And in February 1991, precision-guided ‘smart’ bombs, ground-hugging cruise missiles and invisible stealth fighters forced the massively equipped and much more numerous Iraqi army to its knees.
In 2003, the war in Iraq just missed seeing the introduction of a new generation of sophisticated weaponry, a new type of weapon based not on missiles, bombs or bullets … nor on anything you can hold in your hands. This weapon is made of ordinary light utilizing the same spectrum of energy found in your microwave, your light bulb or in your TV remote control. It’s called Directed Energy (DE).
Science Fiction?
The date is just before the end of the decade. The place is Osan Air Force Base, home of 7th Air Force and the 51st Fighter Wing, located just 48 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ. Negotiations have broken down again and the tensions between North and South Korea have never been higher.
45,000 American troops are still stationed on the 55-year-old DMZ, along the 38th parallel. They are on highest alert as 500,000 South Korean soldiers back them up. But facing them across the border are over 1.5 million North Korean regulars … armed with an unknown number of Taepodong-3 ballistic missiles, now believed to be tipped with nuclear warheads.
And all can reach the western United States within 45 minutes of launch.
Home to the last oppressive, totalitarian government in the world, little is known about the North Korean capabilities, or its motivations. All that is certain is that the world sits at the brink of war.
Suddenly, seven sleek missiles roar from silos deep in the valleys of North Korea. Three rockets streak to the south, arrowing toward Seoul and its five million inhabitants. The other four missiles veer east; they are heading towards San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Diego.
Within seconds the missiles break through the cloud layer. In another two minutes they will exhaust the fuel in their upper stages and will soar unfettered to their targets in an arcing, parabolic trajectory. Officials estimate that 10 to 50 million deaths will occur over the next few days. Nothing can be done. Most observers believe the situation is hopeless.
But that is far from the case.
Orbiting at 65,000 feet above ground in a ‘racetrack’ pattern, 100km south of the DMZ, two high-altitude UAVs fly safely well away from enemy fire. Infrared seekers onboard the UAVs pick up the bright rocket plumes as the Taepodong-3 missiles break through the cloud layer.
In milliseconds—mere thousandths of a second—low-power targeting and tracking lasers lock onto the missiles. On-board computers calculate trajectories and, in the nose of the UAVs, concave mirrors five feet across swing toward the still-rising missiles. Inside each giant drone, a megawatt-class electric laser is activated. At the front of the UAV, deformable mirrors shaped by hundreds of actuators, embedded behind each mirror’s highly-polished surface, change the mirror’s surface hundreds of times a second.
This is adaptive optics, invented by the military and now used by every major astronomical telescope in the world. Adaptive optics make a perfect laser beam as the deformities in the atmosphere are taken out of the laser, even before the beam leaves the vehicle.
Thirty seconds after the Taepodong-3 missiles break cloud layer, nearly a million watts of invisible laser energy streak from each of the UAVs at the speed of light. The UAVs hold their beams with ruthless precision against the missiles, heating their metal skin with enough power to cause the missile’s fuel tanks to explode from internal pressure within seconds.
One by one, like shotguns shattering clay pigeons at a skeet-shooting range, infrared beams from the two AirBorne Lasers target and destroy one missile after another. Exploding debris falls on enemy territory, leaving both South Korea and the United States unharmed.
Is this science fiction? No. The Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser Testbed was first test-fired in flight at an airborne target in 2007. In February 2010, it successfully destroyed two test missiles. While the program was canceled and YAL-1A was grounded in 2012, the Missile Defense Agency began working on deploying lasers on high-altitude UAVs in 2015.
New Technology, New Thinking
Directed Energy (DE) weapons such as lasers and high-power microwaves have come of age. Over the past two decades, DE power has increased by nine orders of magnitude—over a billion times— from milliwatt to megawatt. This is like supercharging your laser pointer used for highlighting PowerPoint slides to shoot down ballistic missiles a hundred kilometres away.
DE is making revolutionary, world-changing advances in warfighting and battling terrorism. And it’s doing so today. It’s happening so fast, it’s the equivalent of a military Future Shock. The first DE weapons have already been developed, their successors are being refined, and in the next decades, when they are deployed on the battlefield, they may prove to be more revolutionary than the longbow, machine guns, stealth airplanes, cruise missiles, nuclear submarines, or even the atomic bomb.
The wars in Ukraine and Syria may be among the last to not make use of DE weapons.
The reason Directed Energy is likely to prove so revolutionary is that national leaders will soon have the ability to respond to threats anywhere in the world and instantly deter them with infinite precision at the speed of light.
The profound change these capabilities will make to international relations will reverberate throughout society. It will transform our way of life. This is because Directed Energy is not just about winning wars; it’s more than just a new weapon in the warrior’s arsenal. It is the basis for a completely new way of thinking, a new way of employing force from the strategic to the non-lethal levels and interacting with the international community.
The large, industrial allied defence establishment that served so well throughout the Cold War will be transformed into a lighter, more agile, and information-centric force, which will shift hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars from the government to the commercial marketplace.
Over the next decade, this shift will result in the most profound change to the U.S. Defense Department since World War II. Just as tourism was revolutionised by the jet engine, and communication was forever changed by the transistor, the next societal change will be fueled by Directed Energy in the form of DE weapons.
The Next Big Thing
But does everyone share this view? And if DEWs are so revolutionary, then why aren’t they being championed as ‘the next big thing’?
DEWs have many critics, and societies such as the world’s premier organisation of physicists, the American Physical Society (APS), have sponsored several politically-charged studies as the critics are skeptical of the benefits and capabilities of DE‘s military applications. The first APS study was conducted in 1986 in response to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.
The criticism is not limited to strategic uses of laser weapons; High Power Microwaves have their foes as well. Human rights advocates are up in arms both about the unknown long-term effects of Active Denial, as well as the possibility of civilians receiving eye damage from airborne lasers as the light glints off ballistic missiles.
Other criticisms face DEWs as they make their way to the battlefield: what happens when they proliferate? What will happen when, not if, gangs and criminals who could disrupt our way of life manage to obtain them? Or even worse, what if terrorists obtain DEWs? And are there any long-term effects that might occur when exposed to DE? How many remember American soldiers marching and flying into atomic fallout clouds in the 1950s, or US citizens being used as unsuspecting LSD and bio-warfare test subjects?
Apart from its potential, Directed Energy’s future is ridden with political and societal uncertainty. So the question is: will politicians ever allow it to be used under fear of these possible long-term effects? Well, they’d better decide fast, because DE is not science fiction. DEWs are real weapons being tested in real scenarios, today. DE is maturing on a daily basis, and advances in technology are accelerating its use.
The only reason these major DEW sy
stems were not used in the last war with Iraq is that they were still being tested, and were not yet ready for the battlefield. Largely shrouded in a highly classified environment, DEW research is conducted by a cadre of closed-mouthed technical wizards. The government labs that worked on revolutions of military affairs in the past—nuclear weapons, stealth airplanes and precision-guided weapons—have now turned their talents toward what they hope is their next ace in the hole: DEW. And they’re on a path to move them to the battlefield. What they’re betting on is that before the world knows it, DEW will break into the headlines as it provides an overwhelming, asymmetrical advantage in war.
And those nations that are not prepared to exploit Directed Energy will stagnate … or, even better for us, lose by clinging to outmoded, traditional forms of warfare. They will fall behind in the same manner as civilisations that clung to the bow-and-arrow lost to the rifle … just as bullets and bombs will fall to DEW.
Cheaper, Faster, Better
When the laser was invented on 6 July 1960, everyone from military strategists to science fiction writers predicted that DE would soon be used as weapons. But people were quickly disappointed when lasers didn’t cause a ‘Buck Rogers’ blow-it-up effect, like you’d see in a Star Wars movie. Tests showed that the most sophisticated lasers in the early sixties only produced a low-power, although intensely brilliant, point of light. The reason was that the technology for producing the laser was relatively immature.
In the early 1960s, laser power levels were measured in thousandths of a watt. Typical laser pointers today, available for a few dollars at any office store, produce unwavering low-power beams on the order of 5 milliwatts (or 5 thousandths of a watt), a hundred thousand times less power than the light bulb shining in your hallway.
Laser weapons require a billion times more power. But, because of investments in science and technology over the last 40 years, DEWs are now poised to be a cheaper, faster and better method of winning wars and saving lives.
Despite DE’s obvious advantages, what about good old ‘bombs and bullets’, the stuff that won wars for years? One problem with them is that bullets and bombs have reached the limits of their capabilities. Military authorities state that in World War II it took approximately 5000 bombs to destroy one target. In Vietnam, the addition of laser-guided technology dropped that number to around 500, an increase of a factor of 10. Precision-aiming technology advanced, and by 1991 in the Iraq war it took approximately 15 bombs to destroy a target; in Kosovo, then Afghanistan, that number dropped from 10 to five bombs. Even more precise weapons were used in the 2003 war with Iraq, and ratios began to approach one target killed for every weapon dispensed.
However, with the ultimate limit of one bomb being used to destroy one target, warriors can’t do any better: they will be limited by the number of bombs they can carry, even if they use a weapon system such as the B-2, which can hit dozens of targets per flight.
Another drawback is that bombs and bullets reach their target by following the law of gravity. This means that they travel in trajectories constrained by ballistics, and thus take a finite time, sometimes measured in minutes, to reach their target. This is where DEWs can radically change the nature of warfare, and why national and military leaders are so excited about its use: not only because it ignores the law of gravity or because it is incredibly precise, but because it can engage a target near-instantaneously, thousands of times faster than any conventional weapon.
Speed of Engagement
Directed Energy travels at the speed of light—186,000 miles a second. This velocity may be incomprehensible to anyone who is used to the normal world where people jog at 3 miles an hour, cars zip down the Interstate at 65 miles an hour, and the fastest airliners traverse the Atlantic at speeds approaching 600 miles an hour. Even the world’s absolute speed record, held by astronaut General Tom Stafford, commander of Apollo X, when his spacecraft returned from orbiting the Moon, stands at only 28,547 miles per hour, 8 miles a second, or 0.002 percent the speed of light, which marks the world’s all-time speed record for a human being.
Light, be it produced from the sun or from a light bulb hanging in your hallway, travels fast enough to circle the Earth over 7 times in a second. That means that DE—light that is in the form of lasers or microwaves—can reach its target in less than the blink of an eye.
Another way to view this is by comparing the equivalent muzzle velocities as a way of measuring military effectiveness. A bullet’s muzzle velocity may be as high as 6,000 feet a second, but DE’s ‘muzzle velocity’ is greater than 982,000,000 feet a second, which is over 160,000 times faster than a typical bullet.
Another advantage to DE is that it can flood areas, allowing one DEW to defeat hundreds or even thousands of targets, as opposed to the best, absolute limit of one bomb killing one target. This gives the military the ability to carry a ‘deep magazine’, and thus shorten the so-called ‘logistics tail’ of ferrying a crate of bullets or bombs from the factory to the war zone to the fighter.
The Impetus for the Next Revolution
World-changing events are fuelled by revolutions in military affairs, and they are brought about by inventions of disruptive technologies so profound that they forever change the nature of society. DEWs are so different from traditional weapons that they will be the impetus for the next revolution. As such, DE will change strategy, national policy and ultimately, affect billions of dollars in funding for the military services.
Despite the dissimilarities of lasers and HPM, both are DEWs and their similarities far outweigh their perceived differences. That’s because lasers and HPMs both:
Exploit different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Travel at the speed of light.
Are impervious to the effects of gravity or ballistic motion.
Are ultra-precise, allowing for enormous amounts of energy to be applied exactly where the warfighter wants. This is in contrast with precision weapons using kinetic energy, which, although accurate, have devastating unintended collateral effects due to blast and fragments.
Such an ultra-precise weapon, capable of striking around the globe near-instantaneously, provides the technological advantage needed to defeat the next generation of adversaries. And that advantage is only provided by DEWs capable of engaging the enemy at the speed of light, exploiting the electromagnetic spectrum.
Editor’s Introduction to:
BOOMER
by John DeChancie
John DeChancie is a versatile writer, as his science fiction Skyway series and the Castle Perilous fantasy series bear witness. He is currently collaborating with me on a near future novel about asteroid mining and artificial intelligence.
BOOMER
by John DeChancie
He knew he had led his platoon into a classic L-shaped ambush when a Soviet RPD opened up with the sound of a jackhammer on a New York street, 7.62x54R rounds splintering trees all around him, chipping through eight-inch trunks like they were toothpicks, powerful slugs, and one of them had torn through his side, he was sure, when his hand brought away wetness and a warm, funny feeling started crawling up his ribs, a feeling he’d never felt before, and he knew something was terribly wrong; he’d been hit maybe with the first round as they entered the woods, where the bastards were waiting, NVA all lined up classically alongside the trail with the goddamned machine gun on the trail wedged between two trees just off to the side, angled to rake the whole area, and wham, they opened up, not even a chance to yell, not even to draw his damn .45, shit, shit….
Funny colors in the trees, what the hell kind of trees… no pain yet… funny no pain… just that creepy feeling creeping… wet… I don’t want to look at my hand…
Jackhammers, that’s what the fucking thing sounds like, jackhammers, whacking away at the pavement, half a dozen guys hammering, tearing the shit out of the street for no goddamn good reason; they used to do that a lot, those street guys in NY, always ripping up the place and you’d think why did t
hey have to do it here, blocking the bus route, now I’ll have to take the subway and I’ll be late for the piano lesson—maybe someday I’ll have a show on Broadway, which they’ll probably tear up next week, to the sound of hammers blasting away…
His mind suddenly focused and he wondered about Ramirez, the radio man, and he thought Ramirez had probably taken a slug, too, right off the bat, just like him, because Ramirez wasn’t anywhere around.
“Ramirez!”
No answer, just the jackhammer.
“Ramirez! Radio man! Where the fuck are you?”
Ramirez wasn’t answering and things were getting worse by the second because he didn’t hear any answering fire, didn’t hear any crack of M-16s to answer the braying chatter of the Soviet weapon and he knew it was a heavy machine gun, not an SKS or AK, but he couldn’t help but wonder why he wasn’t hearing the sharp ear-piercing thwack of M-16s so he knew his platoon was at least shooting back at the fuckers, popping away with rifles, if not the—
“McCluskey, where’s your grenade-thrower?” he yelled toward the rear where he thought McCluskey, the M79 carrier, would be. But no word from McCluskey.
“Harrison! Harrison?”
Christ, no grenade launcher, no M-60 fire to answer the RPD. Could they both have been taken out, first thing? That would be the way to take out a whole platoon. Start with the heavy fire power first. And the radio man.
“Ramirez!”
He knew it wasn’t any good. Ramirez was probably dead.
Funny-colors in the leaves. What? Odd green, funny-looking trees.
There Will Be War Volume X Page 21