Laser Shoots Down Artillery Shell In Flight

An anonymous reader writes "The Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser is a joint project between the US Army and the Israeli Defense Ministry, with much of the work being done by TRW. Tuesday they had a spectacular success when they shot an artillery shell out of the air."

Comments

Isn't this old news?

[Slashdotess]

Didn't they have this back in the 60's? correct me if I'm wrong, I was always told this.

Re:Isn't this old news?

[Wyatt Earp]

Soviets and Russians have used lasers to dazzle American and Canadian pilots, including those involved in fishery patrols.

Re:Isn't this old news?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason to put lasers in space was to target ICBMs during the "boost" phase of operation, i.e. before they (literally) go ballistic.

The main reason is that, once a missile has gone ballistic and is accerated mainly by gravity, you might as well have it release several warheads and decoys that can be targeted independently (this is called "MIRV"). The Soviets and the Americans implemented this in their missiles a while ago.

So the idea is to target thousands of ICBMs instead of tends or hundreds of thousands of individual warheads.

The problem is that, during the boost phase, the missiles would not be in line-of-sight from the US. So there were schemes such as "pop-up defense" (in which defense systems are launched upwards on rockets from submarines so that they are hopefully in line-of-sight of Soviet ICBMs).

The most famous and ambitious of these schemes was the space-based laser idea that you mention.

Since these lasers have to punch down almost all the way through the atmosphere to destroy an ICBM during boost phase, they actually have to be much more powerful than any laser so far constructed.

But there was a very brilliant, and actually somewhat plausible, idea for accomplishing this: the nuclear bomb pumped X-ray laser.

I mean, wow. What a wild idea.

More details please

[A5un]

Reading through the article doesn't give much info about details such as:
How much does one unit cost?
How long is the "reload"/"re-aiming" time?
Will it survive real heavy artillery battle?

Re:More details please

[Docrates]

You seem to be ruling out the possibility of a US vs. North Korea or a US vs. China war. 10 years before Gulf War I noone was thinking about it, but the military was preparing for it nonetheless. When you have a huge war in your hands is NOT the time to star figuring out which weapons would be useful.

Re:More details please

[Wyatt Earp]

It does, if it's possible to achive. Which hasn't happened for the Russians since 1945 and hasn't happened for the Chinese since the winter of 1950-51.

It won't happen anywhere in the world, unless you are talking about battlefield missiles and China pointing them at Taiwan, which I'm not.

No one outside of the Chinese are going to have 300 howitzers, but for shits and grins lets say they do.

Soviet Doctrine is to line them up wheel to wheel in a phase-line that's been surveyed and to toss round after round at the Yankee pigs while T-72s and T-80s roll across in an advancing line.

Sounds swell, but it won't work.

In the 1970s the US Army in Europe came up with Air-Land Battle which was designed to counter this plan.

You take some Apache and Kiowa Warriors (soon RAH-66s) and swoop in Hellfiring the crap out of the tanks, then you zap some of the supporting infantry and softer AAA and mobile SAMs with Hydra-70 rockets while the A-10s Maverick the advancing line and F-16s throw HARMs at the AAA and SAMs dumb enough to light up thier radars.

As soon as the D-30s open up, it's go time, the M-109s counter battery fire and scoot before the first rounds impact, then without a surveyed position form up and counter battery fire more while the MLRS's throw some bomblet love in the direction of the Red Arty.

In 10 minutes 70% of the static Soviet Doctrine guns are foil.

Most conventional USSR units were NOT nuclear armed, tactical nuclear weapons were closely controled by the Communist Party and the Red Army.

I'm not talking about blind-faith, Iraq was a very viable opponent on Jan 14 1991, but they made grave tactical mistakes, driven from the Soviet, Chinese and East German advisors and thier own experiance in dealing with American equipment in the Iran-Iraq War.

Air-Land battle, with combined arms operations and movement destroyed Soviet Doctrine formations, units and hardware.

Soviet Doctrine calls for close management from a higher headquarters, when that is cut off, the army withers and dies. Soviet Doctrine and equipment does not allow for mobile combat formations that can move quickly, the US/NATO doctrine does.

M-1A2, M-2, AH-64, H-56, A-10, F-16, M-109, MLRS, MAV, M-60A3, M-113A3, F-117 and F-15E are all desgined/upgraded to exploit faults in Soviet Doctrine as illustrated in Korea, the Golan, Sinai, Inter-Germany observations and Iraq.

The only nation-state that could give the US a run for the money is Communist China. Russia could at a nuclear level, but not a conventional level.

Israel would be a tougher nut to crack than the EU.

Re:More details please

[athmanb]

This is a nice theory, but you should remember Murphy's rule of combat "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy".

All military commanders have nice thought out plans how they are going to wipe the enemy without a single loss to their troops, but when it comes down to reality, people start to realize that the enemy also has exactly these plans.

Such well thought out scenarios like you paint there only happen in war games when the OpFor is playing especially nice and lets the four star general win to not endanger their military career (unlike this)

In actual combat, you can count on being taken by surprised by some enemy action and having to reform your plans on the go or lose.

What happens if you miss?

[immanis]

Where does the laser go if they miss the shell? Disperse into a cloud? Hit a passing 747? Birdstrike? Internation Space Station? Mars? Passing alien ship?

Sounds to me like an easy way to make a lot of enemies.

Where does the momentum go?

[TimFreeman]

If you start with, say, 20 lbs of supersonic projectile, and then you zap it with a laser, you still have 20 lbs of something moving with about the same average velocity as before.

Thus, if you want to protect the target, you either have to vaporise the entire projectile so the momentum is dispelled by the air, or maybe it's an explosive shell and the laser persuaded it to explode (which is another way of vaporising it, I suppose).

Breaking it in two or poking a hole in it wouldn't be sufficient.

Does anyone know exactly what they meant by the laser "destroying" the projectile?

Re:Where does the momentum go?

[afidel]

hehe, you just pointed out one of the biggest benifits of this type of antiprojectile system. If they work and are fast enough you can explode the ordinance over the enemies own lines. If the enemy is using nasty stuff like biological, chemical, or nuclear arms you've just doubled the effectiveness of your defense by making it an offense.

Re:Where does the momentum go?

[mce]

You're missing 2 points:

• The explosive bit.
• Even if you just succeed in breaking the shell into pieces and due to some magic it does not explode, the pieces will not end up at the original target as designed. First of all, their trajectories and speeds will diverge. Next, shells are designed to do their nasty job in very specific ways (they have care- and purposefully designed geometries, windscreens, armour piercing caps, fuze delays, ...). If these things do not arrive as intended, their effect will be greatly reduced and sometimes even nullified. Hell, even a 1 degree change in impact obliquity can make the difference between piercing an armoured plate or bouncing off (for otherwise identical and intact shells).

Wonder if this was a gimmee

[afidel]

like the ones used to pass the first generation patriot missle system. The gen 1 patriots were so bad that final analysis showed that in one test the patriot missed the mark only to have the target slam into it, thus causing both to break up. In the official scoring this was marked as a hit and win for the patriot sytem even though it was a random fluke. Unless someone not affiliated with the military or the defense contractor verifies the results I shall remain skepticle until field use proves the system.

Re:Israel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the Israli terrorists and their suicide bombs... You know, those suicide bombings are done in the same studio as the fake moon landing.

Re:Shells easier to hit than rockets

[puppetman]

Really?

I would think that a shell starts with an initial velocity, and slows down due to air resistance and gravity as it arcs upwards.

As it begins it's decent, itmay speed up with gravity, or slow down even more, depending on the air-resistence. If it slows down, it will slow down slower (if that makes sense).

Second, a shell goes much faster than a rocket. If the aim is off by just a little, a rocket might not have moved that much. A shell would probably be long gone.

Third, I believe shells are smaller than rockets. Smaller target requires more accuracy.

Ergo, a shell *IS* harder to hit than a rocket.

The future is coming

[NewtonsLaw]

Gosh, it looks as if all those old sci-fi books really were a glimpse of the future.

Now if this prediction made in the 1969 edition of Popular Mechanics would just come true:

"Future watches won't just be for keeping time either. Wlatham engineers forsee this exciting possibility: Wristwatches in the year 2000 will be used for more than time measurement. They will be total communication centers, containing devices not only for accurate timing but also for voice and vision communication; and simple recording -- they'll even contain simple miniaturized computers"

Wow -- imagine that, a miniaturized computer in your wristwatch -- nah, it could never happen!

But a Dick-Tracy wristwatch communicator, yeah, that'll work :-)

Re:Israel?

[charlesbakerharris]

Puh-lease. Like Israel is running out of stuff to shoot at people. This doesn't increase anybody's ability to harm anyone else - it's a defensive capability. We have 2000-lb bombs that land within a few feet of whatever we feel like. We have machine guns, artillery, and RPGs. So does Israel. This is a defensive machine - it doesn't significantly upgrade anyone's ability to kill someone over what already exists. If it saves our lives on the battlefield, more power to them. What I really want to know is how often it can change targets and fire - that's the difference between stopping an artillery barrage or just a handful of rockets. Your post was off-topic and irrelevant, and I hope it gets modded appropriately. Besides, even if you were on topic, if you're claiming the Palestinians are somehow without culpability and that Israel is the only wrongdoer, or even significantly worse than their adversary, you're insane, ill-informed, unbalanced, or any combination thereof. I pray that in spite of short-sighted fools who preach what they don't really understand, there may someday be world peace. Also, I pray that people stop using names of their ex-significant-others as their handles.

Mirror coating?

[Quixote]

What if the shell had a very glossy finish (like a mirror or something). Would the laser still have the same impact (no pun intended)? I'm just curious.

Re:Shells easier to hit than rockets

[Syncdata]

It's one thing to shoot down a shell when you know it's path ahead of time, another entirely to get a fix on an unknown, erratic rocket and destroy it.
Actually, that depends on how you look at it. A rocket, while certainly being much harder to target and track with the laser, is still holding volatile propellent, which the artillery shell would lack. The artillery shell would also have a thicker casing then a missile. This makes me wonder the same thing as another poster, what they mean when they say the shell was "Destroyed". Still, it is interesting to see lasers coming into use in the military, for purposes other than just targeting things.

Re:Shells easier to hit than rockets

[pclminion]

You might be right, but it's a freaking hard problem in any case.

There's a simple formula for calculating how far you will miss by if the laser is misaligned: e = d tan t where t is the angle of misalignment and d is the distance from the laser to the target. Disclaimer: this formula is only accurate for extremely small angles, but those are the kind we're dealing with here.

Say, for example, you're shooting at a missile that's 1500 meters away, and you are misaligned by 15 arc minutes (0.25 degrees). The laser will miss the rocket by 6.5 meters, according to the formula. That's a significant error.

Not only do you have the difficulty of tracking the rocket to within sub-meter accuracy, you also have the problem of keeping the laser in constant alignment to extremely low tolerances, for a long enough period of time to actually destroy the target.

This accomplishment is no laughing matter!

Great!

[Rogerborg]

Now, all we need to do is to find an enemy to use it against.

If we don't know where the shells are coming from, what's the chances that this system will be able to realistically identify a genuine incoming round, activate (from idle) and reliably shoot it down in time? We're not getting the first couple of rounds, and after that, our existing counterbattery systems will be silencing the enemy artillery.

If we do know where they're coming from (and we damn well should, given what we spend on reccetech), then why aren't we pasting them with our existing overwhelming air superiority and artillery?

So what's the theatre? Where are these systems going to be deployed?

One in the White House, one in the Pentagon... where else? Whatever we build on the WTC site? But do we reckon that any grunts are going to get the benefit of it? Hmmm.

It's neato technology, but it seems like a solution to a problem that the US has spent trillions to ensure that it doesn't have any more.

Re:Read the test plan...

[afidel]

This wasn't some conspiracy BS, this was from an operator of first gen patriot system who was present at the tests and couldn't believe it was passed. He then had to field what he believed to be a substandard system. For him it just drove home the line "remember that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder". I have no problem with ABM or field defense systems, in fact I love the ABL program as it is probably the coolest use of high tech I have ever seen. I just know that it is a hard problem to track and target a missle, let alone a munition.

Re:Yay!

[Frank of Earth]

So, lets review. 'Predator' unmanned aircraft armed with Hellfire missles for patrol and attacks, lasers to shoot down artillery (and you know bullets are coming soon), Star Wars V2 to protect us from missiles, and any country that tries to develop anything we don't like gets a "regime change".


Hrm.. well we [Americans] have to get something out of our tax dollars. It sure made my day when CNN reported they were able to identify the target of the hellfire by the leg fragment they found by the blast site.

Begging to violate the Geneva Convention

[ProfessorPuke]

Most nations have signed the Geneva Convention to regulate the conduct of war- amoung other things, this means that you can only attack people with weapons meant to kill them, but not infect, poison, or maim.

(A gentleman's agreement between the respective military-industrial-complexes, really. Dead soldier -> proud military funeral -> enhanced militarism and anticipation of future retaliation. Wounded soldier -> disabled veteran begging on sidewalk -> budget pressure for providing care, and public squeamishness about enrolling in future conflicts. Too much peace hurts our economic growth!)

This means no chemical weapons (tell that to Russia!), no hollowpoint or fragmentary bullets, few shotguns, and no lasers aimed at people. Because the easiest ways to hurt someone with a laser is to burn his eyes out, this is consistent with Geneva.

But, today's new, powerful anti-munition lasers will be an attractive option in the anti-aircraft role as well. Military planners must be thinking of this, but they don't want to talk about it for fear of striking taboo/war-crimes territory.

But I wonder what'll happen if a laser-defense battery suddenly finds themselves face to face with an enemy Hind who snuck up terrain-masked. Will they run for it and hope he's a slow shot, or light it up and watch the fireworks?

And, if the the ABL gets built and we get another hijacker repurposing an airliner into a weapon, the president will be hard pressed not to order him zapped, too.

(Of course, another reason planners might not talk much about targeting aircraft with lasers is that the US and Israel have no potential opponents whose aircraft can't be simply destroyed with Beyond-Visual-Range missiles. Won't stop me from speculating.)

One thing to ponder....

[Rib Feast]

With all these laser developments one article I recall reading a good year ago (possibly New Scientist) was the fact these extremely high energy lasers have the ability to blind. Now typically one assumes you need to be exposed in the line of sight, but in the case of many of these military grade lasers the sheer reflection (that you would hardly notice) from an unassuming object (such as a car hood) can render all those in sight of the car (military and civilian) completely blind.

What I am wondering is the implications and serious research since then that makes these lasers suddenly OK, especially given the force that the Geneva convention brings when it comes to blinding your opponent.

Could the next thing boon in war be forgoing shooting artillery shells and moving into showering a known occupied area with blinding lasers?

I know how hard in Counter-Strike it is to shoot while flashed..

Re:Read the test plan...

[ProfessorPuke]

It'll be a long time before the R&D cost of the defensive missile is absorbed, so they'll be much more costly for a long time. In the long run the price goes down, but its still a precision instrument (with serious maintenance and C4I infrastructure needs) in comparison to a dummy ICBM which only needs to hit the right continent. And labor is cheaper in some of these hostile-states.

Each defensive rocket will have at best Probabilty-Kill 90%, so you'll want to use more than one per incoming agressor. If the attacker is a manuverable cruise missle and not just ballistic, you'll want more. (Submarine-launched cruise missles are really a whole different problem than ICBM interception. And a harder one). Or if there's a MIRV, then that's another multiplier on the target count.

The cost advantage of the defense missiles is that they have less distance to travel, and need less metal and fuel. I can't say for sure how much that'll reduce the overall cost, though. And you'll want protectors to engage at the longest range you can (so that if one fails, you have time to fire more). The price war is no slam dunk.

Remember the Missile Commmand game? It wasn't much fun, you could never win...

More likely than wanting to really be able to neutralize an aresnal the size of Russia's, we'd just want 50 missiles on each coast that could go forth in groups of 5 against "rogue madman" warheads.

Space Shuttle thermal tiles?

[resonance]

Ok, I know the mirror thing won't work for defense against lasers, but how about the thermal tiles they use on the space shuttle? Those little buggers are so very not thermally conductive, wouldn't they make an effective shield against a laser weapon?

Granted, several inches of thermal tiles may not be practical on an artillery warhead, but certainly would be on tanks and the like.

Re:Laser=coherent

[MoThugz]

What do you expect? The Americans are blinded by the world's perception towards them... To them, there is no democracy other than American-style democracy... and that the only people who hates them are terrorists (read Arabs/Moslems).

Why understand when you can just force things unto others? We are great! We are Americans! Tremble before our might!

And don't hope for too much support from Americentric Slashdotters too. :)

Re:Laser=coherent

[cyril3]

The Romans. They gave judea roads and aqueducts and education and all sorts of other stuff.

or so admits the Peoples Popular Front for the Liberation of Judea (Trotskyist Faction)

Re:So what happens...

[kungfuBreaks]

And that's exactly why most innovative music these days is produced in the US. Labels such as Basic Channel, Compost, Ninja Tune, Moving Shadow, Mo' Wax, Hardleaders, Pork and Warp are all based in ...uh...hold on a minute...nevermind. I hope you were kidding, and I feel truly sorry for you if you weren't. And yes, the music scene in Israel is in fact more akin to the European one. Wait, was that supposed to be an insult? Oh dear.

Re:Shells easier to hit than rockets

[Jace of Fuse!]

And there are nuclear power plants to drive them.

This is a chemically-pumped laser.

I was going to mention that myself, but I'll add nearly any laser capable of really doing some serious damage to large objects from a distance ARE going to burn up some kind of chemical.

MIRACL comes to mind. (Look it up at Google.)

Re:So what happens...

[JimPooley]

A couple of years ago Israel won the Eurovision Song Contest. Their entrant was the transexual Dana International, and her victory really pissed off all the orthodox hard-core who would rather see people like that put to death.

I thought her victory representing her country was A Good Thing, purely because it pissed off the fundies!

The song was shit, of course, but then all Eurovision songs are.