By Geoff Fein
Raytheon [RTN] later this year will test its Laser Area Defense System (LADS) against mortars to demonstrate the military utility for lasers on the battlefield, a company official said.
Raytheon first tested its LADS system, a laser that is coupled with the company’s Land-Based Phalanx Weapon System, back in 2006, Mike Booen, vice president of advanced missile defense and directed energy weapons, told Defense Daily earlier this week.
In 2006, the company conducted what Booen refers to as a “proof of principle” test, using an off-the-shelf laser.
“That test was really a static test. We had a lot of help from the AFRL (Air Force Research Lab) and we got a lot of help from Sandia National Lab, which supplied us some of the mortars.”
Those tests in 2006, however, entailed firing the laser at mortars placed on a stand at a distance of 500 meters, Booen said. “We need to shoot one of these things down while it is flying.”
That’s the plan for later this year, he added.
“It’s all about putting energy on a target at the speed of light. One problem with the mortar problem is you don’t have a whole lot of time for a kinetic solution, and a kinetic solution would have to be very cheap, like Phalanx bullets, for example,” Booen said. “We think, long-term, that this thing will be used in conjunction with the kinetic version because we think there will always be a place for the bullet version of Phalanx.”
LADS would be a complement to the land-based Phalanx, and it would certainly help in the logistics of the ammunition and gun maintenance, he added. “Because basically you would have an unlimited magazine. As long as you have access to electrical power through a generator or from the base, you are always going to have ‘bullets.’ It just converts electricity into photons and that destroys the mortars and rockets.”
While mortars have been the focus of LADS development, Booen said the system could be used to defeat softer targets such as enemy unmanned aerial vehicles.
While any mention of a military utility for lasers often leads to shouts of opposition from those fearful of employing the technology in combat, Booen pointed to the benefit of using LADS instead of the Phalanx system’s rounds.
“When you are using the bullet version of the Land-Based Phalanx Weapon System you have to have a certain ‘keep out zone’ because those bullets are flying. So you have to make sure that it is de-conflicted with friendly aircraft, helicopters, all those sort of things,” he said. “When you are using a laser, that ‘keep out zone’ is much smaller because the laser is more precise and you don’t have to lead the target.”
That smaller “keep out zone” will mean warfighters will have more battle space, more opportunity to engage the mortars and rockets, Booen added.
But for all the benefits that LADS will bring, Booen doesn’t see it replacing the Land-Based Phalanx Weapon System.
“We would view a laser version of the Land-Based Phalanx Weapon System to be just another node. It would give the warfighter options to use the laser version when he could and the bullet version when it was more appropriate to use the bullet version,” he said. “The one limitation of a laser is heavy heavy weather, fog, low clouds, in instances like that if I was a warfighter I would certainly want both. Certainly moving to a significant number of lasers eventually would be beneficial on your logistics tail but my guess is the customer is always going to want both.”
If the results of this year’s tests prove the capability of LADS, Booen said: “At that point in time I’ll be arguing it has military utility that day.”
“I think at that point the military will want to take it into some military assessment of their own,” he added. “We are right now getting great support for this demonstration from OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense), from the Joint Technology Office, as well as the Navy in PMS 405, which is the directed energy group.”
If Raytheon were given a green light, and a contract, to produce LADS for deployment, Booen said all that would stand in the way of quickly building and getting systems out to theater would be any limits on how fast the company could replicate the lasers. “Since it is a commercial laser supplier, I would have to check with them to find out how fast they can build the lasers, and then we manufacture the beam director to point the laser.”
“Everything we have here is done with an eye toward producability, because we do think that once we demonstrate it the military is going to want a number of these, and I think, just like the basic Phalanx program, which had many international users, I think once the utility of this has been demonstrated you’ll see a pull from the international community as well,” Booen added.
“We at Raytheon are pretty much laser agnostic, because we are not building the laser, we are buying it out of a catalog. If somebody else, another company comes up with a fiber laser or a different type of solid state laser, we’ll be happy to use that. We just want it now. We don’t want to wait 10 years,” Booen said.