New Army Laser Could Kill Cruise Missiles
New Army Laser Could Kill Cruise Missiles
Instead of building a 100-kilowatt weapon, the Army now plans to leap straight to 250 or even 300 kW -- which could shoot down much tougher targets.
By
SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on August 05, 2019 at 4:48 PM
Russian Kalibr cruise missile
WASHINGTON: Less than three months after
awarding a $130 million contract to build a 100-kilowatt laser, the Army has decided to skip the 100 kW weapon and go straight for a much more powerful one in the 250-300 kW range. Unlike the original design, the higher power level could potentially shoot down incoming cruise missiles — plugging a glaring gap in US defenses against a
Russia,
China or
Iran.
The US has
invested massively for decades in defenses against rocket-boosted
ballisticmissiles such as Scuds and ICBMs. But meanwhile jet-powered
cruise missiles — which fly lower, slower, and more maneuverably — have proliferated around the world, even to high-end irregular forces like
Iran-backed Hezbollah.
“It’s a tremendous piece that we have neglected and only over the past couple of years have begun to reckon with,” said
Tom Karako, director of missile defense studies at the thinktank CSIS. “This sort of thing sounds like exactly what we should be doing.”
The original Dynetics/Lockheed concept for a 100 kW laser truck to kill drones and incoming rockets, artillery, & mortars. The Army is now pursuing a 250-300 kW weapon that could intercept cruise missiles.
HEL Breaks Loose
The news was buried in an Army
announcement Friday that Northrop Grumman and Raytheon would build competing prototypes for a
50-kW laser mounted on an 8×8 Stryker armored vehicle. As the service has said for some time, the first platoon of four laser-armed vehicles would enter service in fiscal 2022, complementing a model armed with conventional anti-aircraft guns and missiles.
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Early experimental laser-armed Stryker vehicle
Both Stryker variants are part of the Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (MSHORAD) program, an
urgent effort to protect frontline combat units against
drones, artillery rockets, helicopters and attack jets. You’d need a relatively expensive missile to shoot down the tougher and higher-flying targets, but 50 kW lasers powered by the Strykers’ engines would provide cheap and virtually limitless kills against low-flying drones, like those used by everyone from the Islamic State to Russian artillery spotters.
But the Army is also building a larger, more powerful, but less mobile truck-mounted laser to defend static sites like command posts, supply depots, and air fields. This weapon would be part of the Indirect Fire Protection Capability. Originally focused on insurgent rockets, artillery, and mortars,
the IFPC program has been overhauled to focus on cruise missile threats as the Army reorients from Afghanistan and Iraq to Russia and China.
The next step
was going to be a
100-kW weapon called the High Energy Laser Tactical Vehicle Demonstrator (HEL-TVD), built by
Dynetics and Lockheed Martin, with demonstration shots in 2022. But on Friday the Army said it would be “adapting” this effort into a 250-300 kW weapon called HEL-IFPC, with the first platoon of four prototypes — not demonstrators, but operational weapons — to enter service in 2024.
When I inquired what exactly “adapting” meant, the Army clarified they are no longer going to build the 100-kW HEL-TVD. Instead, senior scientist
Craig Robbin explained through a spokesperson, “the Army will take the HEL-TVD through a Critical Design Review, leverage that work and apply the outcomes to the 250-plus kW effort.”
It’s not yet clear what will happen to the $130 million contract awarded in May to Dynetics and Lockheed. The Army could either modify it to have the same contractors build the more powerful weapon — presumably for more money — or end the current contract and hold a new competition.
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Lockheed Martin concept for their new HELIOS laser for the Navy.
Fast & Joint
Whatever the contract mechanism, why does the Army now believe it can get a weapon up to three times as powerful in just two additional years? Part of the answer is an increased
sense of urgency and tolerance for risk across Army. The service has slashed almost 200 lesser programs to fund faster fielding of its
Big Six priorities for major war, which range from
1,000-mile missiles to
robotic tanks to
VR training. No. 4 of the Big Six is improved air and missile defenses, without which the rest of the force would be fatally vulnerable to Russian or Chinese precision-guided weapons.
Last
December, the Army combined its most technologically challenging efforts — hypersonic missiles and laser weapons — under a new
Rapid Capabilities & Crucial Technologies Office, led by Lt. Gen. Neil Thurgood, the service’s highest-ranking acquisitions Program Executive Officer. Army leaders have made clear their goal is not only to field weapons faster but to stop wasting time and money reinventing the wheel. Initiatives that duplicate work already underway elsewhere in the Army or in its sister services
will be cut.
Concept drawing for a laser-armed AC-130 gunship
And there is a lot of work underway across the Defense Department on lasers (as well as hypersonics). In
May, the Air Force shot down several anti-aircraft missiles with a ground-based laser, a forerunner of a self-defense
podcalled SHIELD meant to go on US planes; it’s also developing a ground-attack laser for the
AC-130 gunship. Meanwhile, the Navy, having already fielded a
30-kW laser in the Persian Gulf, is now developing a 60-150 kW weapon,
HELIOS, for its new Arleigh Burke destroyers. And
Thomas Karr, a physicist who works for
Pentagon R&D chief Mike Griffin as assistant director for directed energy, is running a project with all three services on scaling up high-energy lasers to higher power levels. The Army is “leveraging” Karr’s work and “coordinating” with the Air Force and Navy, a service spokesperson said.
Each of the services has different challenges, said CSBA expert Bryan Clark. Lasers on aircraft have tight constraints on size and weight, but the rush of air provides free cooling. Lasers on ships have much more room, but they need dedicated coolant systems to keep from overheating. Army lasers on trucks “kind of get the worst of both worlds,” he said — limited room
and no easy way to dump the heat.
So
the supporting systems for the laser — power generation and storage, cooling, vibration control, compensation for atmospheric moisture and dust — will need to be tailored to the environment. But, Clark said, the core technology still has so much in common there’s no point in reinventing it.
As the Army
announcement put it, “This partnership will allow the services” — note, not just the Army — “to achieve a higher power system, of approximately 250-300 kW-class, that can protect sites from RAM [Rockets, Artillery, & Mortars] and UAS as well as more stressing threats.”
The Army declined to clarify what those “more stressing threats” might be. But experts at the independent Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments told us that 300 kW was the crucial threshold for a laser that could shoot down cruise missiles. CSBA was one of the first thinktanks both to sound the alarm about the proliferation of precision-guided missiles, once an American monopoly, and
to call for increased research into lasers to counter them.
Scramjets have recently moved to the forefront of the Pentagon’s hypersonic weapons portfolio, but so far there is no acknowledged follow-on program to produce and test an operational version of DARPA’s Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept. Credit: NASA
James Drew@StrikeWriter
A class of hypersonic weapons now in development has prompted the Missile Defense Agency to invest in a Hypersonic Defensive Weapon System, which could include a new hypersonic interceptor. Credit: Sandia National Laboratories
To intercept a hypersonic glider or missile, a Hypersonic Defense Weapon System will require new kinds of space-based and terrestrial sensors, a new approach to command-and-control and potentially a purpose-built interceptor. Credit: Missile Defense Agency
