Fireflies Plague BMD Laser

Fireflies Plague BMD Laser

Fireflies Plague BMD Laser

The airborne laser, or ABL, was in many respects the most visionary and cutting edge of all the major programs being developed by the Missile Defense Agency to create an eventual multi-layered missile defense system for the continental United States against thermonuclear inter-ballistic missile attack from any so-called "rogue' state.

by Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst

Washington DC (UPI) Feb 19, 2006

The Bush administration's ambitious multi-billion-dollar Airborne Laser program, considered the Pentagon's best chance to develop a weapon to defeat ballistic missiles in their early boost phase of flight, has hit hard times.

It is beset by long-term delays, major technical problems and even though it is many years from deployment, Russia has already developed an advanced missile that may be almost impervious to it.

For at least the next two years, the laser program is being relegated to a technology demonstration status while a planned five-aircraft purchase by the Air Force is put on hold due to questions surrounding ABL's future, a senior Defense Department official said Feb. 6, according to a report published Thursday by Inside Defense NewsStand.com.

ABL officials now are solely focused on attempting to shoot down a target missile during a test the Missile Defense Agency has scheduled for late calendar year 2008. The agency has deferred the purchase of a second aircraft and the engineering studies needed for it until after the shoot-down test, the official told reporters the day the Defense Department unveiled its fiscal year 2007 budget according to the IDNS report.

The airborne laser, or ABL, was in many respects the most visionary and cutting edge of all the major programs being developed by the Missile Defense Agency to create an eventual multi-layered missile defense system for the continental United States against thermonuclear inter-ballistic missile attack from any so-called "rogue' state.

But that was exactly the problem. "There are very serious technical difficulties with the ABL," Victoria Sanson, a research analyst at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, told UPI. "The ABL has been tottering on the brink for some time. The basic problem is that technological goals required to fulfill the program are very advanced, and the difficulties in achieving them were under-rated."

The ABL is a massive chemical oxygen-iodine laser that will be carried on board a Boeing 747-400 or "jumbo jet" designed to shoot down enemy missiles in their first 30 seconds of flight, or boost phase. The program is currently projected to develop at least seven aircraft armed with the weapon for a total cost estimated at anywhere between $7 billion to $13 billion.

The Boeing Corporation is the prime contractor and systems integrator but two other U.S. aerospace giant corporations, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which is working on the laser, are also heavily committed to it.

The program received a boost at the beginning of this year when Northrop Grumman announced on Jan. 4 that the chemical laser had already generated enough power and beam time to destroy a missile during a laboratory test.

Why then, are DOD officials downgrading the significance of the program and describing it as merely a demonstration project "until shoot-down, then it will be serious time"?

Sanson said the developers of the program were currently struggling with serious problems of maintaining beam integrity in real atmospheric, as opposed to laboratory conditions. "They are having difficulty keeping the laser beam focused because of the 'fireflies' problem," she said.

'Fireflies', Sanson said, were atmospheric flecks of dust that were ignited by the laser beam and that, when they burst into flame, diffused the power and integrity of the beam.

Another problem, she said, was that the laser itself was still extremely heavy, even for the enormous lifting capacities of a 747, and much work had still to be done to make it simultaneously operable and smaller and more manageable to operate from within the plane.

Bill Sweetman, IDR technology and aerospace editor at Jane's Defense Weekly, expressed skepticism about the practicality of deploying the ABL as an effective weapon in the near future in an article published in JDW Thursday. He compared it to the 'death ray' fantasy in Orson Welles' 1938 radio production of H.G. Wells' classic science fiction novel "The War of the Worlds," And he estimated the cost of the ABL program so far at $3 billion

The Air Force began the program in 1996, setting development costs at $2.5 billion and projecting that fielding would start in 2006. But by August 2001 the service revised its estimates, saying the cost would be about 50 percent more and the schedule stretched another four years, according to a July 2002 report by the Government Accountability Office, the IDNS report said.

The Air Force was expected to purchase the third to seventh ABL aircraft, a Department of Defense official told IDNS. "They are talking about the force level the Air Force would pay for and sustain. And as we have moved the program to the right they have deferred their investment in additional aircraft to the right, as you would expect them to do," he said. Moving a program "to the right" is Pentagon jargon for moving program plans farther into the future.

MDA admits it has decided to delay trade studies and the second ABL aircraft until after the shoot-down in 2008 "to allow for a design turn on the aircraft," according to the budget overview.

"The decisions surrounding ABL raises questions about MDA's boost-phase programs, as the agency has also made changes to the second effort, the Kinetic Energy Interceptor," IDNS said. Based on a recommendation by the Defense Science Board, MDA started the KEI program in 2003 as an alternative to ABL, it said.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry "Trey" Obering III, the MDA's hard-changing director, follows a policy of holding the different programs he runs to achieve 'knowledge points' where they can demonstrate that they have reached verifiable and reliable points of achievement within time limits.

For the ABL, Department of Defense officials say, it is now achieving the shoot-down capability in 2008. If that is successfully achieved by then, the taps of generous funding will certainly open to the ABL. But it won't happen before that time and until that goal is achieved.

Source: United Press International