Breaking Defense:
….The Defense Department currently spends about $300 million a year on directed energy projects, but that’s all research, development, and demonstrations: There are no programs of record. “I can’t promise you that’s going to get bigger, but I don’t think it’s going to get much smaller,” said Frank Kendall, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics.
Kendall’s personal history shows both “how far we have come and also how far we have notcome,” he told the conference. He’s dealt with directed energy on and off for 40 years, starting when he was a young captain in the Army’s Air Defense Artillery and wrote a paper on this promising new technology. He’s lived through Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and the Airborne Laser — but this time, he thinks, lasers really are becoming reality.
That’s not an easy case to make. “DE was right around the corner in 1976. It was right around the corner in 1986. It was right around the corner in 1996, and now there’s a gunshy-ness,” retired Lt. Gen. Trey Obering said, “but there truly have been some remarkable breakthroughs.”
Obering, now with summit sponsor Booz-Allen Hamilton, headed the Missile Defense Agency in the latter days of the Airborne Laser. What went wrong with ABL, Obering told me, was a fixation on the technology at the expense of the tactics. “It became all about, ‘can we do it?’ and not ‘what should we then do to make this operationally deployable?’” he said.
Today, by contrast, Obering said, technologies are moving out of the lab into operational units, notably the Navy’s 30-kilowatt laser on the USS Ponce. Rather than “wait for the perfect answer,” he said, “we’re beginning to get stuff out there that could have some military utility that you can begin to get feedback and begin to get the warfighter conversation going.” That way, he added, as the program matures, “the warfighter is not only willing to accept it, they feel comfortable with it.”
Such real-world, hands-on testing also builds political support in Congress. “I frequently point to the work the US Navy is doing on directed energy on the USS Ponce,” said Rep. Langevin. “Not only is it a R&D platform, but it’s something that’s operational.”
The Navy’s 30-kilowatt weapon is currently the only operational laser in the US military that can blow things up. (Targeting lasers and non-lethal “dazzlers” are commonplace). But other weapons are in the works.
Air Force Special Operations Command wants to put a high-powered laser into a future version of its AC-130 gunship. “Block 60 with the laser, that’s not 10 years out; Block 60 is a couple years out,” said AFSOC commander Lt. Gen. Brad Heithold.
The Air Force Research Laboratory plans to put a medium-powered laser — big enough to shoot incoming missiles and blind enemy sensors, but not to destroy aircraft — in a podsmall enough to fit on a fighter. That project should do a demonstration by 2020, AFRL commander Maj. Gen. Tom Masiello said. There’s no clear date for a fielded system, however….
