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Mark Gobell
On Gardening Leave
Joined: 24 Jul 2006
Posts: 4529
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 Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 9:58 am Post subject: DoD & Raytheon unveils microwave weapon |
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U.S. eyes heat-beaming weapon by 2010
By Jim Wolf
Link to Reuters Story
MOODY AIR FORCE BASE, Georgia (Reuters) - The U.S. Defense Department on Wednesday unveiled what it called a revolutionary heat-beaming weapon that could be used to control mobs or repel foes in conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The so-called Active Denial System causes an intense burning sensation causing people to run for cover, but no lasting harm, officials said.
"This is a breakthrough technology that's going to give our forces a capability they don't now have," Theodore Barna, an assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for advanced systems and concepts, told Reuters. "We expect the services to add it to their tool kit. And that could happen as early as 2010."
The weapon, mounted on a Humvee, uses a large rectangular dish antenna to direct an invisible beam toward a target. It includes a high-voltage power unit and beam-generating equipment and is effective at more than 500 meters.
Existing counter-personnel systems designed not to kill -- including bean bag munitions and rubber bullets -- work at little more than "rock-throwing distances," said Marine Col. Kirk Hymes, director of the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate.
In increasingly complex military operations, the technology provided a much-needed alternative to just going from "shouting to shooting," said Hymes, who is responsible for the weapon's five-year, $60 million advanced development.
Variations of the system could help in peacetime and wartime missions, including crowd control and mob dispersal, checkpoint security and port protection, officials said. It could also help in conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Raytheon Co., which has worked to develop the technology, has built a prototype called Silent Guardian, that it hopes to sell in the United States and abroad in what could become a multibillion market.
The weapon was shown off publicly for the first time at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, where it has been undergoing operational tests by the 820th Security Forces Group, which protects Air Force assets.
The directorate invited reporters to be zapped as part of what its spokeswoman, Marine Maj. Sarah Fullwood, called an effort to "demystify" the technology at issue.
At a distance of several football fields, the sensation from the exposure was like a blast from a very hot oven, too painful to bear without scrambling for cover.
The burning sensation is achieved by high-power energy waves that heat the skin to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. The pain ended as soon as the target jumped from the line of fire.
Documents given out during the demonstration said more than 10,000 people had been exposed to the weapon since testing began more than 12 years ago. They said there had been no injuries requiring medical attention during the five-year advanced development program.
Raytheon Silent Guardian
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The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan. |
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thought criminal
Moderate Poster
Joined: 19 Apr 2006
Posts: 574
Location: London
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| Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 10:17 am Post subject: |
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| This is the sort of thing they will bring out on the likes of Truth Movement protesters within the US and UK. I really have no idea how we will defend ourselves against these sadists. |
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uselesseater
Trustworthy Freedom Fighter
Joined: 21 Sep 2005
Posts: 629
Location: Leeds
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| Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 5:51 pm Post subject: |
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'make a dictator act like a dictator'
I'd like to see them try. If they used this on the UK population anytime soon they would simply wake more people up.
No lasting damage my arse.
btw. tc, that's a horrible avatar. |
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Samantha J Fox
Minor Poster
Joined: 08 Jan 2007
Posts: 68
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| Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 5:57 pm Post subject: |
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I bet it causes cancer 
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Thermate
Angel - now passed away
Joined: 13 Nov 2006
Posts: 445
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| Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 7:45 pm Post subject: |
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Metallic paint and/or space blanket/s may help. Knew about this a few months back, useful mass torture device I'm betting...
In tests no volunteers could take more than 3seconds of it. So, lets see, what do you think happens when you CAN'T get away or get to cover? Unconsciousness? Death? ...or just insanity?
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Thermate
Angel - now passed away
Joined: 13 Nov 2006
Posts: 445
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| Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 7:54 pm Post subject: |
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Just had a thought: Tin Foil may help!!1  
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utopiated
Validated Poster
Joined: 09 Jun 2006
Posts: 645
Location: UK Midlands
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 8:52 pm Post subject: |
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Follow-up article emailed to me by Mal Function.
| Quote: | Light Boosts Destructive Power of Microwave Weapons, Sensors
By David A. Fulghum
Electronic warfare is becoming less a science of developing new
technologies and more a process of sensor fusion, target networking and
finding new ways to manipulate existing tools of the trade. A case in
point--lasers and high-power microwave devices long have been eyed as
competing directed-energy attack options. However, researchers are now
combining the two to produce smaller, cheaper, more powerful, nonkinetic
weapons. Electronic attack has taken a new path as well, shifting from
covering enemy emissions with noise to finding, penetrating and
exploiting enemy networks from low-power cell-phone networks to
sophisticated air defense systems. The following articles explore some
of those changes.
High-power microwave weapons may be on the verge of a high-speed turn
toward the practical.
An advanced concept, pioneered by BAE Systems' researchers, uses light
to multiply the speed and power at which HPM pulses--powerful enough to
destroy enemy electronics--can be produced without the need for
explosives or huge electrical generators.
Researchers predict leaps of 10-100 times in power output within two
years. That advance could push the beam-weapon technology far beyond the
1-10-gigawatt limit of current tactical-size HPM devices. Long-standing
industry estimates are that it would require a 100-gigawatt pulse for a
few nanoseconds to disable a cruise missile at a useful range.
BAE Systems is not alone in the chase. Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are
also building distributed array radars that can produce air-to-air and
surface-to-air HPM weapons effects, contend longtime Pentagon radar
specialists. In particular, the F-22, F-35, F/A-18E/F and newest F-15
radars are designed to accept modifications that would focus their beams
to produce HPM energy spikes powerful enough to disable cruise,
anti-aircraft, air-to-air and emitter-seeking missiles. Germany's Diehl
is developing suitcase-size HPM devices that could be placed
surreptitiously in a target building to damage electronics such as
computers.
In addition, the U.S. military is giving classified briefings on the
threat of HPM weapon technologies being developed in China and Russia.
The Russians are believed to be developing radio-frequency microwave
weapons for air defense, and the Chinese are developing HPM and
electromagnetic pulse weapons for information warfare.
However, BAE Systems researchers claim they have made a singular leap in
HPM weapons technology by combining the use of lasers and radar-like
microwaves. Furthermore, the technology is scalable through the use of
4-in.-square arrays, each an integrated structure of dielectrics and
electrical conductors. One hundred of them distributed over a square
meter, for example, can generate up to 10 gigawatts of power, says
Robert D'Amico, BAE Systems' director of advanced programs.
"We have shown everything we claimed with a laboratory testbed," says
Oved Zucker, director of photonics programs for BAE Systems' advanced
concepts facility here. "We are in the process of demonstrating total
power substantially above 10 gigawatts, and we have plans to test [the
system] further in an airborne mode.
"The power bandwidth product--how much power and how fast you manipulate
it--is potentially the largest of any technology around. Having the
bandwidth with larger power is where the money is," he says. There's no
dearth of missions for HPM technology, including detecting and
detonating improvised explosive devices, finding suicide bombers or
hidden explosives, and attacking shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.
There's also the appeal of weapons that can rob a foe of communications,
power and mobility--while largely eliminating collateral damage to
people and structures--which is a high priority for the U.S. military.
The development of HPM weapons has been hobbled for the last 30 years by
seemingly intractable cost, size, beam-control and power-generation
requirements. Tests of modified air-launched cruise missiles carrying
devices to produce explosively generated spikes of energy were
considered big disappointments in the early 1990s because of an
inability to direct pulses and predict effects. New active
electronically scanned array (AESA) radars can jam emitters or possibly
cause damage to electronic components with focused beams. But power
levels and ranges are limited by aperture size.
BAE Systems' photonically driven technology could open the way to much
smaller and more powerful electronic jammers, nonkinetic beam weapons
for cruise and anti-ship missile defenses, and stealth-detecting sensors.
"You could put a [sensor] system on a fighter-size aircraft that could
generate enough power, with a 1-ft. resolution, to see stealthy objects
at 100 mi." D'Amico says. "You can defeat stealth with enough power. If
stealth takes the signature [of an aircraft or missile] down a factor of
10, you have to increase the [sensor's] power by a factor of 10." Most
current fighter-size radars have less than a megawatt of peak power.
Detecting stealth would require tens of gigawatts, which is now
impossible in fighter-size packages.
What effects can HPM produce as an electronic warfare weapon?
"At one end, it can fry anything [electronic] that's out there," Zucker
says. "The levels of EW extend from the sledgehammer to just making the
[computer's] brain a little bit befuddled so it can't think for a
moment. At a lower level, you can kill the detector of the other guy's
radar as part of the suppression of enemy air defenses. You don't need
much power because you're going after the most sensitive part. You're
blinding the system."
The level below that is to momentarily stop electronics from
functioning. A radar will try to defend itself by using a chain of
circuits to "blink," and thereby shut out intruding signals. One method
of exploitation is to do something during the blink. But if an intruding
signal is fast enough, the radar can't react in time to keep out the
invader.
"You can put energy in there and it won't be able to respond," Zucker
says. "Another low-level effect is to make the computer skip bits so
that it's not processing efficiently for the moment. All these games
have to do with how much power [can be applied] and how fast."
BAE researchers envision HPM pulse weapons that are powerful enough to
disable a tank, a missile, perhaps a helicopter or aircraft, but at the
same time are small and light enough to function as part of a microwave
radar sensor designed into the skin of an aircraft.
Alternatively, the HPM weapons could be scaled up to shipboard
size--perhaps 100 sq. meters--to produce terawatt-size energy pulses.
That's theoretically a large enough energy spike to stop another ship.
"You kill the brains by aiming at the bridge area because of all the
computers and control systems there that run the ship," Zucker says.
This brute-strength scaling up of the technology involves installing a
distributed array on the side of a ship. The elements would work
together to form a large virtual antenna and then pull enough power from
the ship's electric engines to concentrate a beam on vulnerable areas.
From a few hundred yards, predictions are that the energy
spike--focused in a beam several feet wide--could disable all the
electrical equipment, including propulsion, leaving the ship a darkened,
drifting hulk.
Researchers have some unusual techniques in mind for the associated
antenna arrays.
"We are integrating a large number of transverse electromagnetic [TEM]
apertures," to produce the distributed transmitter arrays, he says. "To
produce a large number of TEM antennas is sensible only if you can make
each one sing to the same tune through this coherence [or
synchronization] that comes from using [the speed of] light. That allows
us to spread the source [of HPM pulse production] across the whole wing
of an airplane. Moreover, TEM doesn't have a cutoff frequency, which
gives us flexibility."
Because the high-speed switches modulate the HPM, they match the
circuitry to the antenna. Composite skins for fuselages could have the
conductors and switches built into them. At the moment, BAE is looking
at new, 20-cm.-thick aircraft wings, tapered at the leading and trailing
edges, with imbedded antenna structures instead of using a bolt-on system.
"That is my radiator, and it is a phased array," Zucker says. "It can be
a radar, communications, receiver or HPM transmitter. The wing is the
source with more gain than any aperture that's been available before. I
don't have to pump the energy through wave guides. More area means more
power and gain. Instead of megawatts, we're talking about gigawatts of
peak power."
Researchers say the antennas, photoconductive switches and transformer
blocks can be built into conformal skins for unmanned combat aircraft as
well. Unmanned designs are favored initially because of the vagaries in
distribution of HPM side lobes, the effects of HPM on humans, and the
disturbances that energy spikes can create in fly-by-wire flight control
systems.
Zucker also is designing fly-by-light flight control systems for UAVs.
With fly by light, actuators are triggered by simple blobs of light that
can't be disrupted by spikes of electrical energy produced by the
aircraft's payload. |
http://aviationnow.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/aw012207p1.xml
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