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flux—reflected and focused sunlight—was sufficient to set the ships’ tarred-fir planks on fire. In their first recorded use, relay mirrors destroyed Marcellus’s fleet. Whether this story is real or just a fable will probably never be known. 1 However, it is known that although Syracuse—through Archimedes—won the battle, it soon lost the war. Marcellus landed his regrouped forces on the undefended western end of the island and captured Syracuse by land attack, unintentionally killing Archimedes in the process. Nothing in the laws of physics would have precluded Archimedes from building and employing this extraordinary defensive weapon. Several experiments, some recent, have successfully demonstrated that even crude mirrors could concentrate sufficient energy to cause the storied effect. One experiment fitted an aiming device to bronze shields, traditional equipment for the soldiers of Syracuse, and was able to successfully focus the reflected sun’s energy and set wood on fire at several hundred meters. However, what really matters is not whether the story is true, but rather that it has persisted for over 2,000 years, which demonstrates the attractiveness and importance of such a capability. Military research into high-energy lasers for weapons applications traces its beginnings to the early 1960s. Since then, significant advances in laserpower production, target tracking, and beam control have been made. 2 Systems such as the Airborne Laser Laboratory (ALL) of the early 1980s demonstrated that laser systems staged on airborne platforms could destroy enemy missiles. Nevertheless, are we any closer to fielding that revolutionary new capability for the war fighter? The answer is “perhaps so.” How? When? The remainder of this article addresses the difficulty of transitioning new technologies to the war fighter and the importance of robust technology demonstrations for high-energy laser weapons systems. Additionally, it highlights two critical newtechnology areas that will likely be the key to our long-term laser warfighting capability. Technology Transition Consider the general problem of transitioning a new technology into war-fighting systems. The laser was invented in 1961, and high-energy devices were demonstrated several years later. The high-energy laser community is often criticized because there is not yet any production associated with high-energy laser weapons. It turns out that an extended period of incubation is true of most revolutionary technologies. Today we are all familiar with the rapid evolution of fielded computer technology and capability, but the transistor, which makes it all possible, was invented in 1940. Arguably, it was the 1980s before the accelerated development of computer technology really matured. The Air Force Scientific Advisory 16
Board, under Dr. Gene McCall, characterized this phenomenon in its New World Vistas study of 1995. 3 Consider a new technology which doubles in some attribute, say “relative importance,” every four years as shown in figure 1. It is interesting to see how the “relative importance” compounds over 40 years—three orders of magnitude (from 1 to 1,000) on the chart, with most of the acceleration being in the last few years. In fact, the first few years are barely distinguishable. This simple, nonlinear behavior seems to be a characteristic of many technologies; the computing world knows it well as Moore’s Law. An example in the weapons field is the development and fielding of precision strike weapons. The first prototypes of these now-sofamiliar weapons were available in the early 1960s, but maturation did not occur until after Desert Storm in the early 1990s. Relative Importance 1,200 1,100 1,000 900 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 Time (Years) Figure 1. An attribute that doubles every four years demonstrates the effect of compounding, which is typical of many developing technologies. Where would we place today’s high-energy lasers on the chart of the hypothetical case just described? They are arguably somewhere around the knee of the curve, perhaps near the 30-year point. It is also plausible that the development of high-energy laser technology has nearly reached a point that, within the next decade, will enable most of the currently envisioned applications. Based on the simple exponential-growth analogy above, high-energy laser weapons are poised for a revolutionary leap. Whether or not US military interest in high-energy lasers actually accelerates these developments depends on many factors, not the least of which is the unfolding world situation and the demands and circumstances of the military operator. Although the research, development, and acquisition communities can neither predict nor control that requirement, the current trends of what the war fighter needs seem well entrenched— increased precision, rapid response, and tailored lethality to minimize collateral damage and reduce civilian casualties. What these communities 17
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