Taking down an enemy’s air defenses — his radars, missile launchers and command centers — is a prerequisite for large-scale air campaigns. Today, jet fighters packing radar-seeking missiles do the heavy-lifting in the so-called “Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses” mission. In the future, that dangerous task might fall on stealthy drones armed with electronics-frying microwave weapons.
That is, if the Air Force can ever get the combination to work. The drones are coming along just fine. The microwave weapons … not so much.
After years of research costing tens of millions of dollars, the Pentagon doesn’t seem to be any closer to a working “e-bomb,” “e-missile” or “e-ray.” This class of weapon has “seemingly intractable cost, size, beam-control and power-generation requirements,” according to Aviation Week. But with bad guys’ air defenses getting more lethal by the year, the Air Force isn’t giving up.
In what appears to be at least the fifth Pentagon e-munition push in recent years, last week the Air Forceawarded Lockheed Martin a $230,000 contract for microwave-weapon concept development, aiming to begin defining a “high-power microwave energy weapon” that would “destroy electronic equipment without endangering personnel.”
Some previous efforts tried packing a microwave emitter into a bomb or missile. The latest try seems to emphasize a beam weapon. “The contract also involves the development of … a concept of packaging the high-power microwave source system into an aerial platform,” according to Lockheed. The company has until next year to study the idea.
For starters, the platform could be Lockheed’s mysterious RQ-170 stealth drone, pictured. According to Bill Sweetman at Ares, the Air Force might already have tapped the recently-unveiled RQ-170 for defense-suppression missions using “electronic attack” systems. Unless the Pentagon has some other radar-frying ray weapon up its sleeve — and it just might — that means microwaves. Further along, the future MQ-X drone could take on the defense-suppression mission, armed with the same e-weapons.
In any case, don’t hold your breath. Those old cost, size, control and power issues facing microwave munitions are probably still pretty daunting. For now, RQ-170s will probably have to rely on other weapons to suppress the enemy’s defenses. If the Air Force’s latest e-weapon push works, a microwave ray might be ready for action around the time the MQ-X enters service in the 2020s.
Posts
