By Geoff Fein
The Navy has been testing a commercially available laser technology that the service is looking to use against enemy unmanned aircraft, according to a Navy official.
Under the effort, the service has bought eight lasers, Capt. Dave Kiel, Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) directed energy and electric weapons program manager, told Defense Daily yesterday.
“We are going to take six of these lasers, line them up precisely, run them through a telescope and they are all going to hit the same spot,” he said. “We are going to have 60-100 kwh of laser power. The goal is to be able to kill UAVs for pennies a shot, instead of the large cost of a missile.”
To date, the Navy has demonstrated the technology, shooting down five tactically relevant unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in desert tests, Kiel said.
While there have been several efforts to use lasers to shoot down missiles, most notably Airborne Laser, Kiel noted these efforts were all chemical lasers, which means they will eventually run out of chemicals.
The Navy opted for a new direction, looking at the investment made in commercial off the shelf technology, Kiel added. The Navy wanted to leverage the fact that these lasers were a quarter the price of one-off military lasers, he added.
After the successfully shooting down five of five UAVs during testing of the system, it is now at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5, Kiel said.
“We are replicating that experiment at the end of this month out at San Nicholas Island (California). We are doing it over the water, so we will be at a robust TRL 5. Then, we will work to find the money to do it on a ship,” he added.
The effort is not yet a program of record, Kiel said.
And Kiel added laser weapons will never replace kinetic weapons. “You will need to have both.”
“We are not trying to replace anything. That’s one of the reasons we choose to integrate onto the Close-In-Weapon System (CWIS),” he said. “The whole idea there is we don’t have to take up any additional topside space, we don’t have to take anything off the ship. It also makes a nice common fire control solution throughout the fleet.”
Dahlgren is the technical design agent and will be the lead system integrator, Kiel added.
The government will build the first prototype, he said.
Taking a laser weapon from land to sea presents a few challenges, Kiel said. “To me, all the technical challenges that exist to moving to a maritime environment are really just engineering issues. I don’t think there will be any significant S&T issues.”
The issues range from stabilizing the system to the effect that higher humidity has on absorbing some of a lasers power as it passes through the atmosphere, he said.
“The biggest issues though aren’t purely technical they are related to just the whole socialization issue–no one has ever had a laser weapon on a ship before and it is going to take people time to get used to them,” Kiel added.
That means making sure the laser does what it is advertised to do and that every time the system is turned on, no one is going to be blinded from the laser, he said.
By using Raytheon‘s [RTN] CWIS, Kiel hopes to cut costs on manning and logistics.
“We do think we will have to add some weeks to the Fire Controlman’s school because they will have to learn a little bit more about lasers and optics, but we don’t think there is going to be any increase in manning to the ship,” he said.
“I think the total system, when we finally get it out there, will be on the order of $15 million per system and then there will be no ordnance costs, no logistics tail for maintaining the ordnance, no depots to overhaul ordnance, and no fire suppression as you move this ordnance around,” Kiel said. “This is a low cost way to kill a low cost target.”