The United States is having a really hard time figuring out what to do with Syria. The 20-month-long conflict there has become increasingly violent, as it’s becoming increasingly clear that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has absolutely no interest in giving up power, regardless of how many rebels send suicide bombers in the country’s busiest cities, never mind what the rest of the world thinks.

But the rest of the world is not happy with Assad and his handling of the uprising. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the U.S. is going to get more involved in the conflict and help the rebel leadership get their act together. Many agree that the best thing we could do is send the rebels some sweet missiles. The only problem with that plan, though, is that we have no control over what happens to the weapons once they’re out of our hands.

The big fear is that the weapons could find their way into the region’s many jihadist organizations who could turn around and use U.S. weapons to attack the U.S. or its allies—or anyone, for that matter. That’s a legitimate fear. It’s silly, though, because one would think that the U.S. could just throw a lock or something on the missile crates before sending them to the Middle East. Or how about something a little more sophisticated? Are we really supposed to believe that the U.S. military with its trillions of dollars in funding and its staff of whiz kids doing R&D at agencies like DARPA can’t just install a fingerprint scanner or something to make sure weapons we send to Syrian rebels don’t end up being used by evil terrorists?

Plenty of people have ideas about how the U.S. could safeguard the weapons it distributes to other countries, including (but not limited to!) that padlock idea. Actually, one of the plans is a more sophisticated version of slipping on a combination lock. Military analyst Anthony Cordesman recently told PBS that very simple modifications to the Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank weapons that might help the Syrian rebels win their war would greatly reduce the risk of weapons being used by our adversaries. We could, for instance, modify the weapons so that they require authentication codes in order to be used. Another idea is to outfit the weapons with GPS chips so that we can see when a terrorist organization gets ahold of them and lug them off to their cave. “I think it would be relatively decisive,” Cordesman said. “You could probably quickly develop … a device which would inactivate the weapon through two sources: one is a limited-life power supply; and the other is a fail-safe mechanism that would … make it inactive or would require a code to activate it.”

Okay, sounds good! Let’s do this to all the weapons. Seems like a good idea even outside the context of supplying rebel fighters in the Middle East. Sort of like parental controls but for deadly bombs. But the brass doesn’t think so. “I think it’s too risky,” said retired Brig. Gen. Robert Drolet, who actually ran the Army’s Stinger program in the 1980s. “If it works, it’s great. But if it doesn’t, it’s got dire consequences. The downside is drastic: the proliferation of the most effective shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile….So this is not a good idea.” Drolet added that terrorists would inevitably figure out how to disable the security systems, “If OnStar can figure out how to unlock my car, I would assume there must be some technical way to have GPS control a Stinger.”

I mean, does it make sense to argue against locks because they’re not failsafe, and end up with no locks whatsoever? But he general makes a strong point: If we can’t be reasonably sure that our weapons are just going to go to people that want to use them against us, we shouldn’t be sending them out into the field.

Image via Flickr