Lockheed Takes a Shot at China

Stealth Saga #8: Setbacks, Bulling Ahead and Progress

The plot thickens on the F-35/KF-X scandal in South Korea.

Despite the setbacks, the South Korean government will be pushing the KF-X program on schedule.

The Indians continue to worry about their cooperation with the Russians on the FGFA/PAK-FA program.

India is starting to emphasize the AMCA 5th generation fighter program over the FGFA.

A Canadian defense rag claims the Chinese J-20 stealth fighter doesn't qualify as a 5th gen fighter!

The Chinese FC-31/J-31 is being promoted as a replacement for the JF-17 in export markets.

A US Congressman notes the Chinese J-20 and J-31 'mirror' the F-22 and F-35.

A new book claims the 'Stealth-hawk' used in the bin Laden raid was one of two prototypes that were built.  Other sources are claiming nonsense.

The Long Range Strike Bomber contract has been delayed at least two months.

However, the LRS-B program has two prototypes already and will award the contract even if Congress is dumber than dumb and does a continuing resolution for the full year.

There are hints the LRS-B program may get accelerated. 

The F-35C returns to sea for testing on October 5th.  Turns out this was moved up to October 2nd.

The F-35 has done its first external weapon release.

Norway has reaffirmed its intent to buy 52 F-35s.

Lockheed is already started work on how to place its fiber lasers onto the F-35.

Northrop has completed the first center fuselage for Japan's first F-35A.

Lockheed is Investing in a Fiber Laser Production Line

The world’s largest defense company is taking a big step towards battlefield laser weapons. In a few weeks, Lockheed Martin will start production of high-efficiency fiber-optic modules that can be wired together into a wide variety of different weapons. Production will start with a prototype 60-kilowatt rocket-killer for the Army, they said, but it could easily scale to larger numbers, higher power, or both. Lockheed envisions its lasers potentially arming Littoral Combat Ships, AC-130 gunships, F-15 fighters, and one day even the F-35.

“We’re testing this facility out with a view to ramping it up,” Lockheed business developer Iain Mckinnie told me when I quizzed him after a roundtable with reporters. “In many ways, it’s… a test production facility, to test out how do we optimize this , to make it as efficient as possible [or] respond as quickly as possible [if], let’s say, if an urgent need came up.”

“I can’t get into the exact dollar figures of the investment,” he added, “but it is certainly very high profile within the corporation.”

The plan is to ramp up not just production but power. Fiber lasers like Lockheed’s generate use large numbers of small modules to generate many low-power beams. These run through fiber-optic cables to a “spectral beam combining” unit that turns the dozens or hundreds of weak lasers into one strong one. Increasing the power is simply a matter of adding more modules — along with appropriate power and cooling, that is, but small individual modules are much easier to cool than a single large “slab” of laser-generating material, the previous state of the art. (Overheating has been a particular problem for lasers in the past, since it distorts the beam into uselessness).

“Our 60 kW design is scalable to over 100 kW, if we populated it with more fibers. Right now the customer’s only asking for 60,” said Lockheed senior fellow Rob Afzal. “That’s kind of the core advantage. You can have a system that you can choose to populate with 10, 20, 50, 100 lasers.”

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Britian Planning Laser Demonstrator & Lockheed Destroys a Truck With a 30 KW Laser

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has disclosed plans to compete the build and demonstration of a prototype high power laser directed energy weapon.

A supplier briefing for the project - known as the Laser Directed Energy Weapon Capability Demonstrator (LDEW CD) - is to be hosted by the MoD's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) in mid-April. The announcement of this event has followed the release of a prior information notice in February.

According to Dstl, the aim of the capability demonstrator "is to enhance the UK's understanding of the capability of laser-based weapon system, as well as assisting in the prediction of the anticipated system performance". It added that the project "will consist of system studies and hardware trials, culminating in a number of practical demonstrations".

No details of the power, laser type, or proposed platform for the LDEW CD project have been released to date. However, Dstl has confirmed that the project demonstrations will be required to establish five key metrics: the ability to detect, acquire and track targets at range and in varying weather conditions with sufficient precision; the ability to generate and precisely control a high energy laser; control of the irradiance of the laser; management of power and cooling demands whilst enabling operation of the laser over a prolonged period; and control requirements, particularly managing the risks such that the laser is safe to operate.

Dstl said it expects to award a single contract to cover the design, build, and test of the capability demonstrator. However, it added that, given the broad range of capabilities required to meet the LDEW CD research requirement, it "is not expected that a single supplier would be able to fulfil this requirement in its entirety". This infers an expectation that industry players will coalesce into multi-disciplinary teams to bid for the contract.

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The battlefield of the future recently came a step closer, as a Lockheed Martin laser weapon took out a truck in a field test. The 30-kW fiber laser weapon system was fired at a small truck mounted on a test platform, the laser beam disabled the running engine and drivetrain within seconds.

The recent field test used Lockheed's Advanced Test High Energy Asset (ATHENA) ground-based prototype, single-mode laser, which is based on the company's Area Defense Anti-Munitions (ADAM) laser weapon system. It incorporates the 30-kW Accelerated Laser Demonstration Initiative (ALADIN) fiber laser developed by Lockheed.

ATHENA uses a process that the company calls Spectrum Beam Combining. Though laser weapons have been successfully tested in the past, Lockheed says that even though such systems could acquire, track, and destroy targets, they lack practicality as a tactical weapon because the inefficient nature of the lasers resulted in them being too large, needing too much power, and being difficult to cool.

Spectrum Beam Combining overcomes these limitations by using fiber laser modules where the active gain medium consists of an optical fiber doped with a rare-earth element such as erbium, ytterbium, neodymium, or others. The optical fibers are flexible, so the laser can be thousands of meters long for greater gain, while taking up very little space because it can be coiled like a rope. The large surface-to-volume ratio means that it's easy to cool. In addition, fiber laser are very durable and project a high-quality beam using 50 percent less electricity than an equivalent solid-state laser.

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US Navy Issues Presolicitation Notice for High Energy Laser Weapons System (HELWS)

Notice Type: Presolicitation Notice

Posted Date: 28-JUL-14

Office Address: Department of the Navy; Naval Air Systems Command; Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division Dept. 1; Commander, NAWCWD, Code 210000D, 429 E. Bowen Rd - Stop 4015 China Lake CA 93555-6108

Subject: High Energy Fiber Laser

Classification Code: A - Research & Development

Solicitation Number: N6893614R0123

Contact: Jonas Kidd, Contract Specialist, Phone 760-939-2654, Fax 760-939-0528, Email jonas.kidd@navy.mil - Steven Shultz, Contract Specialist, Phone 760-939-8895, Fax 760-939-0528, Email steven.shultz@navy.mil

Setaside: N/AN/A

Place of Performance Country: US

Description: Department of the Navy

Naval Air Systems Command

Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division Dept. 1

The High Energy Fiber Laser (HEFL) Project Office (Code 4.L.700D) of the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD) intends to procure technical assistance and systems engineering in the development, testing, and fielding of the High Energy Laser Weapons System (HELWS). NAWCWD serves as a focal point for defining HEFL system and sub-system requirements, system design and integration plans, prototype systems development, and testing and evaluation (T&E). Under this effort the contractor will develop and demonstrate prototype HELWS subsystems, which will be integrated together and installed in a rotary-winged aircraft for a series of airborne laser weapon demonstrations.

Specific activities to be performed include: Completion of the Integration Structure(IS) design, building, testing, and qualifying required hardware, conducting and delivering qualification testing and analysis, generating drawings and technical reports, installation of subsystems into the IS, development of written procedures for system test support, design and building of special test/handling equipment, providing system engineering support and execution of system risk management and configuration management tasks.

It is anticipated that one award will be made to fulfill this requirement under the authority of and in accordance with FAR Part 15 - Contracting by Negotiation.

This is a full and open competition..

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US Army, US Navy Make Progress on Deploying Lasers by Early 2020s

Lasers that can shoot down incoming missiles have been a work in progress since Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” days. Now, the Army and Navy not only have working demonstration models but ambitions to field real-world weapons circa 2021. This time, insisted Pentagon science advisor Howard Meyer this morning, it’s really going to happen.

Why so confident? I asked Meyer, himself a veteran of the Airborne Laser program cancelled in 2012, after his remarks to a small Marshall Institute seminar in the Congressional Visitor’s center this morning. The differences are both tactical and technological, he told me. Not only have lasers gotten better, the military’s expectations have gotten lower — and the urgency of the threat has gotten higher.

Technologically, as in so many other areas, commercial industry is leading the way: “I can buy lasers for welding, for cutting, [etc.],” Meyer told me. “There are thousands of these systems out in industry applications all over the world.”

In fact, the Navy’s “laser weapon system” (LaWS) is basically just six commercial welding lasers “strapped together,” Congressional Research Service analyst Ronald O’Rourke had noted earlier at the event. The six lasers don’t even cohere into a single beam, he said, they just “converge at the target.” The simplicity of that approach, O’Rourke argued, is what has allowed the Navy to advance LaWS quickly and affordably to the point that, this summer, it will head to the Persian Gulf for at-sea tests.

LaWS also embodies the more modest and yet more urgent missions the military now envisions for lasers. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative envisioned a belt of satellites to shoot down Soviet warheads in space. The enormous flying airborne laser focused on shooting down a few ballistic missiles — say, a North Korean strike — shortly after launch, when warhead and rocket booster are still attached in one large, combustible target. The ABL technology actually worked, said Meyer, but the equipment and chemical power supply filled a converted 747, and the military felt the vulnerable aircraft would be easily shot down before it got into laser range.

By contrast, both the Navy LaWS and the Army’s “mobile high-energy laser demonstrator” are relatively small solid-state lasers, able to fit on a ship and a truck respectively. They’re also designed to fire over relatively short distances at targets much slower and less durable than a ballistic missile, targets such as small drones, fast-attack boats, precision-guided mortar rounds, tactical rockets, or — at the high end — anti-ship cruise missiles. Iran and its proxy Hezbollah have most of these weapons already and are working on the others, and many expects predict cheap precision-guided weapons will proliferate worldwide in the near future.

Meyer agrees. In future conflicts, “I am going to have mortar rounds or cruise missiles or UAVs coming in,” he told me. “We will be absorbing G-RAMM [guided rockets, artillery, mortars, and missiles]. We either have to take it out or we have to suffer the losses.”

That’s the urgent but achievable mission driving the Army and Navy programs. The shipboard LaWS generates just 33 kilowatts of laser energy and still manages to shoot down slow-moving drones in tests; the Navy wants to build a follow-up model generating roughly 60 to 100 kw, potentially mounted on the small Littoral Combat Ship or the mid-sized Arleigh Burke destroyer. The Army, meanwhile, is looking at laser defense platoons with either three 100-kw lasers mounted on large trucks or five 50-kw lasers mounted on smaller Stryker armored vehicles.

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Lockheed Wins $25 Million Fiber Laser Contract

The U.S. Army has awarded Lockheed Martin a $25 million contract to design, build and test a 60-kilowatt electric laser to be integrated and tested in a truck-mounted weapon system demonstrator. The laser weapon is designed to significantly improve the warfighters' ability to counter rockets, artillery, mortars and unmanned aerial threats.

Under a contract managed by the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command's Technical Center, the Lockheed Martin-provided laser will be integrated on the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD). This ruggedized laser builds on the corporation's work under the current Robust Electric Laser Initiative (RELI) contract for the Army.

"Lockheed Martin continues to advance its high-energy fiber laser technology to provide a proven, affordable weapon architecture that supports the size, weight, and power constraints our customers face," said Paula Hartley, vice president of Advanced Product Solutions for Lockheed Martin's Mission Systems and Training business. "Our solution is much smaller, lighter and more electrically efficient than others in the market and can bring tremendous value to the Army and other military customers."

The corporation's electric laser system implements multiple compact, rugged fiber laser modules to generate a high power output beam with excellent beam quality and high electrical efficiency. A unique spectral beam combining process is used to combine many fiber lasers into a single beam of light that retains the high beam quality of the individual fiber modules while reaching the 60 kilowatt mark.

Earlier this year, Lockheed Martin announced it had demonstrated a 30-kilowatt fiber laser, the highest power ever documented while retaining beam quality and electrical efficiency. The internally funded research and development demonstration was achieved by combining many fiber lasers into a single, near-perfect quality beam of light—all while using approximately 50 percent less electricity than alternative solid-state laser technologies.

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Lockheed Pitches Fiber Lasers for Military Use Over Slab Lasers

Whenever aerospace and defense can tap into a commercial technology, it hooks up to a pace of development that can speed the fielding of new capabilities. That could be coming true for long-sought-after high-energy laser weapons.

Lockheed Martin has demonstrated that electric fiber lasers can be spectrally combined to produce a high-power, weapon-grade beam. Fiber lasers are used in communications and manufacturing, and component technology is being driven by commercial markets. What the aerospace industry has to do is find a way to take them to higher, lethal power levels.

With the most power yet achieved with high electrical efficiency and beam quality, Lockheed says its 30-kw fiber laser is a key step toward tactical high-energy weapons. The laser was tested under the company-funded Accelerated Laser Demonstration Initiative (Aladin), but Lockheed is under contract to supply a 60-kw fiber laser for field-testing in the U.S. Army's truck-mounted High-Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator in 2017. A 100-kw version is to be tested in 2022.

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