Loren Thompson
The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed MartinLMT -4.1% a $2 million contract in September to assess how high-energy lasers might be integrated into the nation’s missile-defense architecture.
It’s a modest contract for a company that generates over a billion dollars in revenue per week, but it could have outsized implications for how wars will be waged in the future, given the series of breakthroughs the world’s biggest defense company has achieved in laser systems.
Lockheed, a contributor to my think tank, recently delivered the most powerful laser it has ever built, a 300-kilowatt system, to a project run by the Pentagon’s research and engineering chief called the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative.
As reported by Jason Sherman in Inside Defense, the initiative as conceived in 2019 called for further scaling to a 500-kilowatt system in 2024, and then to 1,000 kilowatts (one megawatt) later in the decade. At the latter level of intensity, a laser could deposit enough energy on a hostile ballistic missile during its vulnerable boost phase to destroy the missile.
Reporter Sherman, one of the few people in the trade press who covers beam-weapons research, says that Pentagon officials are so impressed with recent progress that they may elect to skip the 500-watt stage and leap ahead to the megawatt weapon.
Two other companies, Nutronics and General Atomics, are also developing 300-kilowatt systems.
This isn’t the only laser breakthrough that Lockheed has reported of late. In August it delivered the Navy’s first tactical laser weapon suitable to serve as an integral element in layered defense of warships, a 60+ kilowatt system dubbed Helios.
Earlier this year, Lockheed and engine-maker Rolls Royce demonstrated a 100-kilowatt laser capable of destroying cruise missiles in flight. The system in its final configuration will be sufficiently compact to carry on a C-130 airlifter pallet, a Stryker troop carrier, or in the mission
What all these efforts and others demonstrate is that, after decades of anticipation, the age of fast-as-light kill mechanisms for defending friendly forces has arrived.
That could have huge operational and budgetary consequences for the joint force.
The customary way of engaging overhead threats is with interceptor missiles, but as such threats proliferate, U.S. forces increasingly find themselves using high-cost weapons to defeat low-cost threats. That kind of unfavorable cost-exchange relationship could not be sustained in a major conflict—the defenses would be exhausted before the attackers were.
Laser weapons offer a way out of this dilemma. Because they use energy rather than kinetic systems as their kill mechanism, it only costs a few dollars to engage a million-dollar cruise missile. They don’t expend costly technology with each shot, and thus can destroy dozens of targets without any loss of capability.
Equally important, they hit intended targets instantaneously, at the speed of light (about 300,000 kilometers per second). And the same beam technology that is used to kill attackers can also be used to track them.
This is possible because high-energy lasers organize light, either visible or infrared, into tightly focused, coherent beams that do not lose their intensity over great distances. A missile eventually exhausts its propellant and then loses velocity. Lasers don’t. In a vacuum like outer space, they can hit targets thousands of kilometers away with minimal loss of energy.
So, it has long been a dream of military scientists to bring laser weapons to the battlefield. There are other beam technologies being developed, most notably high-power microwaves where Raytheon (another contributor to my think tank) appears to be the top source of innovations.
Unlike lasers, which use heat as their kill mechanism to disable hostile missiles and aircraft, microwave weapons are designed to scramble the electronics of their targets in milliseconds so that, for instance, their seekers fail.
However, microwave weapons, while offering the same speed-of-light, low-cost, inexhaustible magazine advantages of lasers, are less discriminate than lasers. Thus, while they may be more lethal than high-energy lasers in some circumstances, they increase the danger of collateral damage.
Laser weapons, on the other hand, are the most precise weapons ever devised. As long as defenders know exactly where to point them, they will only disable their intended targets.
The research contract awarded to Lockheed Martin last month will help answer the question of how soon high-energy lasers might be integrated into U.S. tactical and strategic defenses.
At this point, nobody is seriously suggesting that beam weapons should replace kinetic interception systems in U.S. missile defenses. There are details that first need to be understood, such as how the kind of inclement weather found in places like Ukraine might interfere with the propagation of beams.
So, systems like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, for which Lockheed recently delivered the 700th interceptor missile, won’t be exiting the force for a long, long time. If anything, their global footprint will grow as allies seek reliable protection from the tactical and theater-range missiles of countries like North Korea.
Over time, though, the laser work Lockheed has pioneered is blazing the trail to new operational concepts. The day may arrive when laser weapons in low-earth orbit offer a viable means of blunting strategic-missile attacks originating in China or Russia within moments after they are detected.
That would transform the practice of nuclear deterrence, and greatly diminish the power of Moscow’s nuclear threats. Long before that occurs though, lasers are likely to find their way onto the conventional battlefield as an affordable, reliable way of intercepting diverse overhead threats—aircraft, missiles, drones, even hypersonic weapons.
Lockheed Martin presents its laser work as just one facet of company efforts to chart new paths for 21st century security, and when it comes to beam weapons, it seems to be leading the pack.
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