HUNTSVILLE, Ala.—Lasers and high-powered microwaves will need equal standing to traditional weapons when it comes to the Army’s approach to missile defense, the service’s space and missile-defense chief said. But as battlefield tech is developed and integrated, proper training will be key to keeping soldiers safe.
“Integrating systems like lasers or high-powered microwaves, there’s a pretty significant burden of implementing that across training and organizations,” Lt. Gen. John Rafferty, who leads Army Space and Missile Defense Command, told reporters Tuesday at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium.
Rafferty’s top enlisted advisor concurred.
“I know everyone’s talking about faster, cheaper—all those things are needed. But what’s most important is our soldiers need to be trained on it,” Command Sgt. Maj. Rickey Jackson told reporters Tuesday. “We don’t want to assume too much risk in that, because the soldiers are the ones that are going to have to use it and implement it. So I look forward to the rest of this week and hearing from industry and how we can do that, because ultimately our soldiers need it.”
In his keynote, Rafferty said air-defense strategy should balance the use of missiles, which can reach beyond line of sight, and energy weapons, which can be cheaper per round and used for closer ranges.
“We need a more comprehensive missile defeat strategy that focuses on interceptors—equally so on non-kinetic effects, both electronic warfare and directed energy—and the type of targeting [command and control],” on top of the ability to move sensitive data to lower classification levels “and make decisions to engage targets faster,” he said.
After decades of touting directed energy as a weapon of the future, the Pentagon may at last be on the verge of realizing its vision. Nascent programs such as the Army-Navy Joint Laser Weapon System and the Army’s Enduring High Energy Laser, as well as operational systems such as the Navy’s HELIOS drone-dazzler, suggest that directed-energy weapons may soon go mainstream.
The Army tested non-kinetic weapons during a recent test at White Sands. They synced C2 systems to get a clear picture of the battlefield and help soldiers pick the right weapon for the incoming threat, Rafferty said.
“The individual systems worked, right, because they’re all systems that exist right now. That wasn’t the trick. The trick was integrating them into a command-and-control system to make sense of and then assign effectors against those against those targets. So that, in a nutshell, is a sort of combined-arms approach to missile defeat or or a comprehensive missile-defeat strategy,” Rafferty told reporters.
“I’m not surprised that we could do it, I’m just thrilled that we actually did it, that we decided to integrate multiple C2 systems and figure out how to enable our soldiers to defeat complex threats.”
The Army has leaned forward on adding lasers to its armory through a directed energy program.
But ultimately, the concern isn’t about the Army’s ability to integrate new tech and weapons systems into its operations—it’s training.
“Clearly, there are technical challenges to integrating platforms into command-and-control systems and planning software that helps us to integrate the effects at the right place and time,” Rafferty said. “But in terms of our Army being well-equipped and agile enough to do this, I’m 100-percent confident.”
The challenge comes in making sure there’s an adequate power source, in “maneuvering and supporting” the system, he said.
“It’s not about the laser anymore. It’s really about putting it together, packaging it, making it ruggedized, and coming up with the doctrine and the techniques…the sustainment that needs to be done to go from a high-end technological capability to a no-kidding weapons system that’s able to be…usable by 20-year-old sergeants,” Tom Karako, a missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Fox News in a recent interview.
That also means the systems have to work in bad weather and austere conditions, and be repairable in the field, he said.
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