Lockheed Martin Laser Breakthroughs Could Signal A Turning Point For Missile Defense
Loren ThompsonSenior Contributor
Oct 13, 2022,11:41am EDT
The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed MartinLMT -4.1% a $2 million contract in September to assess how high-energy lasers might be integrated into the nation’s missile-defense architecture.
It’s a modest contract for a company that generates over a billion dollars in revenue per week, but it could have outsized implications for how wars will be waged in the future, given the series of breakthroughs the world’s biggest defense company has achieved in laser systems.
Lockheed, a contributor to my think tank, recently delivered the most powerful laser it has ever built, a 300-kilowatt system, to a project run by the Pentagon’s research and engineering chief called the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative.
As reported by Jason Sherman in Inside Defense, the initiative as conceived in 2019 called for further scaling to a 500-kilowatt system in 2024, and then to 1,000 kilowatts (one megawatt) later in the decade. At the latter level of intensity, a laser could deposit enough energy on a hostile ballistic missile during its vulnerable boost phase to destroy the missile.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2022/10/13/lockheed-martin-laser-breakthroughs-could-signal-a-turning-point-for-missile-defense/?sh=4c2e52532cf0
