X MARKS THE SHOT
Spc. Brandon Sallaway, fire support specialist and forward observer with the 2nd Battalion, 12th Field Artillery Regiment, points to a sticker on a Stryker equipped with the Mobile High-Energy Laser (MEHEL), which he helped evaluate in April at the Maneuver Fires Integrated Experiment at Fort Sill. The stickers represent the number of drones the MEHEL has hit, and Sallaway was the first Soldier to use the weapon to take down a target. (Photo by C. Todd Lopez, Army News Service)
U.S. Air Force transport planes are fitted with lasers as an infrared countermea- sure, as are U.S. Marine Corps CH-53 helicopters.
It appears to be a toss-up whether money or power is the biggest remaining challenge to getting directed-energy weapons onto the battlefield. Directed-energy weapons require a lot of … energy. To produce a 150-kilowatt beam, for instance—what researchers think is necessary to begin to counter aircraft and cruise missiles from farther away—requires 450 kilowatts of power. How to generate enough power without making the weapon too big to mount on any platform is a persistent stumbling block, though certainly not unique to laser weaponry. How to store that power for mobile weapons is a sec- ond hurdle.
Lasers are expensive to develop, though cheap to use once developed. In 2012, DOD retired the Airborne Laser Testbed, its last effort to weaponize chemical lasers, in favor of lasers powered by more renew- able means, after spending $5 billion. Te high-energy laser weapon system that the USS Ponce carries was part of a $40 million research effort. But Navy officials estimate that each shot of the
laser weapon aboard the USS Ponce costs 59 cents, for example, compared with the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to fire a standard missile interceptor or the approximately $115,000 for each HELLFIRE missile dropped from an Apache helicopter.
FROM LAB TO TEST Over the past three or four years, the Army has gotten pretty good at shooting down drones with increasingly powerful laser weapons mounted on ground vehi- cles, as the result of several programs: the High Energy Laser Mobile Test Truck, for which Boeing Co. mounted a 10-kilo- watt laser on a heavy cargo truck; and the Mobile High-Energy Laser, which was the first integration of a high-energy laser onto an Army combat vehicle. Te Stryker-mounted 5-kilowatt laser weapon took down about 50 drones in an April 2016 test at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
“We did a lot of preparation … seeing if we could track the airborne targets among ground clutter,” Adam Aberle, who runs high-energy laser technology development and demonstration for the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Com- mand, told defense reporters after the
demonstration at Fort Sill. “We abso- lutely blew lots of stuff up.”
Te next frontier in terms of platforms appears to be airborne laser weapons. On June 27 at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, a laser weapon on an Apache helicopter shot down an unmanned target during a collaborative test run by Raytheon Co., U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and the Army’s Apache Program Man- agement Office. Te kilowattage of the laser used wasn’t released, but this test was news for several reasons.
For one, the dust stirred up by a helicop- ter’s rotating blades makes it harder for laser beams to hit targets. Hitting a target from a moving platform is difficult, and a moving platform that also vibrates, as an attack helicopter in flight does, adds another level of difficulty, since a laser beam needs to be held steady on the target for seconds. (How long exactly depends on the kilowattage of the laser beam.) Clearly, technical progress has been made.
Research efforts also focus on increasing the kilowattage and ability to control the beam of directed energy so as to hit not
ASC.ARMY.MIL 151
THEN & NOW
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