Concerns about the military’s waning technological dominance have fueled a $200 million boost to directed energy research in the Senate Armed Service Committee’s (SASC) defense authorization bill.
The committee’s version of the fiscal year 2016 bill contains $400 million for a new initiative meant to propel the creation of technologies that would help the military services retain their edge. Half of that sum would fund efforts to develop directed energy technologies, such as lasers capable of taking down small unmanned aerial systems and boats.
“The provision would establish a program to accelerate the fielding of offset technologies, including, but not limited to, directed energy, low-cost high-speed munitions, autonomous systems, undersea warfare, cyber technology and intelligence data analytics,” said SASC’s conference report released this week. 
The Pentagon is facing an innovation gap. “U.S. adversaries have been rapidly improving their own military capabilities to counter our unique advantages,” the report said, and military officials often have lamented that those threats sometimes cost a fraction of what the United States spends to deter them. Directed energy weapons could potentially reverse that trend, with technologies like lasers costing only pennies per shot.
The Defense Department has invested more than $6 billion in directed energy R&D since 1960, but SASC members are concerned that might not be enough to ensure that projects transfer from the laboratory to the battlefield.
The military has made strides in this area, the committee noted, such as the Air Force’s development of electromagnetic weapons. The Navy has deployed a prototype 30-kilowatt laser on the USS Ponce and plans to build a larger 100-150 kilowatt laser for more widespread operational use. The sea service also recently announced plans to test its electromagnetic rail gun—which uses bursts of energy to hurl projectiles at high speeds—on the USNS Trenton next summer.
However, services’ efforts to field directed energy tech are disaggregated, and “there is no inter-service entity dedicated to advancing promising directed energy platforms beyond the development point towards acquisition,” the committee stated in the report.
To ensure the Pentagon is developing the right technologies at a quick pace, SASC directed it to create a directed energy strategy that would be refreshed every two years. It also put Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in charge of creating new practices that would accelerate the fielding of offset technologies.
The Senate committee’s effort mirrors several recent Pentagon initiatives. Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work is at the helm of a “third offset strategy” that would identify the technologies the military needs most to retain its edge, and the department’s acquisition chief Frank Kendall has made U.S. technological superiority the bedrock of his Better Buying Power 3.0 initiative (Defense Daily April 10).
Elsewhere in the authorization bill, SASC added $20 million to the Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) $30.3 million directed energy R&D request, which would speed up development of a prototype fiber combining laser that could be installed on unmanned aerial vehicles. MDA is working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create a suite of lasers for high-altitude, long-endurance UAVs that could be used to blast cruise and ballistic missiles out of the sky, a prospect that the Senate sees a promising and low-cost way to deal with missile threats.
SASC also included $115 million for directed energy applied research and $67 million for directed energy research, development, testing and evaluation. Those figures reflect the full amount requested in the president’s budget.
The committee’s recommendations may not ultimately end up in the 2016 budget. Senate and House appropriators and authorizers will have to agree on a final bill, which must then be signed into law by President Barack Obama. The Senate Appropriations Committee has not yet released its version of the budget, but House bills do not contain a separate fund for technology offsets.