The US is making "really exciting" progress on directed energy weapons like high-energy lasers

directed energy weapons like high energy lasers could be a game changer in future wars but they've been in development for decades and the dod has yet to field these weapons at scale mark gunzinger is a director at the mitchell institute and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense mark welcome thank you very much all right so what kind of target would these um what a directed energy weapon be used against and to be clear we're talking about laser we're not talking about high-powered microwave right lasers that exist today are capable against rockets artillery mortars and increasingly they're becoming capable against higher end threats like cruise missiles depending on the geometry of a shot if you get a side shot on a cruise missile and you get a burn through on its thin skin then that would be an effective kill all right so explain a little bit how these weapons actually work yeah there's really two kinds of uh laser technologies right now distributed gain which is a series of slabs and you beam energy into one and hit them serially and it amplifies until you have a coherent beam of laser energy coming out the other end and then he has spectral beam combination there's a bunch of fiber lasers individual lasers kind of look like communications laser fibers and they're specularly combined to form again a coherent beam of energy that can hit a target at short to medium ranges so they use electricity so where do they get their power source yes well i'll tell you that the army is scheduled to deploy a 300 kilowatt laser this november to arrange to test it and be all contained on an oshkosh heavy truck with a generator to provide the power source the cooling the laser and the beam director all contained forming a highly mobile package that can emit a beam of energy of 300 kilowatts which would be good for many different kinds of cruise missiles as well as the other threats that i mentioned so let's talk about the benefits because one big benefit is you don't need to reload there's no supply chain for ammunition that's absolutely correct and that's critical because our air force is and our marine corps and of course the army is developing concepts for conducting highly distributed operations to reduce their vulnerability to attack by china and russia and other adversaries so if you're highly mobile you move your basing your posture around frequently you need mobile defenses you need to reduce the logistics to support those kinds of defenses and that's exactly what direct energy weapons do you don't need to reload them with large missiles like you would a patriot missile battery there's one other advantage these weapons are electrically powered so they're cheap a laser shot might cost the price of you and i going to starbucks or coffee compared nothing in dod is that cheap that's true but compared to a 4.3 million dollar patriot missile which doesn't make sense against some of the threats that we would have to use them against today since we don't have operational lasers all right well let's talk about the range though because is doesn't it become more expensive as you get farther and you need more energy yes uh it it does but you also need better beam quality lasers too it's not just the energy output but the beam quality and lasers are going to be best at short to medium range kills frankly high power microwave weapons which we just barely touched on their medium to longer range the fact is you need a combination of kinetic and non-kinetic including directed energy weapons to handle the thousands of ballistic missiles cruise missiles swarming uavs and other threats that our military faces you need both what about bad weather because when you're talking about laser it's not going to work as well if there's a storm if it's cloudy how does that work and that gets right back to the point it is made you need both because they can laser beams can be attenuated by weather high power microwaves not so much again it's the combination of both that you need to give our forces the kind of defensive capacity they need to survive in contested areas and there was a the air force research lab did uh run off war game a couple of months ago of that kind of hybrid between the high directed energy weapons and the kinetic energy kinetic weapons that's exactly right that in many other war games some of which i've led have shown is the combination of the two the ability to have fire control systems integrate both kinetic defenses like patriots as i've mentioned thaads and and even lower-cost kinetic interceptors with directed energy systems to choose the best tool to use against that threat that's inbound what do we know about the directed energy capabilities of china and of russia they are in full pursuit of those technologies and in some cases we may not be the first mover similar to uh we see in hypersonic weapons um give me an idea of the timeline um when are we going to actually see these being deployed in the field and used now that's the really exciting part uh the word for the last 30 years has been directed energies are always 10 years out five years now they're 10 years out well guess what over the last six years we went we are now at 60 kilowatt lasers and we're deploying a 300 kilowatt laser this november as i mentioned for testing in another two years we could be at uh fielding those 300 kilowatt waisers maybe even 500 and in five to six years we'll be hitting megawatt class lasers and those be effective against some kinds of ballistic missiles including possibly any ship ballistic missiles that china have fielded to you know attack our fleet do you think that the defense department is fully behind this and that the funding reflects that i think the funding is beginning to reflect that over the years i've seen a constant level of funding somewhere between 506 million per year going into research and development for all kinds of direct energy capabilities now that has been almost doubled in the last budget but still if you think about hypersonic weapons that last budget was about 3.8 billion dollars for hypersonic weapons so directed energy weapon research development and some acquisition is still about a third of that all right well mark thanks so much for coming in we'll see where this goes my pleasure thank you very much

Channel: Government Matters

Views: 22,875

Keywords: Government Matters, WJLA, Mimi Geerges, 7News, government, federal, Mimi, Geerges, news, United States, U.S., US, missile, Russia, China, DOD, Defense Department, defense, military

Id: SyNS-BYWBS4

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022