Security

National Academies: Laser Defense $100 Million Short

The Defense Department is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop lasers that can blast rockets, artillery, and mortars out of the sky. By the end of the year, military researchers promise, those lasers should be at battlefield strength. But a new report from the National Academies of Science say it’ll take at least […]

Hel_td_beam
The Defense Department is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop lasers that can blast rockets, artillery, and mortars out of the sky. By the end of the year, military researchers promise, those lasers should be at battlefield strength.

But a new report from the National Academies of Science say it'll take at least another $100 million more than planned to put together a real-life laser defense. And the lasers may have to be 400% stronger than previously thought.

The Academies' panel loves the idea of the lasers on the battlefield. Such a "weapon system that could counter RAM [rockets, artillery, mortars] would be a tool of national importance. If one existed today, it would be in great demand in many places around the world," the report notes.

But the panel is less enthralled with how the U.S. military is going about developing that laser defense. Right now, the Pentagon is pouring money into a mobile, 100 kilowatt laser system that could zap RAM targets. In the panel's eyes, "it is clear that the various pieces required to demonstrate a mobile 100 kW solid-state laser weapon system have relatively low technological maturity and relatively high risk and involve challenging engineering and integration issues."

**

For a technology-paced program of this type, it is likely that substantially more money than the Army currently has programmed will be required to realize the demonstration. Indeed, the committee estimates that over the period of the program $100 million more than the amount currently planned will be needed.

The rudimentary effectiveness assessments made during this study reveal the clear benefits of higher laser power than is provided by the
100 kW demonstrator to counter more stressing raids and hedge the need to destroy future hardened RAM projectiles. Accordingly, the committee endorses the Army’s longer-term goal to eventually develop and field a multi-hundred kW solid-state laser (e.g., a 400 kW laser weapon system).

Laser weapons have been sold as a way to target out targets -- without collateral damage. The Academies' committee isn't so sure that'll happen, either.

*The use of lasers necessarily raises concerns about the safety of airborne platforms that may be in the vicinity, of any manned or unmanned spacecraft that may be in the laser’s field of view, and of persons either on the ground or in the air who might suffer ocular damage from exposure to direct or scattered laser light. In all of the above situations, the probability of illumination is small, but the consequences could be significant. *

ALSO: