It’s five years from now, and the next Moammar Gadhafi starts massacring his people. The United Nations approves another no-fly zone. The U.S. starts enforcing it with another round of missile attacks on the dictator’s air defenses. Only these don’t blow them off the face of the earth — they fry them instead.
That’s what Raytheon’s going to announce at the Paris Air Show on Tuesday. So-called directed energy warheads are the defense giant’s new initiative, reports David A. Fulgham at Ares, part of an effort to avoid civilian deaths while forcing the U.S. military’s way into places its adversaries don’t want it to operate.
Imagine a Tomahawk missile tipped with a warhead that can “analyze targets and then tailor a beam of radio frequency or high power microwaves to upset or even electronically destroy systems dependent on electronics,” Fulgham reports. Or put a smaller version onto a missile fired from a plane. Command bunkers, intelligence hubs and communications centers? Fried, fried and deep fried.
The Air Force has been testing out the impact of microwaves on its computer networks as a way to figure out how to fry the other guy’s. It’s not had much luck strapping microwave weapons onto drones, but that’s definitely a goal for the service, as is a missile that would fry all electronics in a given radius. And Raytheon rival BAE is even building a microwave gun for ships.
Raytheon’s effort hasn’t been unveiled yet, but it sounds like a bigger, more targeted version of these tentative efforts. That is, if anyone buys it.
The Senate just sent a big signal on Friday to the Navy’s directed energy program: get your costs under control. A key panel recommended the outright cancellation of its premier laser program, the Free Electron Laser, due to its high “technical risk.” Tough budgetary times do not favor experimental directed energy weapons. At his Senate confirmation hearing, future Secretary of Defense Leon Pannetta eagerly asserted that the Pentagon can’t tolerate massive cost overruns from its contractors anymore.
Still, Raytheon appears to be undeterred. Fulgham reports the company wants to place directed energy weapons on Navy planes from the Growler jamming fleet to the carrier-launched X-47B killer drone.
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