Developing, Deploying Solid-State Laser Could Take About 10 Years: Estimate
Technical Hurdles To Lasers Surmountable, But Non-Technical Barriers Must Be Bested
The United States faces a grim threat of rogue states and terrorist groups likely obtaining precision-guided missiles, rockets, artillery and mortars (G-RAM), but the solution can be developed in the form of laser missile defense systems, noted experts said in a Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) congressional forum.
Proliferation of missile, rocket and other technologies to rogue states and terrorists will provide the impetus to drive laser defense development, overcoming entrenched resistance to change in the armed forces, they predicted. As well, the low cost of operating lasers and their speed-of-light response to threats will be major selling points, the experts explained.
The forum stemmed from a CSBA report authored by Thomas Ehrhard, CSBA senior fellow; Andrew F. Krepinevich, CSBA president, and Barry Watts, CSBA senior fellow. CSBA is a Washington defense-oriented think tank.
Their report said any laser defense platform should be mobile, “so that they’re not vulnerable to saturation attacks” involving scores of incoming enemy missiles or other weapons, Krepinevich said.
That mobility criteria would fit the description of the Airborne Laser (ABL), a heavily-modified 747-400F aircraft by lead contractor The Boeing Co. [BA], with a laser system by Northrop Grumman Corp. [NOC] and beam control-fire control by Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT].
However, the experts also said that it would be preferable to have a solid-state laser (SSL), instead of the Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) in the ABL, stating that it would be better not to have chemicals in the platform. That would especially be true for lasers intended for use not in a huge aircraft, but in smaller fighter aircraft and on land, where the giant chemical laser unit would be unwieldy, the report indicated.
“Solid-state lasers … are much more likely to be mobile, or to be made mobile, than chemical laser systems,” Krepinevich said, “and a lot easier to resupply the magazines, if you will, in terms of batteries or electrical supply, as opposed to sloshing chemicals, highly toxic, moving around the battlefield.”
To be sure, he said, one might wish to experiment with a couple of Skyguard laser missile defense systems, provided they were fully mobile.
President Obama has proposed dropping plans to buy any more ABL aircraft, keeping just the one existing ABL prototype aircraft as a research and development tool. Congress is reviewing his defense budget proposal for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2010, and will decide whether to kill ABL procurement plans as he wishes, or to overrule him and continue the existing ABL program.
One question here is, if the COIL ABL program is frozen except for research, then how long might it be before an SSL system could be developed in its place? The answer might depend on whether the threat is major (think ICBMs), or a lesser incoming attack.
The report at one point predicts that it could be a decade before large-scale solid-state lasers are operational: ” … the basic technology for battlefield laser systems appears to be sufficiently mature to permit the fielding of battlefield laser systems by 2018.”
But the CSBA forum was asked by Space & Missile Defense Report whether the rapidly rising threat situation among rogue states and non-state actors will allow waiting 10 years for the arrival of a solid-state laser.
Ehrhard replied that an initial laser defense system against some types of threats could be available immediately.
“We think that you could proceed with a G-RAM defense system, given the technology that exists right now,” Ehrhard said, an SSL system that would be effective against many types of enemy weapons.
However, to counter an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), then an ABL-style defense is required, by hitting the missile shortly after it is launched, in the boost phase, Ehrhard said.
Proponents of this approach note that in the boost phase, an enemy missile is easily tracked because of its hot exhaust, and hasn’t yet had time to emit multiple warheads, decoys or confusing chaff. Also, if an attempt to annihilate the enemy weapon in its boost phase isn’t successful, then other U.S. missile defense systems can attempt to obliterate it later in its midcourse or terminal phase trajectory.
Krepinevich added that “we don’t want to depict that everything has been solved, all the [technological SSL] problems are over. But if you look at the threat, both the existing threat if you look back at the ’06 Lebanon War [when Hezbollah terrorists fired 4,000 rockets and missiles on Israeli buildings and civilians], and the potential for what happens when adversaries get G-RAM, then, does the Persian Gulf become a no-go zone? … It already is dicey.
“We have certain ways of defending forward assets, whether they are Green Zones or Camp Victories, or key economic facilities, key transportation nodes like bridges and so on … they become a lot more difficult to defend” when even rogue or terrorist opponents wield guided missiles and other weapons.
What if those adversaries launch mass salvos, massive numbers of cheap, plentiful guided weapons, and the United States remains dependent on hugely expensive anti-missile kinetic interceptors to counter those incoming threats?
“We’re not in a position where the country … can throw a lot of money at a problem and try and solve it,” he said.
This doesn’t work, as a simple matter of mathematics, Krepinevich reasoned.
“The idea of kinetic interceptors, whether … [the Israeli missile defense] Iron Dome or other types of interceptors, that cost far more to defeat the threat than the threat” costs the enemy, “seems to us to us, is not a particularly attractive solution.”
Per shot against incoming enemy missiles, it is a fact that a laser beam costs far less than an interceptor missile, which can run $500,000, $1 million or more.
While a former defense secretary whom Krepinevich didn’t name once dismissed laser missile defense systems as “those interesting toys,” Krepinevich said the decades in which lasers have been in development but not operational may be about to end, with lasers coming into their own. The reason:
“The technological risks [of developing laser missile defense] have gone down significantly,” he noted. “The threat is going up significantly.” And with the threat rising, and the nation financially unable to afford to counter it with expensive interceptors in “a rich man’s strategy to deal with it,” then an SSL “may be the only thing that gives you a cost-effective solution to this particular problem.”
This means that laser missile defense now has become the right solution for the problem.
“Our judgment is, it probably is something you ought to go for,” Krepinevich concluded.
The catch is that some nations may not wish to invest heavily in existing chemical laser systems, knowing that superior solid-state lasers are about to be developed, he said.
“Why invest in chemicals when I’ve got solid-state coming down the road?” he said leaders likely will ask. An advantage of solid-state lasers is that they can pack hefty power in a small package, while a chemical laser unit is large, riding on a giant 747 aircraft.
For any airborne laser system, however, the response time is far faster, just seconds, after sensors detect an enemy missile launch, Ehrhard said.
And the report also notes there are some non-technology hurdles facing development and deployment of lasers, such as entrenched military attitudes of wishing to employ familiar systems. But resistance can be overcome.
“There remain some major non-technical hurdles that still need to be overcome if battlefield lasers are to enter service in the US military in time to meet and deter those threats,” the report noted. “Institutions inside and outside the Pentagon can play a critical role in overcoming those challenges by accelerating laser systems out of the laboratories and into the field.”