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The U.S. Marines are developing laser weapons. Here's why.
2014 Oct 20, 12:32am 2,311 views 13 comments
by zzyzzx follow (9)
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Dan8267
2014 Oct 20, 12:47am
The U.S. Marines are developing laser weapons. Here's why.
What else are we going to do with all our cats?
Dan8267
2014 Oct 20, 12:49am
The U.S. Marines are developing laser weapons. Here's why.
No practical reasons. The military just wants more toys.
Give the military money and it will waste it.
Heraclitusstudent
2014 Oct 20, 2:22am
Swarms of drones will make current planes and ships obsolete.
Imagine a swarm of long range autonomous torpedo-drones launching a coordinated attack on an aircraft carrier or a sub. Google can do a self-driving cars. I bet someone is working on this.
That's not even mentioning that in the future aircraft carriers will be attacked with nuclear weapons in missiles tracking moving targets.
The only rational response is to produce cheap autonomous drones en mass.
As for lasers, remember they don't work well with fog and clouds. And you can defend easily by making the surface of the drones reflective.
Tenpoundbass
2014 Oct 20, 2:36am
Take out the satellites and they'll all drop like flies.
Once we're that dependent on that technology, WII crop dusters will be a threat to us.
Rin
2014 Oct 20, 3:16am
How about sharks with freakin' laser beams on their heads?!
Why not mutant Piranhas?
zzyzzx
2014 Oct 20, 4:42am
No practical reasons. The military just wants more toys.
Give the military money and it will waste it.
Considering how much ordinance costs these days, it should be way more economical to use lasers at some point.
Dan8267
2014 Oct 20, 5:19am
Considering how much ordinance costs these days, it should be way more economical to use lasers at some point.
Yeah, when energy is dirt cheap. And I don't mean coal. The chemical reactions used in portable high-power lasers use fuels that are a lot more expensive. So until cold fusion becomes a reality...
RWSGFY
2014 Oct 20, 5:22am
Imagine a swarm of long range autonomous torpedo-drones launching a coordinated attack on an aircraft carrier or a sub.
These things already exist and are called "cruise missiles". Duh.
Heraclitusstudent
2014 Oct 20, 6:20am
Imagine a swarm of long range autonomous torpedo-drones launching a coordinated attack on an aircraft carrier or a sub.
These things already exist and are called "cruise missiles". Duh.
As far as I know "cruise missiles" are not torpedoes, are not making autonomous decisions, and are targeting fixed targets.
I meant replacing expensive man operated navies by cheap autonomous sub-marines.
Tenpoundbass
2014 Oct 20, 8:29am
If you're a country like Russia or Pakistan and you can't compete with the technical military might of the USA, how do you bomb us back to the stone age?
They might not have the resources to fight a tech war with the US, BUT they can build and launch a satellite into orbit that is nothing more than Satellite battering ram.
Just like in the movie Gravity, take out a few satellites then the debris field would wipe out every satellite in orbit within a few days. We would be crippled, I doubt the US has any low tech war machines in our arsenal that doesn't depend on satellites, I doubt if we have any communication capabilities that doesn't rely on satellites.
I would be willing to bet that Russia and Pakistan could fight a better WII era war, limited to period technology, better than we could.
zzyzzx
2014 Oct 20, 8:34am
Yeah, when energy is dirt cheap. And I don't mean coal. The chemical reactions used in portable high-power lasers use fuels that are a lot more expensive. So until cold fusion becomes a reality...
I was assuming that they ran off electricity.
http://theweek.com/article/index/266871/the-us-marines-are-developing-laser-weapons-heres-why
Every military in the world worth its epaulets is investing in drones. Now sensing that drones could be a threat to U.S. troops, the Marines are working on a laser to zap them out of the sky.
It's called GBAD  —  for ground-based, anti-air directed energy weapon. The Pentagon's Office of Naval Research announced in June it had awarded a series of contracts for the laser, which the Marines hope will augment a looming future shortage of anti-air Stinger missiles.
ONR has tested some components for the weapon already, and wants to carry out field experiments with a 10-kilowatt laser later this year. In two years time, it wants to triple the laser's power to 30 kilowatts.
Eventually, the Marines want the entire weapon to weigh less than 2,000 pounds and fit inside a Humvee and its replacement, the still-in-development Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.
Here's how this weapon would conceivably work on the battlefield. At any given time, several thousand Marines are floating around the world's oceans aboard amphibious assault ships. In the event of a crisis, the Marines are — along with the Navy's aircraft carriers — one of the two deadliest kinds of tools the president can order off a nation's coastline.
This means the Marines are an expeditionary force. But Marine reconnaissance units landing on a beach or entering hostile territory for the first time could be easily spotted by drones — which are increasingly being deployed by more and more nations. The GBAD is supposed to destroy these kinds of drones.
The branch is looking to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to handle detecting and tracking incoming drones, and then beaming that data down to GBAD units. The office has also selected the drone-tracking RPS-42 radar to help out on the ground.
Right now, the leathernecks in Low-Altitude Air Defense battalions train to shoot down drones with shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. But in the coming years, the Stinger stockpiles will begin running low. According to a 2013 report from the service, Marine stockpiles in 2019 will drop below the 1,081 Stingers mandated by the Pentagon's War Reserve Munitions Requirement.
This has led the branch to extend the service life of these launchers by upgrading their day/night sights, as well as relying on .50-caliber and 7.62-millimeter machine gun rounds to destroy drones at ranges of less than 500 meters. And, of course, developing lasers to do the job.
The Navy is working on lasers for ships, as well. The sailing service plans to deploy one aboard the transport ship USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf this year.
But ground-based lasers are trickier. Energy weapons require a lot of power, and you're relying on small vehicles instead of a huge warships to lug the weapon and power supply around. High altitudes also lower combustion pressures, which makes generators work less efficiently.
This has been an issue with another drone-tracking radar known as G/ATOR. The Marines developed the radar in part to track small drones, but its 60-kilowatt power supply began weakening at altitudes greater than 4,000 feet.
If the Marines want to zap drones in the mountains, it'll have to make some trade offs. You don't want a glorified flashlight, but a laser that is too powerful to work up high isn't much better.