Weeks ago, the Senate Armed Services Committee unexpectedly recommended terminating the Navy's experimental Free Electron Laser, the most powerful laser weapon the military has ever developed. When placed aboard a ship and it generates a megawatt's worth of power, the FEL, as it's known, will be able to burn through 20 feet of steel per second. It won't be ready for maybe a decade. The Senate thinks it's not worth the trouble. FEL has engineering difficulties, and generating the onboard power to fire the thing is a big challenge.
But the Navy wants it for a simple strategic reason: missiles have gotten way cheaper over the last decade and ships have gotten more expensive. Burning missiles out of the sky with lasers would be a gamechanger -- perhaps even "the end of the dominance of the missile," Adm. Gary Roughead, the Chief of Naval Operations, told me in May.
Now check out what my Danger Room colleague David Axe is reporting:
Beijing has a brutally simple — if risky — plan to compensate for this relative [military] weakness: buy missiles. And then, buy more of them. All kinds of missiles: short-range and long-range; land-based, air-launched and sea-launched; ballistic and cruise; guided and “dumb.”
Those are the two striking themes that emerge from Chinese Aerospace Power, a new collection of essays edited by Andrew Erickson, an influential China analyst with the U.S. Naval War College.
Today, the PLA possesses as many as 2,000 non-nuclear ballistic and cruise missiles, according to Chinese Aerospace Power. This “growing arsenal of increasingly accurate and lethal conventional ballistic and land-attack cruise missiles has rapidly emerged as a cornerstone of PLA warfighting capability,” Mark Stokes and Ian Easton wrote. For every category of weaponry where the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) lags behind the Pentagon, there’s a Chinese missile to help make up the difference.
A big-ass laser that burns missiles out of the sky is a cost-effective way of blunting that one asset, which would likely compel some strategic reconsiderations by the PLA. The Senate panel feels that it's better to channel the money from FEL into other Navy laser programs, and it's got a point: back in April, for the first time in history, a solid-state laser disabled an outboard motor on a watercraft through choppy seas and a distance of a mile.
But that should give confidence that the laser barons at the Office of Naval Research know what they're doing with FEL. Other lasers aren't as powerful: the new laser cannon/machine gun mashup does 10 kilowatts, which can give you a suntan. The PLA probably isn't sweating those.
He is a good friend that speaks well of us behind our backs.
Posted by: Belstaff leather | 01/16/2012 at 03:24 PM