Brett Daniel Shehadey
Special Contributor for In Homeland Security
This month the US Army completes six weeks of field testing at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico for the Boeing High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD). The Hel MD is the first mobile terrain high energy platform.
Directed energy weapons have been tested for some time. Recently, the US Air Force Airborne Laser Program starting in 1996 was shut down in 2012. It used an in-flight platform rigged 747 and a massive chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL). In spite the recent successes in the last few years countering missiles the program was canceled in large part due to costs and a switch to the efficiency of solid state lasers.
The US Navy this last April, placed their solid state high energy Laser Weapon System (LaWS) near the stern of guided-missile destroyer, USS Dewey, stationed in San Diego.
Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder said, “Our directed energy initiatives, and specifically the solid-state laser, are among our highest priority science and technology programs. The solid-state laser program is central to our commitment to quickly deliver advanced capabilities to forward-deployed forces. This capability provides a tremendously affordable answer to the costly problem of defending against asymmetric threats, and that kind of innovative approach is crucial in a fiscally constrained environment.”
These programs are often costing the government tens rather than hundreds of billions of dollars in research and development funding. Moreover, they are much more cost-effective than missiles and ammunition. Admiral Klunder stated that the cost to fire energy directed weapons is conservatively somewhere around $1 versus the hundreds of thousands of dollars for missiles.
“We expect that in the future, a missile will not be able to simply outmaneuver a highly accurate, high-energy laser beam traveling at the speed of light,” Admiral Klunder said.
Present practical downsides: obviously, US military energy directed weapons are in their initial stages. The time to take down a target is long and potentially consumes large amounts of power diverted from other key systems. They need to be smaller, carry more lethality and be much faster than they are today.
The Army’s 10 kilowatt HEL MD laser is planned to continue testing until 2017. The intention is to scale it down in size and increased to 50 kilowatts and eventually 100 kilowatts. This will also increase the time required to neutralize a target. This could be a drone, a plane, a missile, or a mortar, for example.
The Air Force wants to put lasers on their sixth generation fighters by 2030, at the latest and operational testing by 2022.
Aside from direct quick kill, these laser weapons systems will also be able to interfere with enemy electronics and offer the fastest and best precision available. Additionally, other directed energy weapons besides lasers include: sonic, radio, EM, microwave, particle-based, etc. All can offer greater non-lethal options for the US Armed Forces in future warfare.
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