Boeing has now announced the successful firing of a tactical laser from an aircraft. The weapon "defeated" an unoccupied stationary vehicle.
This milestone demonstrates that directed energy weapon systems will transform the battlespace and save lives," said Boeing exec Greg Hyslop. "The ATL team has earned a distinguished place in the history of weapon system development."I thought this part was interesting:
... may be able to cause a cell tower to stop working, a vehicle's fuel tank to suddenly explode, or a single person to inexplicably be incinerated - all completely silently and tracelessly, without anyone knowing they were ever there and not so much as a spent bullet left behind...The source does not sound unbiased, but the report and conclusions are probably valid.
Via NAACAL.
Addendum: Additional info posted by Doug in comments.
I ordered mine yesterday. I am looking forward to mounting it on the front of my truck to "instruct" bad drivers.
ReplyDeleteThis is standard weapons system "feature creep" and propaganda. Don't buy it.
ReplyDeleteRecall that the beam weapons were originally dreamed up during the Reagan administration as the Strategic Defense Initiative, which it turned out was mostly BS designed to scare the Russians into giving up the Cold War. Bush II revived some of the SDI concepts after 9/11 created a new spending opportunity for the defense community.
The SDI beam devices were intended to disable missiles, because thick & turbulent air reduces the ability of a beam to operate, they were imagined operating in orbit or at high altitude, the satellites would be crazy expensive to test & deploy, some designs involved the detonation of a nuclear device to power the beam (not popular with the public), so they decided to try firing a beam from a plane. The Boeing system includes a single beam mounted in a swivel turret in the nose of a 747, the large fuselage is likely needed to house the laser and its power source, which are likely quite large, I guess the idea was we'd keep a fleet of these laser jumbos in the air whenever we felt threatened, as there wouldn't be time to get them off the ground & up to altitude to defeat an incoming missile. Now they've shown it can hit a stationary target. How well will it do against moving targets? Other anti-missile weapons have done pretty poorly. How long & often can it fire the laser, or is it essentially a one-shot wonder? In other words, will it be effective & cost-effective against its intended target? You can bet those answers are conveniently classified.
The Boeing puff piece, rather than dealing with these critical issues, would instead have us imagine using the airborne laser against stationary & ground based objectives, as if a dive-bombing 747 with a nose mounted death ray would be a more effective or stealthy way to take out a cell tower compared to a relatively inexpensive currently-available GPS-guided bomb dropped from a small plane at high altitude. In other words, they know it's overpriced & likely ineffective, and want to drum up popular support to prevent DoD from canceling the program.
My favorite euphemism for one variant of newfangled death-ray: Active Denial System
ReplyDeleteThis milestone demonstrates that directed energy weapon systems will transform the battlespace and save lives," said Boeing exec Greg Hyslop.
ReplyDeleteThat's the sort of doublespeak one can only admire.
Someone's been watching too much Real Genius and then writing press releases again...
ReplyDelete