Should the DoD Revive the Airborne Laser?

Surprised? Seems that the current budget is much more biased toward funding a fatally flawed ACORN than for defense spending or even NASA's budget.

Without deeper understanding of the defense department's plan it is hard to determine if the proposal really has merit, but development in the technology (and perhaps deployment) does have merit.

I expect there will come a time when we wish we had it.

Hi,

the problem of the decoys that may come in hundreds together with one warhead is not solved. These are lightweight baloons that are not subject to drag in the outer atmosphere.

So where to aim? (Any weapon, not only the laser)

At reentry with near 100 to 200 Km/minute there will not be much time to select the target, aim and hit. And there maybe more than one warhead in a shower of decoys.

It is much easier to multipy the number of attacking warheads than to give a sufficient protection.

This is different if any lightweight object is not possible: in the atmosphere.

To cover this situation the versions that are capable today to protect against attacking missiles are advanced "Patriot" style rockets or fast firing fast velocity guns that are automatically steered by advanced radar systems.

Maybe (I expect so) these or similar systems will do a much better and cheaper job.

RHABE

The idea of the ABL is to take out the missile in the boost phase before it gets above the atmosphere in the coast phase and releases multiple decoys. Obviously the ABL can't be everywhere, but if there was intelligence that a hostile country was planning a launch, a number of ABLs could be deployed to that location.

I think you are exactly right. During the boost phase you only have one target.

A valid scenario would be to station aircraft in the theater of operation in advance. If the plan is an offensive, the aircraft can simply orbit and counter any threat.

Defensive operations would work best on preplanning, like the current buildup of forces going on now to protect the Persian Gulf from a potential Iranian incursion, or Iranian retaliation.

Additional to surface launched missiles, ABL can easily counter enemy aircraft at great distances.

Once a target is acquired, unlike a missile, there really is no easy way to counter an ABL attack. It does not take long to test fire the atmospheric corrective laser, make adjustments for diffraction, and fire.

Yes, this system is designed to be used in the boost phase and thus does not have to worry about decoys, but it's precisely that this system works during the boost phase that this platform has a significant flaw. This system has to be deployed within a radius of the launch site at the time of launch. This means that we have to already have the intelligence that a launch will occur at some point in time and space in order to deploy this system before launch.

Then there's the added simple counter-counter measure of launching many missiles.

Lastly, I believe there's been a few theaters that long range missiles have been used in anger, WWII, Gulf War I and Gulf War II. (I don't think the US used Tomahawks in Afghanistan but it won't matter in my argument.) In all of these cases the relatively small number of imprecise missiles proved to be nothing more than a way to focus the civilians targeted on defeating the missile launcher. In contrast the large volume of highly precise Tomahawk cruise missiles the US used, quickly dismantled the Iraq infrastructure and "softened" the response capability of Iraq. While this weapon counter-measure system may have been effective against a few of the Scud missiles launched by Iraq, Iraq would not have found the few Tomahawks killed by this platform any more helpful than the few Tomahawks they were lucky to hit with anti-aircraft artillery.

We certainly should be proud that this formally science fiction technology has been done. But I'm afraid that until a more compact reusable, re-loadable energy source than the over one ton chemical source required by this platform can be found, this project should be mothballed.

GA AH. .....that's GAAH as in "Good Answer Anonymous Hero"....not GAAH as in "gaah! I just ran over the cat"

Very Good Points AH & a GA,

I did mistype by saying to moth ball this program, for I'm all for virtually any and all test bed programs. I still do not see this as a practical part in any system but rarely has any completely new technology or research been immediately obvious how it can be used.

As far as your last point though on an arms race being a good thing, that bothers me. I think you're putting way to much value in the United States military expenses being the cause of the Soviet Union's collapse. Also, some historians attribute the magnitude of the slaughter that happened during WW1 to the arms race that preceded it. So referencing just the immediately previous arms race scenario seems a little myopic. But you are correct that it does prove that an arms race is not necessarily a bad thing. But I feel that we recently had an two exceptions, one that went quite well and another quite the opposite.

My point being that weapons will never solve a dispute, they can only end a dispute.

I did say it goes both ways, but the Soviet Union, which was in economic tatters because of the huge sums of funding they poured into their military and not their private sector was the clear loser.

The 1st Gulf war was of great interest to the Soviet Union and when their defense systems used in Iraq failed so miserably it was clear to them that they had lost that arm's race and had suffocated their own economy trying to do so.

Alea iacta est (the die has been cast). It was a pivotal point that caused the regime to crumble. Of course that may turn out to be a temporary thing, but that is another story altogether.

"My point being that weapons will never solve a dispute, they can only end a dispute."

There is plenty of evidence that weapons have solved disputes. WW II comes to mind. Or they can prevent a dispute from even starting. Think of a well armed sheep.

Funny thing is I was originally tempted to use WWII as my proof that weapons will only end a conflict and not solve them. The military actions in both the European and Asian theaters did stop the aggression by the Axis powers. But had the Marshal plan not been instituted for Europe and instead a new treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany and Italy, many people were afraid that Europe would have erupted again. Without a post war reconstruction plan for Japan, the rebuilding of this country was much slower. Had the Korean Police action () not happened, the US may never have seen any interest in Japan strengthening. But in both theaters the political reasons for WWII were not solved by the weapons used.

Hi,

any attack will be accompanied by "diplomatic" actions to confuse the targets country.

Like Hitler did with Stalin.

So the system will be useless - or worse: counterproductive as absorbing a lot of money.

RHABE

Consider a wider picture as I attempted to paint in post number 8.

I would think 7 planes is a testbed. All you have to do after that is to find a way of mass producing them at lower cost and adding them to any aircraft that needs one. Maybe two per aircraft even!