Global Security Newswire

The U.S. Defense Department last week welcomed proposals from small companies for lasers intended to detect, track and destroy enemy missiles, Wired magazine reported yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 12).

The Pentagon already has some experience in work with antimissile lasers; its experimental Airborne Laser aircraft in a February exercise successfully destroyed a mock enemy ballistic missile for the first time. The Missile Defense Agency, though, called the chemical oxygen iodine laser “too large and expensive to field in large numbers on many operational airborne platforms.”

An alternative design incorporating a gas-phase iodine laser, a lighter device with fuel stored as a gas rather than a liquid, could be easier to handle while offering the same level of power as the megawatt-class ABL aircraft, the agency believes.

Solid-state, "electric" lasers currently offer orders of magnitude less power than their chemical counterparts, but the Pentagon's call for idea submissions said the "rechargeable and clean" device was "the laser of choice in the long term."

A fiber-optic laser, for example, "integrates well with other sensors and electro-optical elements in the aerospace environment," the document states. Use of such a laser mounted to a fighter jet-type aircraft could be feasible in battlefield environments, according to Wired.

The Air Force has been “exploring and developing several aircraft mounted high-energy laser (HEL) systems for precision strike and self-defense missions” (Olivia Koski, Wired, July 27).