Directed Energy Applications for High Power Vacuum Electronics

Abstract

Directed energy technologies are advancing rapidly and are now beginning to be applied to meet the needs of national defense. While these technologies have been described by some leading military thinkers as "the next arms race", directed energy technologies and their impact on warfare are not well-understood by the warfighter, since the hard lessons of the battlefield have not yet been taught, and indeed, rapid progress is being made in these technologies so it is difficult to forecast the future of directed energy with certainty. Some trends, however, are apparent to thoughtful observers. In recent years, the changing face of warfare is creating opportunities for the insertion of directed energy weapons on future battlefields, which are now described as consisting of air, space, land, sea, and cyber domains. The cyber domain is the information world that gathers, processes, and disseminates all the information necessary to wage war, to anticipate, find, fix, track, engage and assess effects on targets: "anyone, anywhere, anytime". The cyber domain is linked to all the other domains, which contain sensors, weapons platforms, personnel, command and control assets, etc. The breadth and pace of warfare, continuing the trend of many centuries, continues to accelerate, pushed by technology. The presence of reporters embedded in combat units, with near instantaneous relay of information and images to a sleepless global media is also impacting warfare. It is therefore increasingly important, when the use of force is necessary, to use that force in ways that will minimize collateral damage and non-combatant casualties, and reduce post-conflict reconstruction costs, while still rapidly winning the fight. Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs) have many characteristics that potentially offer these benefits.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADP022423

Entities

People

  • Kirk E. Hackett

Organizations

  • Air Force Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Active Denial System
  • Blast
  • Collateral Damage
  • Directed Energy Weapons
  • Electricity
  • Energy
  • Frequency
  • High Power Microwaves
  • Millimeter Waves
  • Nonlethal Weapons
  • Pulsed Power
  • Repetition Rate
  • Superconducting Magnets
  • Vacuum Electronics
  • Warfare
  • Weapon Systems
  • Weapons

Readers

  • Enterprise Information Systems Architecture and Joint Command Capability Interoperability Support.
  • Pulsed Power and Plasma Physics.
  • Strategic Security Studies

Technology Areas

  • Cyber
  • Directed Energy
  • Fully Networked C3
  • Fully Networked C3 - Command and Control
  • Microelectronics
  • Space