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Pentagon Leaders Turn Up Heat On Advanced Weapons
Pentagon Leaders Turn Up Heat On Advanced Weapons | Defense content from Aviation Week
Star Wars II
Senior Pentagon leaders, technologists in industry and the armed forces, and civilian analysts are advocating a suite of radical technologies for ground-based defense against new air and missile threats, with a number of crucial tests set between now and 2020. Their main motivation is the concern that inexpensive unmanned air vehicles and widely proliferating guided missiles cannot be affordably defeated by conventional interceptor weapons.
The new technologies include ultra-wideband “impulse” radar, hypersonic guided projectiles fired from both conventional mobile artillery guns and electromagnetic railguns, and directed energy (DE) weapons—of both high-energy laser and high-power microwave (HPM) types.
Current and near-term test and research programs include an Army-hosted “bring what you have” demonstration at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico, set for November, of a mobile laser rated at more than 150 kW power, enough to destroy many missile types, and the first seaborne firing trials of a prototype railgun from the USNS Trenton, one of the Navy’s Joint High-Speed Vessels.
A next-generation railgun is under development, feasibility studies are underway of installing a railgun on the DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer, and a demonstration is underway to adapt the railgun’s high-velocity projectile to a 155-mm. gun, giving the Army’s M109 Paladin self-propelled gun an anti-missile capability.
Under apparently classified programs, air-defense HPM weapons have been brought to the point where a mobile system is a low-risk venture, one Air Force officer says, and could be used as both a long-range, all-weather target identification system and as a lethal weapon.
Longer-term work includes the Missile Defense Agency’s support of new laser concepts capable of delivering fractional-megawatt power from a high-altitude airborne platform, which could be tested in 2020-25 and would allow stand-off boost-phase intercept of ballistic missiles.
The challenge facing ground-based air defense (GBAD) today, whether in peer-level warfare or in defending cities against terrorist attack or intrusion, is the proliferation of lethal or dangerous threats that cost orders of magnitude less per unit than conventional guided-interceptor missiles.
“Future ground warfare, regardless of type, is going to see a proliferation of guided munitions and advanced weaponry,” Bob Work, deputy defense secretary, told the Army War College’s annual strategy conference in April. “So our ground forces are going to be faced with what many people call G-RAMM—guided rockets, artillery, mortars and missiles.” But, Work added, “right now, we’re firing $14 million missiles to go after a $50,000 missile. It doesn’t make sense. But when you have electromagnetic railguns and powder guns, using the same smart projectiles, now you can start to break the raid.”
Work has called for a large-scale technology program named Raid Breaker to look at ways to protect forward-deployed forces and their logistics systems from guided missile salvos. “The competitor who can demonstrate the ability to defeat the guided munitions salvo competition is going to have a unique advantage at the operational level of war,” Work said. The project’s name is an allusion to Assault Breaker, the 1980s demonstration of a tactical reconnaissance strike complex that—many analysts believe—undermined the Soviet Union’s conventional warfare strategy.
Another threat was highlighted by Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, at a July 28 Directed Energy Summit here, hosted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Booz-Allen Hamilton. “One of my friends bought a $1,000 drone. It’s got an endurance of a couple of hours. It’s a great targeting system. What happens when terrorists start to use them?” In combat, Kendall noted, a small unmanned air vehicle (SUAV) can vastly increase the lethality of indirect fire.
Inexpensive guided weapons and SUAVs constitute a cost-imposition strategy—because it is more costly to shoot them down than to deploy them—and conference speakers repeatedly referred to the potential for DE weapons to “reverse the cost equation,” as U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command vice-commander Maj. Gen. Jerry Harris put it. “If I can use 1 liter [0.26 gal.] of fuel [providing energy to a DE weapon] to defend my aircraft against surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles, I’m using dollars to defeat millions of dollars.”
Another revolutionary characteristic of DE weapons and railguns is magazine depth. Rep. Jim Langevin, (D-R.I.) co-chair of the House DE caucus, noted: “Ships that can’t do anything except air defense” [for instance, if most or all of their missile capacity is dedicated to intercept missiles] “are on the wrong side of the cost equation.” Langevin also said industry needs to see more commitment to DE weapons to build a case for investing its own resources.
DE advocates concede that after decades of overpromise and underperformance, concrete demonstrations are needed. (Kendall reminded the summit that he was a veteran of the 1980s fad for lasers.) However, they point to solid progress in some areas and forthcoming demonstration projects: Kendall sums it up as, “We have made a lot of progress, but we’re not there yet.”
Pentagon Leaders Turn Up Heat On Advanced Weapons | Defense content from Aviation Week
Star Wars II
Senior Pentagon leaders, technologists in industry and the armed forces, and civilian analysts are advocating a suite of radical technologies for ground-based defense against new air and missile threats, with a number of crucial tests set between now and 2020. Their main motivation is the concern that inexpensive unmanned air vehicles and widely proliferating guided missiles cannot be affordably defeated by conventional interceptor weapons.
The new technologies include ultra-wideband “impulse” radar, hypersonic guided projectiles fired from both conventional mobile artillery guns and electromagnetic railguns, and directed energy (DE) weapons—of both high-energy laser and high-power microwave (HPM) types.
Current and near-term test and research programs include an Army-hosted “bring what you have” demonstration at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico, set for November, of a mobile laser rated at more than 150 kW power, enough to destroy many missile types, and the first seaborne firing trials of a prototype railgun from the USNS Trenton, one of the Navy’s Joint High-Speed Vessels.
A next-generation railgun is under development, feasibility studies are underway of installing a railgun on the DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer, and a demonstration is underway to adapt the railgun’s high-velocity projectile to a 155-mm. gun, giving the Army’s M109 Paladin self-propelled gun an anti-missile capability.
Under apparently classified programs, air-defense HPM weapons have been brought to the point where a mobile system is a low-risk venture, one Air Force officer says, and could be used as both a long-range, all-weather target identification system and as a lethal weapon.
Longer-term work includes the Missile Defense Agency’s support of new laser concepts capable of delivering fractional-megawatt power from a high-altitude airborne platform, which could be tested in 2020-25 and would allow stand-off boost-phase intercept of ballistic missiles.
The challenge facing ground-based air defense (GBAD) today, whether in peer-level warfare or in defending cities against terrorist attack or intrusion, is the proliferation of lethal or dangerous threats that cost orders of magnitude less per unit than conventional guided-interceptor missiles.
“Future ground warfare, regardless of type, is going to see a proliferation of guided munitions and advanced weaponry,” Bob Work, deputy defense secretary, told the Army War College’s annual strategy conference in April. “So our ground forces are going to be faced with what many people call G-RAMM—guided rockets, artillery, mortars and missiles.” But, Work added, “right now, we’re firing $14 million missiles to go after a $50,000 missile. It doesn’t make sense. But when you have electromagnetic railguns and powder guns, using the same smart projectiles, now you can start to break the raid.”
Work has called for a large-scale technology program named Raid Breaker to look at ways to protect forward-deployed forces and their logistics systems from guided missile salvos. “The competitor who can demonstrate the ability to defeat the guided munitions salvo competition is going to have a unique advantage at the operational level of war,” Work said. The project’s name is an allusion to Assault Breaker, the 1980s demonstration of a tactical reconnaissance strike complex that—many analysts believe—undermined the Soviet Union’s conventional warfare strategy.
Another threat was highlighted by Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, at a July 28 Directed Energy Summit here, hosted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Booz-Allen Hamilton. “One of my friends bought a $1,000 drone. It’s got an endurance of a couple of hours. It’s a great targeting system. What happens when terrorists start to use them?” In combat, Kendall noted, a small unmanned air vehicle (SUAV) can vastly increase the lethality of indirect fire.
Inexpensive guided weapons and SUAVs constitute a cost-imposition strategy—because it is more costly to shoot them down than to deploy them—and conference speakers repeatedly referred to the potential for DE weapons to “reverse the cost equation,” as U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command vice-commander Maj. Gen. Jerry Harris put it. “If I can use 1 liter [0.26 gal.] of fuel [providing energy to a DE weapon] to defend my aircraft against surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles, I’m using dollars to defeat millions of dollars.”
Another revolutionary characteristic of DE weapons and railguns is magazine depth. Rep. Jim Langevin, (D-R.I.) co-chair of the House DE caucus, noted: “Ships that can’t do anything except air defense” [for instance, if most or all of their missile capacity is dedicated to intercept missiles] “are on the wrong side of the cost equation.” Langevin also said industry needs to see more commitment to DE weapons to build a case for investing its own resources.
DE advocates concede that after decades of overpromise and underperformance, concrete demonstrations are needed. (Kendall reminded the summit that he was a veteran of the 1980s fad for lasers.) However, they point to solid progress in some areas and forthcoming demonstration projects: Kendall sums it up as, “We have made a lot of progress, but we’re not there yet.”
