En el marco de las prioridades de modernización definidas por el US ARMY, los proyectos relacionados con los sistemas de armas LASER y los misiles Hipersónicos, concentran parte del esfuerzo presupuestario. Es que el nuevo concepto de “Cross – Domain Capabilities”, obliga a las distintas Fuerzas a incorporar nuevas capacidades, tales como los Fuegos de Largo Alcance de Nivel Estratégico, que el US Army obtendría al disponer de misiles Hipersónicos.
LANPAC HONOLULU: Earliest this week, Army leaders approved a detailed plan to get high-powered microwave and laser weapons into the hands of soldiers, advancing rapidly in parallel to development of hypersonic missiles, Lt. Gen. Neil Thurgood said here. But, he warned the AUSA conference here, directed energy is “not the panacea of all things.”
“Clearly, we can accelerate directed energy into our formations,” said Thurgood, who as head of the service’s recently reorganized and beefed-up Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO, manages the service’s most high-tech, high-priority programs: directed energy, space, and hypersonics. (More on hypersonics below). The Army’s especially interested in taking out incoming rockets, artillery, mortar rounds, and small drones with electrically-powered weapons that cost pennies per shot instead of expensive one-use interceptors. But lasers and microwaves have real limits.
For example, they don’t work well against swarms, where lots of small targets are converging on you at once. ”You want to kill a swarm of things — whatever that thing is — lasers are not really a swarm-killing tool. They can kill things fast but they can’t kill a swarm of things fast enough.”
That said, he continued with a chuckle, “if you’re in my world, I’m always thinking about Private Thurgood. Killing one thing is better than killing nothing.”
The Army plans to test a roughly 50-kilowatt laser on an 8×8 Stryker armored vehicle by 2021, followed by a 100-kW one on a heavy HEMTT truck.
Fuente: https://breakingdefense.com
