Land Warfare

Booz Allen Hamilton establishes laser weapon focused ‘HELworks’

It's the company's first business unit focused solely on directed energy.

By Justin Katz on October 10, 2022 10:00 am
Stryker
The Army’s Stryker armored vehicles are one of the military programs HELworks’ High Energy Laser Mission Equipment Package is set to be employed. (U.S. Army Sgt. Michael Spandau/Released)

AUSA 2022 — Booz Allen Hamilton today announced it is standing up its first business unit focused exclusively on directed energy and high energy lasers, dubbed HELworks.

The impetus for the new organization, which boasts approximately 50 staff and two locations in Virginia and Tennessee, was to consolidate a number of different directed energy projects being worked throughout the company, according to Joe Shepherd, HELworks president and chief executive officer.

“Now that we’ve been able to progress as we have with that tech maturation, and we have real solutions, and a product portfolio that addresses the warfighter’s needs, this time was perfect for us to be able to position this segment of the business to deliver those capabilities separately through HELworks,” he told Breaking Defense in an Oct. 6 interview ahead of the announcement.

HELworks will start out with three directed energy projects under its purview, all at different stages of development, according to Shepherd.

The Modular Compact High Energy Laser, nicknamed MCHEL, is a static 12 kw weapon designed for ground engagements and already delivered to “the customer.” (Booz Allen Hamilton declined to disclose the identity of said customer.) The company claims it is the “smallest, lightest and most portable HEL weapon for its mission.”

RELATED: Iron Beam, Israel’s laser air defense system, could be ready in 2-3 years

The High Energy Laser Mission Equipment Package (HEL MEP) is a combination of kinetic and non-kinetic air defense capabilities designed to be outfitted on a US Army Stryker vehicle. Shepherd said Booz Allen is in the final stages of development and integration for that weapon system and it will be featured in a demonstration at Fort Sill in Oklahoma later this year.

The third initiative, dubbed LightEngine, is “essentially a powered and cooled laser that can be the common core infrastructure for a number of HEL systems,” according to Shepherd.

Booz Allen’s endeavor to stand up HELworks comes as the Pentagon continues to push directed energy weapons out of the research and development holes of the past decade and into operations. The Army, Navy and Air Force have all been advancing various high energy laser projects this year.

For the military, directed energy — if it can be mastered — offers both methods of destroying adversarial unmanned aerial systems or munitions at a cheaper cost than traditional kinetic weapons, as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities through the powerful optics required to use laser weapon systems.

Asked what has been the biggest stumbling block for industry to move the technology forward, Shepherd said it has come down to packaging the weapons in a way that the Pentagon can integrate them onto different platforms.

“Getting this capability on the right platforms for the operational mission has been a challenge,” he said. “These HEL systems and DE systems generally tend to be large and clunky because a lot of the systems that have been materialized and… [from a] prototyping perspective, operationalized, in the last number of years have been exactly that: operational prototypes.

“There hasn’t been a big focus on the packaging of those [lasers] onto relevant platforms or mission applicability. So that’s been the big challenge. And I think that’s where HELworks is really focused,” he continued.

AUSA 2022

Gallery
Presented by

parsons-defense-logo-2

AUSA 2022

Over at Rheinmetall's booth sat the hefty Lynx OMFV (Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle). The company, as its competitors, is hoping to make a strong impression as the Army looks for OMFV proposals later this fall -- the early stage of an almost certainly lucrative long-term contract award. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
All the way from down under, the Australian firm Defendtex presented some of its modular UAVs. Here visitors can see the Drone155, which the company says can be outfitted with ISR payloads or explosives. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The MVPP from Globe Tech stands for Modular Vehicle Protection Platform, a vehicle add-on that can take the brunt of improvised explosive device detonations. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
AUSA was well attended by international officers and officials as well, and by foreign defense firms. The Korean booth, shown here, featured some products hoping to make a splash in the US military. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Not your traditional defense contractor, the computing giant IBM has a booth at AUSA showing off its flashy but functional quantum computer. The US government as a whole, and the Pentagon in particular, are heavily invested in the quantum computing race with the likes of China. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Among the fleet of vehicles parked throughout the AUSA floor for display was the Flyer 72-U, made by General Dynamics. The company says the vehicle takes a "modular approach" so it can be configured for anything from "light strike assault" to rescue and evacuation. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The stuff of counter-UAS nightmares, the Virginia-based BlueHalo firm makes drone swarms that use AI and machine learning to provide battlefield intelligence to soldiers. The Army's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office awarded the company $14 million in February to develop the HIVE. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
It's a .50 caliber Gatling gun, one that Dillon Aero says can fire 1,500 shots per minute, or 25 rounds per second. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
For this year's show AM General rolled its own Humvee Saber, Blade Edition, onto the floor. The company claims "leap-ahead" technology for a light tactical vehicle. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Patria, a defense firm owned jointly by Finland and Norway's Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, made it's way across the Atlantic for AUSA 2022, bringing along its AMV multi-role vehicle. The AMV was recently purchased by the dozens by Slovakia and its home country of Finland. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
At the Pratt Miller Defense booth, visitors will see a full-sized Expeditionary Modular Autonomous Vehicle (EMAV) is the "newest and perhaps most mobile and lethal" of the company's autonomous offerings. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Marathon's Autonomous Robot Targets are exactly what that sounds like: shooting targets guided by computer code and designed to "look, move, and even behave like people," the company says. The robots were on the move on the AUSA floor -- though no shooting was allowed. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The AUSA show floor offered a fresh look at a futuristic version of an old Army standby: the Abrams tank. This one, the Abrams X, is made by General Dynamics Land Systems, manufacturers of the current Abrams M1A1 and M1A2 battle tanks used by the US Army. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Attendees may walk by model versions of the famous Iron Dome system, in use for years in Israel, and its sister SkyCeptor system, both made by Rafael. The SkyCeptor, in particular, is meant to "defeat short- to medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles and other advanced air defense threats," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
As the need for counter-UAS systems explodes, Epirus is at AUSA repping its counter-electronics system Stryker Leonidas, made with General Dynamics. The system's "counter-swarm" weapon "fills a pressing short range air defense (SHORAD) capability gap," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
A new unveiling for AUSA, Rheinmetall announced this week the Mission Master CXT platform, the newest addition to the company's "family" of autonomous ground vehicles. The company says the CXT "combines the power of a diesel engine with a silent electric motor." (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The GMC Hummer EV Platform, the first vehicle on GM's New Ultium EV Platform, goes on display at AUSA 2022. All-electric offerings are the center of much of the Army's attention these days as it aims to electrify its non-tactical, and eventually tactical, fleet. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
Two new Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicles (AMPV) sit at the booth by Bae Systems. The vehicles are meant to replace the Army's venerable, but old M113s. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
Palantir shows off its prototype for the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) vehicle. The company says the TITAN "will be the critical backbone that provides correlation, fusion, and integration of sensor data alongside insights from AI/ML overlaid at the tactical edge." In other words, it's meant to find the signal in the noise. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
A model of a "modernized" Boeing Apache AH-64E shown Association of US Army Conference in 2022. While the Army is about to choose two new airframes, there's currently no Apache replacement on the horizon. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
Lockheed Martin teamed up with Sikorsky to produce the Raider X, the team's competitor in the Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program, one of two high-profile Army Future Vertical Lift contests currently underway. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The Bell 360 Invictus is the other FARA competitor, looking to beat out the Lockheed-Sikorsky team. The Army's expected to make its decision in fiscal 2024. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The defense start-up Anduril has expanded its footprint in the defense market in recent years. This product, the Mobile Sentry, "brings autonomous fixed site counter UAS and counter intrusion capabilities into a mobile form factor," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The military's no-so-furry friendly robot dogs are back at AUSA this year. This model, called the Vision 60 Q-UGV from Ghost Robotics, is an "all-weather ground robot for use in a broad range of unstructured urban and natural environments for defense, homeland and enterprise applications," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
1/27
Presented by parsons-defense-logo-2