USA har kommet langt med Lyn Gordon stråler

Airborne Directed Energy Technology Maturing in the U.S.

AIN DEFENSE PERSPECTIVE » OCTOBER 3, 2014

by  CHRIS POCOCK

Groundcrew check the fit of the Boeing Champ high-power microwave (HPM) payload on a B-52 bomber before a test flight of the directed-energy weapon. (Photo: AFRL)

October 2, 2014, 1:49 PM

The U.S. Air Force is ready to “weaponize” and quickly field directed-energy technology, following two recent successful high-power microwave (HPM) demonstration programs. Progress is also being made with solid-state high-energy lasers (HELs). Directed Energy was one of three “game-changing” technologies discussed by Maj Gen Tom Masiello, the commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), at the recent Air Force Association Conference in Washington, D.C. The others were hypersonics and autonomy.

Masiello showed video from flight-tests of the Boeing counter-electronics, high-powered microwave, advanced-missile project (Champ) on the Utah test range. He revealed that the Champ platform is a modified Boeing AGM-86 air-launched cruise missile (ALCM), launched from a B-52. It first flew in 2011, but Boeing revealed little detail of the project then. Flights evidently continued through Fiscal Year 2013, when the modified ALCM was successfully flown against two targets: an unhardened office building and a hardened chemical/biological weapons (CBW) facility. “The computers in the office building went blank, and an electrical generator was disabled on the first pass,” Masiello reported. The HPM weapon “would also have destroyed whatever batch of CBW was being manufactured in the [hardened] facility,” he added.