DoD Drafts Guidelines For Laser Design

WASHINGTON: As the military rushes to deploy new laser and microwave weapons, it doesn’t want to end up buying a welter of incompatible systems that don’t work well together, as happened so often in Afghanistan and Iraq. So the Pentagon’s directed energy office has tapped a veteran of Navy laser programs, Christopher Behre, to draft technical guidelines for all the programs to follow.

The directed energy “reference architecture” now in the works will not impose mandatory technical standards, Behre said. Instead, he told a Booz Allen Hamilton webinar today, the goal is to get in on the ground floor, before different services buy a host of different systems from different manufacturers that use incompatible components, and establish a modular open systems approach that all the programs can abide by.

“It’s going to allow for identifying components and subsystems that we can standardize around,” Behre said. That will both reduce costs – by allowing different programs to come together to buy shared tech in bulk, and ease future upgrades – by creating plug-and-play interfaces that allow old components to be replaced with new and improved ones as they become available. It could even improve the chances for small companies to compete against the big prime contractors, since a small firm will be able to focus on developing a particular niche component that – as long as it follows the standards – can be bought and used by multiple programs.

A crucial concern, DoD and industry experts at today’s webinar agreed: creating a system strict enough to encourage companies to build compatible components, without discouraging innovative new ideas.

“You’re not seeing capital-S standards anywhere in this documentation,” Behre said. “We’re looking for guardrails, if you will, to help guide things — not hard requirements that are going to stifle the innovation that people are concerned about.”

But now is the time to take standardization seriously, he said. Directed energy weapons have a huge advantage in that there’s a lot of different experiments and prototypes to draw technical data from, but none of them has yet entered mass production. That means you can apply a modular and open approach from the start, rather than having to sort through decades of entrenched and incompatible equipment from different vendors.

When people try to apply modular open systems approaches to other areas of technology, “they’re having extreme challenges with changing things that have been in place for a long period of time, and we have an opportunity to try and get ahead of that curve a little bit,” Behre said. “We have many years of prototypes and demonstrators to leverage, but we’re ahead of the first programs of record.”

For the reference architecture, “the draft version is pretty well fleshed out,” Behre said. “We anticipate coming out with version 0.5, probably sometime early in calendar year ’21.”

“Over the next eight or nine months,” he said, “I think that’s the point where we would open it up for comment from industry and the acquisition offices.”

The other government panelist at the webinar, Air Force Research Laboratory laser physicist Sean Ross, sounded a note of caution. While the Pentagon can come up with the guidelines, they’ll go nowhere if the services and industry don’t embrace them as their own.

“In my career in the government, I can recall any number of government initiatives, [and] if they don’t make sense, then we just kind of give them lip service and they go away,” Ross said. “It’s kind of like when you tell your kid to clean up their room, and they just shove it all under the bed.”