via Bloomberg.
The U.S. Navy has deployed on a command ship in the Persian Gulf its first laser weapon capable of destroying a target.Warfare at sea is about to change.
The amphibious transport ship USS Poncehas been patrolling with a prototype 30-kilowatt-class Laser Weapon System since late August, according to officials. The laser is mounted facing the bow, and can be fired in several modes -- from a dazzling warning flash to a destructive beam -- and can set a drone or small boat on fire.
All those vaunted supersonic anti-ship missiles will be worth nothing. Suddenly, air defense against boat swarms will be simplistic. The idea that a "sea base" needs to stand off 200 miles off shore will seem foolish.
Yeah. I like what the Navy is doing.
Its amazing what happens when you build your forces to fit your doctrine, instead of fitting your forces to certain procurement objectives.
this coupled with the future Rail Gun will really bolster the return of the "Battle Ship" or heavy cruiser. when these weapons start being deployed via Air and ground vehicles as well, the impact will be huge
ReplyDeleteThe big drawback on 100KW laser Sea-AD is attenuation and Fresnel losses as you ionize a path through the wet-warm air at sea level.
DeleteAgainst a target that is little more than an overblown RC plane puttering along at 120 knots, Youtube shows upwards of 2-3 seconds of stabilized, no-jitter, beam strike to get a good burn going.
Something moving a little quicker, say 600 knots is going to cover a mile every six seconds. So, seven missiles = guaranteed penetration of the inner zone air battle. Except that you have the mid and outer battles plus any terminal EXCM to consider.
Take that up to 2,000 knots (Wrecker/Oniks/Klub territory) and it's a mile every 2 seconds. By the time you get a single director to lock on and engage, the missile is going to be within your destruct window of a close-aboard BANG! which damages electronics and does blast to structures, at least.
Now it only takes maybe 3 missiles and they are just as likely to beat the mid and outer airbattle conditions as the inner zone defense.
So...
You put your flashlight and a turbine power plant, along with 500 gallons of fuel and a sizeable capacitor stack on a landing craft to keep the juice flowing (SSL beats Fluorine for ease of operations but oh does it suck power) and you play flak barge, biasing out in the axis of a likely attack or, if the threat employs surround sound gating tactics, doing a schiltron (that's Gaelic for 'great ring' by the way) with concentric ships.
And then you something like a Pave Penny to point every laser on-line at the flash-back sparkle of the first one (implying you only need one Mk.15 level, set of tracking optics or network hand) and maybe, you get 1-1.5 second kills from far enough out to let the Sea-RAM or CIWS have one last go at the leakers. Puts an entirely new spin on well decks and the necessity of Gator Freightors in every CSF as well.
The problem, as I see it, is that the basis of SSL (doped glass which passes electric current to get coherent light) is basically civilian telecoms so it's not going to be long before these things start showing up ashore in unfriendly hands. There is no way to contain proliferation.
DeleteWhile 100KW (weaponization threshold) systems will never touch a high altitude intruder with their 5-7km beam. They could easily lamped on to engage the falling rock PGMs.
And along with APS or smart-fuse AAA, that's a viable terminal defense against the U.S. IAM-from-stealth-jet approach of the cheapest possible hamburger munition with a junk guidance kit.
Of course, once they pump up the jam to around 1-2MW and start using prismatic relay mirrors like the Boeing experiment highlighted, you have another problem. Suddenly your 20-25km straight slant shot becomes a 10km rush to the beam director and a 30-50km run down range. A short path through dirty air then becomes a long rush to mid or even high level targets with ZTOF on engagement lag.
This could indeed 'change things' and it would not be to the benefit of an armed force that had invested heavily into a 1.5 trillion dollar follow-recap for tacair. We would be back to loloing cruise missiles and hi-fast hypersonics in /no time/.
Targeting being the key issue because, with a system that only has to solve for angle off (ZTOF) you will inevitably also see a shift from radar based systems to optical networks with cheap drones or even aerostats on sounding rockets forming a regenerable, inexhaustible, tracking system for these eyeblink killers.
And that in turn means a heckuva investment in making every spydrone into a regular Romulan Bird Of Prey (Activ/Black Fox Peltier tiles for everyone!). You will never be able to put an F135 class powerplant -anywhere near- such an EO surveillance and directed energy effects system. It would stand out like the veritable lighthouse on the horizon.
How long do we have you ask? Not later than 2030 is my best guess, the 250KW weapons could happen tomorrow (Northrop Grumman tested the 108KW Gamma Firestrike back in 2010 with an installation footprint equal to a small refrigerator and weight 500lbs).
With the F-35 not intended to leave service until 2060, that means half it's service life is spent as a JSM or HSSWK spear carrier or/and manned target drone. Should empty the prisons real quick.
It's a great step up from a standard ballistic AWS system. But don't count out the missile countermeasures yet. Want to increase the required 'burn time'? Spin the warhead/missile while showing only one side to the laser system.
DeleteThe Burkes only produce 7.5MW of auxilary power, lasers are not 100% efficient either, and I would hate to think of what the footprint would be a megawatt rated laser, how much of that 7.5MWs is surplus and available for the laser to use,, and how long they can run those generators at maximum for....
DeleteAnd that is just the practical side, what they cost, and how effective they would be on a ship is an additional story... I tend to think that Cannon-based/missile-based systems will remain the most effective interception systems for the foreseeable future.
Ofcourse in the air, high-altitude, I can see it potentially being a different story, if they can somehow fit powerfull enough systems on large enough airframes. There is very little atmosphere to degrade the beam quality, and you can shoot targets very far away, very quickly. And defeat them before they can enter mid-course corrections on hypersonic AAMs.
I doubt that.
DeleteThe future will be large numbers of smaller corvettes and destroyers loaded to the gills with supersonic, or, hypersonic, anti-ship missiles. Simply spamming enemy navies with missiles that even lasers or railguns wont be able to adequately defend from.
Im not buying into the laser or rail gun koolaid. And if battleships do make a comeback, their greatest strength will be their massive conventional projectiles (just like it always has been), which cannot be feasibly stopped by enemy laser defense systems or rail guns.
The trend is bigger ships, not smaller ones. Sweden's cute little Visbys don't count. China and South Korea are not building smaller.
DeleteAs for missile spam, more submarines, more ECM. Or just use nukes in anti-missiles.
Oh, and I am very pessimistic about the performance of all, "Modern" weapon systems. That includes those supersonic, or, hypersonic, anti-ship missiles.
Ha Notruescotsmen, you obviously haven't seen how many guns the russians cram onto their ships, check out their nuclear cruisers or their carriers, they pack them to the brim with CIWS. As long as you have enough guns covering them (so the cue time is short enough, and you can intercept enough targets), you should be fine.
DeleteAnd requiem, you can make nice little corvetes or light frigates like the Hsun_Hai-class_corvette the Skjold, Visby, Houbei class. On the frigates side you have things like their type 52 frigate which are very small yet still pack 32 large area-defense VLS stations, 8 ASMs and ASW torpedoes. I imagine something a bit larger than those missile boats could even have missiles like CAMM installed and bays for drones.
"you obviously haven't seen how many guns the russians cram onto their ships'
DeleteOh yes, I have :D
In fact, studying the Russian navy and their current acquisitions has led me to my conclusion above with the smaller ships and ASMs. You cannot defeat waves of missiles, no matter how many guns you have. It is a physical impossibility, like trying to sandbag a river, and the increased velocity of missiles will only make gun CIWS less effective.
and Requiem, im the same way. That is why I will never buy into the laser or railgun fetish that seems to be circulating. Or stealth multi-purpose wunderwaffe that can do everything.
That was a mouthful... Laser weapons are the future, but it will take time to perfect. But the allure of a tactically limitless magazine and the on-station time it enables is tantalizing.
ReplyDeleteRate of Fire is going to be the limiting factor, and it's never going to be as high as a ballistic system.
DeleteI should amend that the combination of lasers and rail guns is the future. Defensive missiles are expensive and consume large amounts of magazine real estate, and really are not reloadable forward.
DeleteLasers will work, simply because the weapon is already going to be in a Mach 8-10 plasma stream of reentry and if you can seriously add to the thermal rise on one side, you will either get burn through on the ablatives or destabilization of the shock across the nose, causing the round to tumble and disintegrate.
ReplyDeleteThe big issue, as another poster mentioned, is power. I doubt seriously if you are going to get enough juice running through non-dedicated ships service lines to sustain constant firing (cool down and optics train distortion being another issue) as the voltage losses would be incredible if not run through a conditioning system of capacitors.
Which means you get 10-20 shots before the capacitor banks have to reset and then 2-5 minutes later, you get another 20. Going by the MIRACL (and Sea-Lite director) vs. the Nautilus/MTHEL, you are NOT going to be stacking 1MW class laser weapons on hulls like they were CIWS or even 5".
A dedicated class vessel is much more likely and perhaps more affordable (concentrating BMD specific radars on an optimized deckhouse design) but also presents a single point of vulnerability and a 'how many chicks can huddle under a hen's wings' constraint to tactical formation keeping vs. other threats.
I'm told that X-Wave (phase modification that prevents attenuation) and frequency stacking (burn-through transparency on target surface area ablations) allows for a substantial improvement in power loading, using PEP or Pulsed Energy Projectile/Packet technology.
If you slow the speed of a laser by about a third, the power loading also goes way up (yeah, I know but Discovery Channel says it's possible) and so you might buy back some total shot count with shorter duration tracking window as added thermal stagnation temp threshold rise times within a micro or 'impulse' shortened burst rather than continuous wave condition.
This is going to be important because, while Megawatt class weapons will plow right through clouds and anaprop, you are still going to have a lot of upper atmosphere modeling to do to get a focused shot and the shorter the rise time before the target goes kablooey (technical term) the less dead air you have to control the aimpoint jitter through.
Either way, we're talking about a massive investment in system as platform mount and all for a terminal defense which could well have RFG already bus deployed and moving at anything up to 2 miles per second.
Do we want to play the all-defense game? I have yet to hear what level of threat a DF-21D (or a CM-400AKG or a CX-1) poses to a submarine with a VPM load of Hoplites and HSSW. Take it out further and there is equally no reason for a followon SSBN to not have a conventional IRBM response to hostage key industrial targets with.
Cease fire, negotiate and withdraw, or we slit your wallet and watch your economy bleed out.
Someone rewrote the Planck's constant? I know light slows down in different media, but not to that extent. Discovery channel isn't the most practical of shows. Think there was once I saw them pitching for supercavitating submarines. God knows how those are going to steer through the air/water barrier in front of them.
DeleteNow, now, stop insulting me with big words I don't understand and am too lazy to Google. What, do I look like a carpenter?
ReplyDeleteI can only tell you what I watch as I wait patiently for ACME truck to drop off my lightsaber.
Holding Light Still For A Second (Time Index 6:00-7:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lr5OUjFDkg
Talking to a physicist friend, as you slow light, passing through a gas which has been charged to a given spin state, it starts to lose the properties of a wave and gains those similar to a solid. What's more, it can be massively powerloaded as the photon wavefronts overlap or 'stack' based on oscillating frequency bandgaps around the Debye Curve as the plasma degenerates (what causes the PWs to 'stick' actually as the light creates a plasma mirror, whose refraction shape is semi-predictable in altering their behavior...)..
If you think of this, not as a function of lightsabers but blaster bolts, the impact of laser light against an onrushing projectile could be treated as a kinetic as well as thermal event where the X-Wave stabilization of the wavefront causes a thermal loading which 'blows off' the plasma front protecting the target and in the microsecond you have the target face exposed, you generate a dinnerplate sized 'solid' mass of light which creates an enormous percussive effect, like a hydraulic ram acting at the speed differential between the photonic strike area and the onrushing, hypersonic, projectile surface around it.
Thus, at the speed of a MARVing warhead or skimmer missile, it cracks itself, like an egg, not on a spear of light but a speedbump where the thermal effect creates a mechanical one. My friend hinted that this could be made to be an /electromechanical/ effect as well with the type of 'light' (he was talking Gamma and X-ray photons at this point) derived from the strike generated vs. flow field plasma interface leading to charge polarization shocks that disrupted the covalent bonds between individual atoms, even in ultrastrong nano-materials.
M&S, interesting if they can pull it off. I did basic light in Uni and IIRC, once the beam passes the boundary between the 2 mediums, they start to spread out again as part of the wave that exits first speeds up over the waves still stuck in the denser media. This usually results in the exiting beam being almost totally similar to the input beam. Assuming same frequency of course. A non-coherent light source will split due to their different wavelengths and frequencies, similar to what happens in a prism. Hit at an angle though and the beam goes sideways. You commonly see this in the air/water interface.
DeleteShould be interesting to see their tricks in action.
With regard to the small vs. large debate, I tend to look at the effects delivery process as a function of time and distance more than anything.
ReplyDeleteRight now, we are stuck in the Ninja Mode of stealth obsession which leads to single target, direct delivery, predictable associations with the threats shooting at the intruder because that's where he has to be to do his IAM martial arts trick. This has a secondary effect of pushing the basing mode way too close to the target zone which, along with sorties per day, limits on a 500-1,000nm radius (OEF had some 12-15hr missions) makes subsonic tacair a non-viable player in future power-projection warfare.
But 'what if'...
You go higher and faster rather than slower and sneakier? WIth a recoverable HSP or Hypersonic Strike Platform, carrier capable, across 4,000-6,000nm -ranges- rather than 400-600nm radials?
Well, for one, any ballistic effect you care to deliver goes a lot further downrange. We are talking half a time zone or more, even from extremely large crossing angles relative to the delivery platform's ground track. Like skipping stones across water. This basically takes any and all target area terminal defenses, out to 400nm or more, right out of the picture and so eases route planning quite a bit.
By shortening the distances involved, you can lower the operating Mach point which is to say moving from the Falcon (Mach 20 from CONUS = indistinguishable from an ICBM and with massive Q and aero effects which ate through the carbon-carbon skin of both XTV testbeds in just a few minutes) to the X-51 at Mach 8-10.
Which in turn eases the fundamental physics problems of airframe as well as the propulsion scheme penalties. The X-51 can operate on JP-7 rather than slush hydrogen or methane for instance. No cryo storage eases systems as well as structural weight effects.
Perhaps to a level which allows carrier launch.
With an airframe that looks like the X-37 but which has Tomcat style VG wings under folding glove fairings (ala B-1) on top of the fuselage. Since takeoff, climbout and landing are secondary envelope points you don't have to have a massive amount of performance to accomplish them, a low T/Wr (think S-3 around .4), single turbofan in the F414 class could do it. Once you motor up to 30-40K, you light a pair of SRBs of the THAAD class, on each side of the turbopath.
And hey, Spaceship 1 style (Plastic airplane Mach 3.5 @ 150,000ft speed) you are completely through the SR-71 'redhot' envelope, in a matter of seconds.
NOW you start your scramjet, somewhere around Mach 5 and 200K feet and away you go. For about an hour of flight time.
With the F-35 as a key example, we waste -far- too much engineering time and structural weight consideration solving essentially non-effectant problems in worthless parts of the envelope like the <1% which is takeoff and landing. This has a political motive, designed to protect service _basing mode_ turf rather than achieve anything dramatic in roles and missions (the JSFs have essentially identical weapons systems). Which allows more sensible threat states to catch up to us by focusing more on what their platforms /do/ than how they land afterwards.
ReplyDeleteThe proof of idiocy in this is the assumption that sending a 900ft long, 45,000 ton America into a BASM dominated war theater with 300nm radius F-35Bs will somehow leave the Chinese DF-21Ds 'confused' in comparison with the 1,100ft long, 110,000 ton Ford class with 550nm F-35Cs, which we leave at home. Utterly specious logic.
The point being that if we can launch from the middle of the Pacific, hit targets from Beijing to Hong Kong (3,500nm linear distance) and recover 'somewhere' in the SCS, we can protect the carrier from both 2,500nm ROTHR tracking and 900nm BASM strikes and what's more -I don't have to pay for- a composite airwing with EWF, Tanking, AEW&C etc. Nor for bathtub-toy LCS to go mine and SSK hunting in the green water (only to be blown to bits by swarming PCIs or something else cheap and dumb). But it's the flight distance, not the TOL mode that counts here.
With a little broader operational scope as authority, I can hit targets in the far west of China (where the majority of their defense aerospace companies are) and all the IPod, DVD and Air Jordan factories inbetween. _None of which are going to move_. Before recovering into Al Udeid or Shindand. And then turning around to repeat the trip, later the same day.
This semi-strategic shuttle bombing, ala Frantic Joe, is what makes it possible to retain our enormous investment in the existing carriers viable, as opposed to recapitalizing the fleet with a bunch of low value assets with 60-200 crew (vs. 3-5,000) and using them to toss HSSW or the equivalent for a paltry few hundred miles against 'coastal' targets.
Where the enemy can target and shoot us back.
Shrug, why deal with the multi-system overlap as countermeasure headache? Especially if we're not going to keep what we defeat? War is about the most costly league sport there is without the transfer of tributory assets as profit motive.
Put the enemy at risk in strategic depth and you make him 'defend everywhere and thus nowhere well'. Threaten him with the prospect of becoming poor rather than simply embarrassed and you give him pause for thought as to whether chump change Taiwan or Korea or Iraq is worth the effort. And finally, drop hypersonic JDAMs from well over a 1,000nm horizon and you essentially take 90% of the existing, /tactical/ Air Defense right out of the picture.
Whether they can see you or not, anything less than S-400/500 becomes essentially a surplus museum piece.
Hypersonics is about Big Thinking. Stealth is the Airpower equivalent to commando operations. Stunningly effective when they work but ultimately narrow in their effects driven outcomes. And presently available countermeasures mean if I can't stop the subsonic Shinobi in the field, I can certainly put a house-sized hole in his flight deck.
Using the technique of the FAE to explode a fog of say, mercury around the ship carrying the laser might just limit the range and effect of the laser itself.
ReplyDeleteIt could even be oil or gasoline maybe even NaPalm for that matter.
The problem with the Russian gun systems is that they are cheap in their laying technology. Their AKM-630/630-2 which are indeed peppered all over their Slavas and Kirovs like mushrooms on dung have no on-mount fire control and so they end up using remote fire direction and 'crossing the streams' of several guns which is never a good way to do more than confuse the radar with multiple bullet tracks and throw good shots after bad. Heck, they even have a /manual reversion/ on some of them, complete with remote and iron sights.
ReplyDeleteObviously, Kashtan is better...
The problem comes from the ballistic window where the rounds hold a sufficiently tight pattern that you can expect realistic hits. Where you are dealing with a typical (Mk.15) maximum engagement range of 1,500m out and and optimum of only 500m with 200m guaranteed close aboard effects on a weapon that may well be doing 800-900fps (subsonic); throwing more rounds down range doesn't do much good the missile transit time through the engagement zone is so rapid while you are still limited to the number of sensor apertures you have, for multiple target tracks.
IMO, the future of inner zone defense is something like the APS or Active Protection Suite used to defend tanks against ATGW/ATR.
Sure, it's going to need to be bigger, but conventional kinetic kill systems which result in a wardet through the seeker, APS rockets go for a timed control surface destabilization or fuse kill with both frag and (I'm told) EMP effect.
Go for a weapon somewhere between RAM and a smoke mortar bomb and fire it out of MASS or Centurion type launchers using a Metal Storm approach to tandem stacked rounds and you should have a decent ability to kill skimmers at least because even if the rounds have to adopt a parabolic trajectory to get to max range, they are not vulnerable ballistic dispersion and so can be 'waiting' when the missile crosses the outer engagement boundary (they can also be set to safe out well beyond the range gate where a 'clean miss' would otherwise be cluttered with new projectiles or explosive fragments). With a range point that crosses that critical '1nm mile and a second shot' reaction time (they have these things down to 20 microsecond cuing times now I should add), you get a WEZ and NEZ total kill approach _before_ the weapon starts doing it's funky chicken terminal approach dance.
Unlike lasers which need optical tracking, APS uses optics only for launch-flash and MMW for fine tuned approach tracking. Which is to say, "Go ahead and fire your SRBOC and Thermal rockets, we don't care!" APS is also unique in having per-mount sensors for every unit which are small enough to be scabbed onto bulkheads. Which is to say: if you take a hit, you're not out of business because the SPY-1 or Mk.15 (or Sea-RAM) has suffered an electronics failure due to shock.
RAM on it's own is too much weight and size for the capability (3-4nm) offered as an innerzone defense.
Taken together: multiship or flak barge, stacked, DEWS engagement, with inner zone APS and some kind of EXCM/Jamming secondary should do a lot more to handle saturation strikes by evader capable (weave and popup) AShM. Even supersonic ones.
If there is a role for large ships, I believe it will lie in a return to Merrimac style arsenal ship designs with retractable everything, and no deckhouse so as to maximize armor on the angled upper hullsides.
If you imagine something the size of a shipping container as spaced/laminate (translating armor door) silo protection over your VLS and an ACTIV level (Peltier tile) thermal management system to go with the stealth shaping plus no exposed navigation bridge or sensor clusters (everything datalinked from offboard using fast deploy sensor buoys and airbornes), you can start to challenge threat acquisition distances from loose gates and sustain quite a few Close Aboards by substantial warheads, without a lot of indirect frag/shock damage.
DeleteI have also long wondered if the experimental 'water wall' system of towed drogues ala MCM paravanes holding out an angled line with explosive filled secondary drags behind them could be useful if pulled by lighter ships slightly ahead of capital centers as skimmer, torp or PCI swarm protection.
But more than anything, the key to high value asset defense is never making level 1 your only shot at stopping the threat. Layering means zoning and sectoring to keep other ships/aircraft in the battlegroup out of trouble but today, the flexibility of digital battlespace mapping systems should allow for much more tightly integrated spacing for common BASM defense and AShM cross-fire coverage using DEWS from multiple beam directors.
But there is nothing really that loiters in the mid-zone beyond DLI interceptors which means that, again, you are looking at fleeting shot opportunities and a lot of bad fusing angle misses if you stick strictly to ESSM/Standard options with their limited SARH counts on missile stacking.
If you won't buy into microhulls with dedicated turbine generators and capacitor banks that scoot out on the bias to engage with lasers as the AShM fly by, then you should instead at least consider the secondary option of MALD type subsonic/supersonic turbo-SAM which can be launched, fly out 25-50-100nm and 'stand by' as your E-2 hands off on Klub/Oniks/YJ-12 tracks coming over the horizon (or out of the water).
If you narrow the cutoff angle on the approach and put a secondary solid motor (say a 70mm Mk.66 FFAR) below or above the turbine exhaust, you can snap from 300-400 knots to about Mach 1.5 for the critical few seconds that a very fast (FQ) or very slow (RQ) threat goes by, showing your IIR seeker it's thermal shock or exhaust boundary.
Since the APS-18 is specifically intended to break out low-RCS objects over water, you've got a good chance to again _layer back_ with multiple, low aspect, low bearing displacement, loitering missile attacks that can hit an AShM in midcourse before it starts doing terminal jink, snake and porpoise evasions to throw off the intercept geometry.
MALD is only 10ft long, weighs a mere 300lbs yet can fly for up to 500nm. You could stack two of them in a 20ft MK.41 Strike configured well.
Especially for SSCs and SAG operations inshore (little or no carrier support), we need to move beyond the Quick Draw McGraw defense of the 1980s OAB/MAB/IAB zoned defense. And start thinking of ways to engage threats when they are not in terminal mode and thus easier to kill.
A Year back The US DoD has revealed that its Laser Weapons System (LAWS) has successfully demonstrated its ability to down small aircraft during testing ... The laser weapon shot down a drone during testing by igniting it, sending it crashing down to earth just moments after engaging it and Now happy to see it on USS Ponce .... a new laser era begins
ReplyDeleteStephen,
ReplyDelete>>
The laser weapon shot down a drone...
>>
It is indeed a good start. The next steps should be shrinking the system on a common mount/rack interface level which can be expanded as technology improves and getting it networked to act in concert with multiple other beam directors amping up the power on target from other ships (which will in turn lead to new ideas about deployment platforms and formation tactics as cross cover).
As I recall, Ponce is a command ship. It is not an asset you would normally expose in the outer ring of a screen.
The USN needs to make major capital investment choices, away from fixed wing (Brown Shoe) airpower and into SSLs + Missiles to push the state of the art past single installations and towards a more potent, operational, capability. Fleet Wide. Right now, the State Of The Art supports the LAWS only as a dazzler against standoff assets, not as hardkill. Moving towards 500KW would change this and moving towards multi-aperture stacking would enable us to consider AShM defense which bridged the terminal (CIWS, <1,500m) and VSHORAD (RAM, <3nm) performance levels as system installational volume/weight penalties.
Killing JSF would be one way to take a definitive step towards realizing that goal while liberating a _significant_ quantity of cash.
Youtube LAWS Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBuiPZm6hK4