Warfare at the speed of light
By Ian Hoffman
DOWN THIS tiled corridor, light does muscular, noisy work. Lasers dig dirt and weld metal. They pound aircraft parts into shape. In Bob Yamamoto’s lab, light devours.
He straps on emerald green goggles. A technician stabs a fire button and calls out the computer countdown. “Three … two … one …”
Then … nothing. Just a buzz of electronics and an ephemeral glow in this darkened room at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. But inside Yamamato’s target chamber, a block of steel spits flame and molten metal.
In those two seconds, 400 blasts of light poured into slabs of clear, manmade garnet. Swollen in energy, the crystal’s atoms then unleashed torrents of infrared light to ricochet 1,000 times between two mirrors and multiply, finally escaping as 400 pulses of pure, square beam.
Kilowatt for kilogram, this is the world’s most powerful solid-state laser. Its invisible beam drilled Yamamoto’s inch-thick steel plate in two seconds. Add larger crystals and it will eat steel a mile or more away.
“What we’re building,” Yamamoto explains, “is a laser weapon.”
After sinking 40 years and billions of dollars into beam weapons, defense scientists are on the cusp of what could be a military revolution — warfare at the speed of light.
“We’ve made a quantum leap here,” said Randy Buff, solid-state laser program manager for the U.S. Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command. “We’re anxious to get out there and do something.”
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Are military computers and commanders ready for entirely automated weapons that deliver instant, lethal blasts of energy and can be retargeted in seconds? Lasers under testing for air defense already offer that capability. Fully automated firing on offensive targets is a short step behind.
“When you develop the capability to track, target and destroy something in a second, then the temptation to remove humans from the decision cycle becomes very great,” said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based defense think tank.
Will U.S. forces fire lasers on humans? International treaty forbids the use of lasers for blinding people. But there is no legal ban on striking humans. U.S. Special Operations Command wants to load a medium-power laser alongside artillery and miniguns on a future version of the AC-130 gunships that since Vietnam have been a mainstay of special forces attacks on ground targets. The laser’s power could blow tires and ignite gas tanks, but wouldn’t be lethal for tanks or armored vehicles.
“It would be a very long-range, ultra-accurate sniper rifle,” suggests John Pike, a weapons expert and director of GlobalSecurity.org.
The likely targets, Thompson said, “would be some sort of lighter vehicle or combustible structures or it could be people. Remember we’re talking about a system that can be instantenously retargetable.”
Will the payoff of battle lasers sufficiently outweigh their huge drawback — loss of power and range in bad weather, fog, dust and smoke — that the U.S. military will shift toward fair-weather operations?
Is the United States willing to defend or attack satellites with lasers? The Air Force’s Airborne Laser is to start test-firing against missiles in 2004. But the longer range of its laser in the thinner, upper atmosphere brings space vehicles within targeting.
How will other nations respond? Experts believe the United States could enjoy a near monopoly on battle lasers for years. But under what circumstances will it justify their use in the face of likely international opposition?
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October 24, 2003 at 4:10 pm