows, it could be as easy as squirtgunning the awful juice from a micro drone. The future of war smells pretty foul.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

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