“We’re not trying to blow up the Death Star. You can blind the optics, start fires, melt plastic, disrupt targeting, overheat electronics. All of that is possible now,” said General Atomics spokesperson C. Mark Brinkley.
“They will tell you everything and they're not worried about your feelings,” said Doug Bush.
Knowing when to build on commercial systems and when to develop something new can be the difference between parity and information dominance.
“Is it 100 percent ready? Is it going to work perfectly? Probably not but we're going to learn from it,” Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus told Breaking Defense.
The UK lauded the test of the laser air defense weapon, developed by Britain’s defense innovation unit, just weeks after an American admiral said it was time to be more "intellectually honnest" about what the class of weapons can do.
“What we don't know yet from directed energy systems, necessarily, is... how to fight [with] lasers on the battlefield, how to integrate kinetic and non-kinetic effectors,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch.
“Lasers are complicated. This is not a humvee that's sitting in the motor pool,” said Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler.
The network transport architecture for NGC2 could be a hybrid approach that combines high assurance communications with 5G, WiFi, and multi-orbit satellites.
For now, the company has received more than $150 million to produce the service’s Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) prototype weapon system.
“IFPC-HPM provides much needed protection against adversarial UAS swarms capable of targeting and overwhelming US and allied air defense systems,” the Army said in budget request documents.
The work will expand on Israel's experimental Iron Beam system, but aims to boost power, sources told Breaking Defense.
Breaking Defense reviewed video of the laser disabling a quadcopter UAV, part of tests that show directed energy system could be “viable.”
Why edge and endpoint security can’t be an afterthought.
Asymmetric threats addressed by high-energy lasers include small-to-midsize Group 1, 2, and 3 drones, along with rockets, artillery, and mortars.
See how Raytheon Missiles & Defense is developing high-power microwaves as part of layered air defenses.
The Army wants to demonstrate a 300 kilowatt laser weapon in fiscal 2022.
Raytheon's high-energy laser weapon systems is part of the U.S. Army’s Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) program.