The Office of Naval Research has finished awarding contracts for its Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-the-Move (GBAD) laser weapon and has already begun demonstrations with surrogate parts, ONR program manager Lee Mastroianni said last week in an interview.
The program, by necessity, is being conducted in stages. GBAD will eventually go atop a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, which is still in production. And it will use the Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar to find and track targets, but G/ATOR is in low-rate initial production and is not available for a future naval capability demonstration. The solid-state laser, too, is being matured now in the High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office’s Robust Electric Laser Initiative.
But as a group of seven contractors work to mature the laser, beam director, cooling system and more, an early demonstration has proven the concept quite promising.
In April, Naval Surface Warfare Center-Dahlgren – the lead systems integrator – conducted a sensor-to-shooter demonstration with the three-truck system: one Humvee had a commercial off-the-shelf radar in lieu of G/ATOR, one had a command and control system, and the other had an electro-optical/infrared ball to find the target in lieu of the laser to shoot it. The demonstration yielded a lot of data to smooth out some algorithms and to help guide the process of designing an appropriate user interface. Overall, the demonstration was meant to “buy down the risk for all the other pieces while we wait for the laser to come online.”
The ONR program office has already conducted one warfighter workshop with Marines and has another scheduled for next week to further refine the user interface – to include how targets should be identified on the screen, what kinds of buttons are conducive based on the Marines’ gloves and other gear, and more. The program office is also working closely with the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command, which is doing similar user interface research for its High Energy Laser – Mobile Demonstrator (HEL-MD) program.
“We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel,” Mastroianni said. “Marines like to do things their own way, so we may be doing some tweaks, but by in large, this program, I’m willing to take help wherever I can get it. I got free vehicles with onboard vehicle power, those were donated to us. The EO/IR ball was donated to us. Things like that. Marines do everything on the cheap, we’re no different.”
He said his program and HEL-MD can leverage each other’s work in a lot of ways, but the two ultimately have very different mission sets. HEL-MD is a large, powerful system meant to protect forward operating bases from barrages of missiles and mortars. GBAD, however, is meant to be mobile enough to plug into a JLTV and travel around with Marines to ward off enemy drones trying to track or attack ground troops.
“That’s not to say that as power levels and laser technologies improve that I can’t get better and better on my small system and they’ll get smaller and smaller on their system and somewhere in the middle we might meet,” he said. “That’s kind of my vision of where it will eventually go as the technologies all improve. But right now there is a distinct difference in what the programs are doing, and some of it’s service-driven and some of it’s target set-driven.”
Interest in this particular energy weapon was high. The program office received more than 100 white papers after putting out a broad area statement last spring, Mastroianni said. He requested proposals from two or three companies per technology area, and ultimately he awarded seven contracts.
Raytheon [RTN] won a contract worth up to $10.8 million to design, build and integrate the laser. L-3 [LLL] won a contract worth up to $6 million to design, build and test the laser beam director. Navitas Advanced Solutions Group won a $399,000 contract for the pulsed-power battery pack; Advanced Cooling Technologies won a $1.2 million contract for the cooling system; Saze Technologies won a $2.2 million contract for a multi-mission hemispheric radar system to mount on the vehicles; Equinox Corp. won a $1 million contract to adapt its image-based tracking algorithms to a miniaturized, ruggedized platform; and Leidos Incorporated [LDOS] won a $1.1 million contract modification to deliver four Quality of Service-enhanced Broadband Meshable Data Link radios.
“The way we’re approaching the laser platform is, it’s modular in nature,” Matroianni said. Using the drop-in Humvee shelter as the pallet for the laser, “the whole thing will just drop in, plug into the onboard vehicle power, plug into a computer that we mount into the crew compartment, and you’re off and running.”
In addition to leveraging the work done by the High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office, Mastroianni said he benefited greatly from advances in onboard power systems.
Onboard power “is a game-changer in the sense that right now you’re dealing with what you can get off an alternator, which is like 600 watts, maybe 1000 watts if you really bump that sucker up,” he explained. “But all these systems, especially if you start using directed energy in the future, need a lot more power on the battlefield. Or it can be a generator to power a command operations center or whatever else, and plug it into that—instead of lugging around a generator, the vehicle can become a generator.”
Power and cooling are the major technology challenges as the program office aims to balance size and power, Mastroianni said, while adding the demonstrations so far looked promising.
The next major demonstration, set for next April or May, will use a 10 kw surrogate laser to test the full kill chain for the first time outside of a lab. As the subsystems are completed, they will be integrated into the system, and demonstrations with the final components and 30 kw laser would take place in fiscal years 2016 and 2017 against increasingly tougher targets.