Let’s say you’re an Air Force bigwig. You need to decide whether to invest in some shiny new directed energy weapon. Sure, “attack at the speed of light” sounds mighty good, but will the weapon actually work under the conditions youre interested in, or will it run into some obstacle like, the atmosphere?
You can’t just test-fire a mockup because nothing similar exists yet, and, more importantly, because these things don’t really scale very neatly. The experiences of other DE programs have got you worried.
Well, now there’s a computer model to help you predict just how a high-energy laser (HEL) weapon will behave under real conditions. The High Energy Laser End-to-End Operational Simulation (HELEEOS), described in this upcoming paper, is the outcome of a multi-year, joint effort to create such a planning tool for use throughout the DOD and the military.
Why is this so important? Well, laser physics is not exactly an area in which most high-level decision-makers have a lot of technical intuition. And with all the different effects that go into the performance of a laser weapon from those inside the laser and its companion optical systems, to the bewildering menagerie of phenomena known collectively as “atmospheric effects,” to beam-target interaction effects it’s even hard for the pros to answer such a basic question as “how much range will we gain if we double the laser power?”
The potential for poor decision-making is apparent in the history of the Airborne Laser program. As long ago as 2004, a thorough (and not-unsympathetic) report by the American Physical Society concluded that the ABLs lethal range would be so short that intercepting an ICBM launched from central Iran, for example, could only be accomplished, at best, from one small area in southwestern Turkmenistan. Yet the program still survives.
In fact, the paper tacitly admits that all is not well within the HEL weapons community, stating that one of the primary purposes of HELEEOS is “the establishment of trust among military leaders.”
So, what does this computer program do? Basically, for a set of laser parameters (size, power, wavelength) and engagement geometry (distance from source to target, altitudes and velocities of source and target, and so on), HELEEOS estimates how long the laser would need to dwell on the target in order to achieve a certain probability of kill if a kill is even possible.
But there’s more and this is where HELEEOS gets really cool. In order to model the effect of the atmosphere, the simulation taps into a massive database of worldwide climate data and into detailed models of atmospheric phenomena. This lets the user tailor the simulation of the weapon’s performance to a particular location and time of year, and even to different weather conditions so you’ll know whether your new toy will work not just at Kirtland Air Force Base, but on a muggy night in Pyongyang or a dusty day in Kuwait.
(Of course, there’s a catch to this: the climate data is complete only for those corners of the world where the US military has friends so, for example, there’s an inconvenient Iran-shaped blank on the map.)
Now, here’s this week’s $64,000 question: will this new “investment strategy tool,” as the paper describes it, really close the realism-deficit in HEL planning? It might; on the other hand, it might just give any unscrupulous folks a powerful tool for figuring out just which figures they need to fudge. I’ve argued elsewhere that technology, however useful, will not solve the problem of insurgency warfare alone; the same can be said for the problem of poor acquisition practices.
hi, very interesting. i guess my question would be, regardless of the use of this simulation, is it going to be cost-effective any time soon to implement and deploy such technology? from what i’ve read a better missile defence system would be provided by the naval one (aegis ships / missles etc?), but this isn’t ‘cool’ sound enough, hence tests are cut etc, talk is of airborne lasers and widely distributed gorund-based interceptors. surely the naval system bypasses a lot of these issues (gives mobility, avoids terrotorial complaints etc).
Could it be that the naval environment isn’t friendly to good DE weapons performance? I’m thinking of spray, fog, storms, all that business. Of course, that’s just an undereducated guess. Seems to me you’d have a good point, otherwise.
@John:
The point I was making is not that shooting down a missile from Turkmenistan isn’t good enough; it’s that our weapon is as good as useless if Turkmenistan decides not to let us use their airspace, or the Iranians decide to launch from a slightly less covenient position, or our airplane happens to be slightly out of that one sweet spot at the very moment when the missile goes up and the two-minute window is available, or the weather that day happens to be wrong…
On the same note, supporting technologies and systems which lose much of their “competitive advantage” is rather wasteful. Just as nobody builds steam engines for vehicles today, you drop what isn’t so good and support the systems with the most potential.
The simulator is an important step for laser physics; and it’s utility is not limited to the ABL program. It’s possible that ABL would work better at higher altitudes, due to lower gas particle concentrations.
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