RAY GUN TWO STEP: LASERS TO IRAQ?

Maybe — just maybe — the U.S. is going to get laser weapons in Iraq, after all. Last week, Reuters reported that the Army had “balked” at deploy­ing Northrop Grumman’s Tactical High Energy Laser air defense sys­tem. But a Defense Tech infor­mant, point­ing to this MIT Technology Review arti­cle, says Reuters may have blown the story.

The Pentagon hasn’t announced its deci­sion on deploy­ment of the pro­to­type laser, [so] it can’t be said that it “balked”… Lt. Col. [Jeff] Souder, [who man­ages directed energy projects at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal] said “We’re explor­ing our options in how to put chem­i­cal lasers in the hands of our sol­diers as soon as pos­si­ble.“
Another rea­son I think [THEL deploy­ment] is a real pos­si­bil­ity is that [Brig.Gen. John] Urias just arrived in Baghdad and is in con­trol of acqui­si­tions for the oper­a­tions in Iraq. He over­saw the MTHEL [mobile THEL] pro­gram from Washington for sev­eral years and was the one who pushed it towards solid state lasers [as opposed to chemically-​​powered lasers like THEL, which gen­er­ate more power but require giant vats of toxic mate­ri­als to oper­ate — ed]. He also has said recently that he thinks they moved towards solid state too soon…
Another wrin­kle in this premise is that I know sev­eral high-​​ranking
MTHEL offi­cials, includ­ing Souder and Aden, were in Israel all last week. [THEL has co-​​developed with the Israelis, and THEL’s radar sys­tem has already been put to use in Israel — ed.] I think that means they might have been dis­cussing putting the pro­to­type in Sderot in time for the dis­en­gage­ment. Or it might mean that they are con­sid­er­ing the $25 mil­lion quarter-​​scale “relo­cat­able” THEL for future dis­en­gage­ments. A big caveat should go here — I imag­ine that there are sev­eral Pentagon peo­ple who don’t want to see the laser go to Israel, with its pro­cliv­i­ties for shar­ing tech­nol­ogy with the Chinese. The radar was one thing — it was an Israeli radar built for the pro­to­type. But giv­ing the laser to Israel seems like a huge leap for the Pentagon to take, con­sid­er­ing all the foul-​​ups in our defense rela­tion­ship with them recently.

Sam Jaffe, who wrote the Technology Review story, adds, “I’m con­vinced that before the end of this year we’ll see a his­toric first: a laser shoot­ing down a hos­tile pro­jec­tile in a real com­bat zone.”

May 10th, 2005 | Lasers and Ray Guns | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.