[Click here for printer-friendly version]

[Click here to view the slide presentation]

Colonel Daniels: The Airborne Laser (ABL) program was an Air Force program up until 2001 when it was transferred to the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). Part of the ballistic missile defense architecture is to shoot down ballistic missiles. We're a 747-400 freighter. A really exciting program; we're really pushing the state of the art. There's never a dull moment on this program. It’s really an exciting time to be on the program. We're way past the bluegrass stage, and I’m the program director. We've got real hardware, real airplanes, real lasers, so it's an exciting time to be on the program.

Again, we are a new 747-400 freighter. We needed a big airplane because the stuff we're putting in the airplane is quite large and I'll talk to you a little bit about that later.

We’re doing some work out at Edwards Air Force Base. I call it the world's largest contact lens—it’s about a 1.7 meter diameter piece of glass that the laser propagates through out the front of the airplane. That turret weighs about six tons. It's a very large piece of equipment, as you can imagine on a 747. Then there's a rolled shell, so we get 360 or many axes of rotation there with the turret.

The pod on top of the airplane's is going to have a carbon dioxide laser which will allow us to go out and get very active state vectors off of boosting missiles and give cues to other systems as well as predict where the missile came from and where it's headed—which as you know is pretty important to a theater commander.

We relocated the weather radar that goes in the front. It gives you an idea of how big this airplane is. The weather radar is a big bump there and below it is an infrared search and track camera. There are two other cameras on each side of the airplane and one in the tail which gives us 360 degree infrared coverage for the initial launch of the missile. That's what starts the tracking sequence.

Again, we’re the air-based component of the ballistic missile defense system. Being an airborne asset gives us some flexibility to get to places in the world fairly quickly. We are a 747-400 freighter. Our job is to acquire, track and kill missiles in their initial stages of flight. We protect deployed forces, our allies and friends in the area, from ballistic missile attack.

I'm convinced that directed energy is going to be a way of life in the future for fighting wars. I really am. I think that in 10 or 20 years you're going to see a lot of directed energy weapons as we begin to get the power up and the weight down on these systems. There are an awful lot of things we're doing with ABL high powered optics, the coatings that will withstand a megawatt class laser, Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) control. If you do this, you're not going to be able to shoot anything down, so you have to be able to focus that beam over the target and hold it there very steady. That's not an easy job in an airplane, so we're working that hard and we're making a lot of progress on that.

I think there are 101 uses for lasers in the future—a lot more uses than just shooting down ballistic missiles. You can use your imagination. When we were an Air Force program, the Air Force was looking at many other missions for this airplane. So I'm convinced this will be a multi-mission platform some day.

Boeing obviously produced the airplane and it's a new airplane which we learned from the Joint Surveillance and Attack Radar Systems (JSTARS). You've got a complex system and you buy an old airplane and it's pretty tough, because now you've got airplane problems and weapon system challenges, so the Air Force was smart in that we bought a new airplane.

The lasers are in the back of the airplane. You can think of them as kind of like batteries. We have six of those in the back, six modules that are packed together. There are three on each side. Each one of them is the size of a Chevy Suburban sitting on its end, so they're not small devices. They're pretty dog-gone big.

Northrop Grumman, once TRW, produces the lasers for us. There is some tankage in the back for the various chemicals that are used for the laser. Lockheed Martin does our optics. We call that our beam control/fire control. That basically is the complex set of optics that allows you to get the laser from the back of the airplane all the way out the front and to precisely track and hold that on target. Then Boeing does our battle management. BMC4I, there's consoles there on the lower deck; eight of those consoles. We envision probably four of those staying for the operational jet. Boeing does the battle management as well as the aircraft mods.

So that's our team. We’ve got a great government team. The thing I like about coming to work is nothing's too hard to do. On this program that's important because what we do is pretty dog-gone hard.

We started out as an Air Force program back in 1996 working system design and, again, in 2001 we transferred funding and program direction from the Air Force to the Missile Defense Agency. My boss is Lieutenant General Henry A. “Trey” Obering III at the Missile Defense Agency, but I get all my train, organize and equip through the Air Force Program Office, so I kind of serve two masters, if you will. I work for Lieutenant General John L. “Jack” Hudson at Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) to get my people trained, organized and equipped, and I work for General Obering for my performance rating and for cost schedule and program direction. We get our funds from MDA.

In 2000 through 2003 we were building and testing a lot of systems for the airplane. We were testing the laser, the optics, the DMC4I and getting the airplane modified. 2004 was a big year for us. That was the year that we got the airplane back in flight, in December of 2004, with the battle management and the optics on board. The only thing missing from the airplane right now is the laser. The laser's on the ground right now at Edwards Air Force Base and we start testing again this Friday and we hope to finish up in about a month and a half with the laser testing on the ground.

We bought an old fuselage from a worn-out airliner and we put the lasers in a fuselage there at the System Integration Lab at Edwards to make sure we could form, fit and function everything in an airplane before we put it on our airplane.

In 2005, we finished eight months of flight testing at Edwards. During that testing, we tested out what we call Low Power Systems Integration-Passive, “passive” just meaning we weren't firing any lasers out the front of the airplane. What we were doing was making sure the battle management could control all the optics, that we could inertially point to a place in space from the turret, and that aerodynamically everything was okay. Also we floated the optical in flight to take JTRS measurements across the airplane to make sure we'd be able to control JTRS with the laser.

On November 10, we produced light at Edwards Air Force Base. Since that time, we've lased about 50 times on the ground.

“Fireflies”—that's nothing more than you get a little dust inside the system. As you can imagine with a megawatt class laser, if there's any dust or impurities in that system, it's going to vaporize it. Those are called fireflies.

Again, in November we fired all six of those modules together at Edwards Air Force Base on the ground. We verified the physics of that setup when we verified our codings to handle that load. The laser hardware's progressing well and we're just about to the point where we can take that down and refurbish it and getting ready to put it back on the airplane. That was a major accomplishment for the team at the end of 2004.

We finished eight months of flight testing at the end of July. That was a real tough milestone. I came on board April 1 as the program director, and this one was going to be a tough milestone to achieve. I'm really, really proud that the team was able to pull this one off. There was a heck of a lot of work and a lot of all-nighters pulled by our team.

The optics are on board, the battle management's on board, the airplane finished up the flight testing at Edwards. We took it to Wichita the first week of August. What's going on in Wichita is they're doing final provisioning in the back of the airplane, getting ready to install lasers next summer. In the front of the airplane what we're doing is installing two eliminator lasers and continuing the optics check out there at Wichita. Next spring and next summer, we'll be doing some more flight testing in Wichita. When we finish that up, it goes back to Edwards and the laser goes on board.

You can imagine on this program you've kind of got to walk before you run because you don't want to be too big a hero and damage equipment. So we’re taking a very structured approach here to make sure the airplane's ready before we go back into flight testing.

We have a dual track approach on the program. We've been working the top half of the schedule and the middle half in parallel. Again, we finished up the flight testing at Edwards Air Force Base, we're doing this work right now at Wichita, and we're going to finish up the laser work hopefully no later than the end of October. That's our goal, to get out of there by the end of October. This work's already going on at Wichita, as well. They're working the back half of structural mods and on the front half they're doing some more optics work and installing two illuminator lasers on the airplane. Next summer, we’ll bring the airplane back to Edwards, put the Chevy Suburbans in the back, and then we'll start doing ground and flight testing.

Our graduation exercise is shooting down a short-range ballistic missile in 2008. Very shortly after that we're going to do some envelope expansion go after medium-range ballistic missiles and ICBMs.

We talked about first light at Edwards. We talked about getting the airplane back in flight with the optics and the battle management in December. We were supposed to finish the laser work by the end of September. Again, I think we're going to miss that by about one month. We finished our passive flight testing at Edwards the end of July. As soon as we finish the laser work, we'll begin to take the laser apart and the Systems Integration Lab will refurbish it. We've been flowing chemicals through that for some time now, so we'll clean it up and lay it out and get it ready for when the airplane comes back to Edwards. Then we'll put it back on. Again, our lethal demo will be in 2008.

There's a lot of stuff that has to fine-tuned as you can imagine. We don't just go out and shoot at a short-range ballistic missile. There's a lot of stuff we're doing. We have a very high-flying composite airplane that loiters at altitude for long periods of time. We have a target board that hangs on the bottom of that airplane. And we'll be using that airplane as well as some other stuff to prove out everything. You don't want to be on board one of those airplanes and have us experimenting with a high energy laser, but our tracking and our illuminator lasers we'll use to make sure we can compensate for the atmosphere before we do this test.

Again, we plan on buying a second airplane right after we prove we can do what we say we can do. That second airplane will be kind of a bridge between what's very much a prototype airplane, the first airplane in production. If you start on acquisition stuff, it's kind of a more traditional Embraer (EMB) kind of a program for that second airplane; a bridge to production.

I've got to tell you one of the challenges we have on a program like this is you can't just go somewhere and have that built. You can't just go to WalMart and have it coated and have it withstand a high energy laser. So one of the things that I have to do is make sure the industrial base is there to support it. In many cases, there's just one or two folks that do the kind of work they do. So we have some spares and some other things that we have done to keep those folks kind of alive, if you will, so they can go back and work. This is an amazing problem on a lot of our weapons systems in the Air Force. You design something and it becomes obsolete or maybe those folks decide to go into another line of business or they're not available.

FY05, we're going to get full power, full duration lasing at Edwards by the end of October, which I'm looking forward to.

We’ve gotten to about 80 percent of design power so far, which is pretty good. We want to bump that number up and we also want to increase the lasing duration that we've had.

The passive flight test that we did out at Edwards … Again, we verified the aircraft air worthiness, we did the envelope expansion, and you can imagine the nose on the airplane is a little different, so there's quite a bit of flight testing data points that we need to build up to with the nose on the airplane.

BMC4I and the optics, interface and timing ... We were able to verify all that. We got a good handle on the JTRS which is a major concern for a laser system. You have to very steadily hold the laser on target. You can't have any of this going on or you're not going to be able to do what you say you can do.

Then we verified our ability to track and target. Once your IR hones in, it's going to tell that optic system where to look, and your sensors basically go from very wide lens down to a soda straw, so it's important that we hold that target very precisely in space. We looked at many optics systems.

In 2006 we're going to install these two illuminators. If you're not knowledgeable about the program, we have something called a “tracking illuminator laser” and a “beacon illuminator laser.” The tracking illuminator laser goes out in front of the airplane. It's a solid state laser, kilowatt class, and it very accurately paints the nose of the missile. It pretty much gives us an aim point on where they want to send out the next series of lasers. The beacon illuminator laser gives us a measure of atmospheric compensation, a measure of how bad the atmosphere is between the airplane and the missile.

It sounds a little like science fiction, but if you get online and do some searches, you'll find that atmospheric compensation is done every day in observatories to basically take out the crud in the atmosphere. We're doing the same thing, we're just doing it from the airplane.

So the beacon illuminator goes out and we have some sensors in there to tell us what the atmosphere is doing to that beam between the airplane and the missile. Then we have a rubber mirror that basically conjugates the signal of what we send out to the atmosphere, refocuses the high energy laser on the missile. It's kind of a neat concept and it works really well.

I've got a great team working ABL. I've left a lot of time for questions on purpose, and also I was adamant about finishing on time, it was one of the requirements, so I wanted to make sure we did that.

Summing up, our primary mission is to shoot down missiles in the boost phase of flight. A secondary mission is to provide launch warning and detection systems. We can give launch locations and where something's headed fairly accurately which is kind of neat. If you were in Operation Desert Storm, if you have a missile that is going, it's kind of hard to get a bead on where that's headed. So instead of putting the whole country in MOP gear, you might be able to tell that it's headed to a specific location which is pretty helpful.

Again, I can't overemphasize this enough. We're plowing new ground for a lot of weapon systems in the future. A lot of accomplishments. I've got a great team. Our industry and government partners are awesome. There's never a dull moment on this program.

With that, I'll close and be glad to take any questions anybody has.

Q: The Navy's developing a matrix that utilizes free election laser accelerators. Have you compared the ABL laser with accelerators?

Colonel Daniels: I have not, but my laser experts talk to the Army and the Navy, the high energy laser folks out at White Sands, and they look at many other lasers that compare to us.

The chemical lasers are really the only lasers in the game right now that produce the kind of power that we need and package it in something that will fit on an airplane. Solid state lasers, as you know, haven't really gotten to the power level that we need today to be an effective weapon system. They generate a lot of heat and they take a lot of power. So chemical lasers are the way to generate quite a bit of power in a small amount of space.

Q: Now that you're at a point of demonstrating results, what kind of booster team do you envision to be in the back? Obviously with this program you were looking at space and missile folks, but once you reach Initial Operating Capability (IOC) are you looking for…

Colonel Daniels: Actually, we're teamed very closely with Air Combat Command (ACC). They're going to be the user, the operator. United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) will probably be the end user, but we've got a good relationship with ACC. If you give me your name I can connect you with my point of contact at ACC. They've already laid out the battle management plan and the various Air Force Specialty Codes (AFSCs) that will be needed. But they're basically battle management; I call them “scopeheads.” That's probably not politically correct any more. [Laughter] But they're basically existing AFSCs that will be training. The consoles are operable if you were Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS)-qualified or whatever. As a matter of fact, the software, the operators, obviously were sitting right there helping us do that. That's kind of what we envision.

Q: We have a long history of developing platforms that are later used for different purposes. Is it going to be possible, or have you guys considered this as an air-to-air platform?

Colonel Daniels: The Air Force, back when we were an Air Force program, had several missions they were looking at. One is self defense. You can read that in terms of another airplane or maybe long-range surface-to-air missiles. You don't necessarily have to blow them up, you can deter them and do other things. So they were looking at some of that before we transferred the program to the Missile Defense Agency. I don't think that will go away. An airplane is a really soft target. If your sensors can find it and track it, you've got an awfully long range here with a high energy laser. You're moving at the speed of light. It's pretty hard to get away from the speed of light when you're a long way away because the angles are not very gross.

Right now, I'm very much focused on my primary mission, but I'm very, very confident that directed energy platforms can be used for a number of things downstream. That's certainly one area that I would think would be looked at really hard.

Q: What problems, if any, have you had with adapting the chemical laser to the airborne environment in terms of pressurization, turbulence, that sort of thing? How stable is it?

Colonel Daniels: It's pretty stable. As you can imagine with the vibrations and stuff, we've got issues in areas where we have a lot of movement. 747s … If we sit in the tail of an airplane versus the front of the airplane, you get moved around a lot, so there's a lot of movement on the 747. We have some really good containment systems. We have a lot of back-up systems where if we did get a lead, we have containment. We also have the ability to jettison stuff and fly. We have the crew sealed off, if you will, from a massive bulkhead. The thousand bulkhead, we call it, where you have positive pressure between the manned or section of the airplane with the chemical plant. So it's working out pretty well. That doesn't mean we don’t have to keep our eye on it because there's a lot of vibration, a lot of moving parts.

The pressurization thing, we haven't had any issues with that. It's mainly just motion. We've also learned a lot by operation in that fuselage on the ground. The machinery produces a lot of vibration, so we've got a lot of instrumentation in the 747 on the ground.

We also heavily instrumented this airplane which we flew around to make sure that our models were accurately predicting the alloys. As a matter of fact, there were even some plumbing hotspots that were installed in the back of the instrument to give us the warm fuzzy that we need for our comfort level.

It's a challenge. It's not something we're not going to be able to overcome.

Q: As far as a future targeted IOC date, how many aircraft, what's going into those aircraft, and any talk on basing, where that might be? I'm not sure how that decision's made. And a second question … Are there any weather limitations with this laser?

Colonel Daniels: Good questions. Air Combat Command, as you can imagine, is interested in the program. It has some money POM'd (Program Objective Memorandum). I'm not sure the years that are lined up. They're working that right now.

ACC had envisioned a fleet of seven airplanes. That would give you five in a forward operating location, one might be in depot, another might be in training as with any fleet of airplanes.

The operational concept, there is a ConOps for this from Air Combat Command. We believe we can forward deploy. The chemicals have a pretty good shelf life. They're standard industrial chemicals that you can even move and mix in place, or maybe have fuel farms at forward locations at a couple of places in the world.

Your second question was about the weather. The lasers do not like weather. As an airborne platform, we're above the weather 95 percent of the time for sure, and we always are shooting up, we don't usually shoot down. That gives us an advantage. We don't want to shoot through clouds, they're not good for lasers. You wouldn't want to shoot through the rain, that's not good for lasers. You'd also get a lot of stray light. So we fly high, we fly above the weather.

I have a couple of weathermen that work for me in the program office and they're developing something called an “atmospheric decision aid” which allows us in real-time to relocate on orbit and optimize our orbit.

And then basing ... Basing is certainly a political question. ACC has done some site surveys and what they found pretty much is this thing could be based anywhere we can handle large airplanes, so they're looking at bases that have long runways, a wide taxi space, and hopefully some big hangars. So there are a number of bases that Air Combat Command has gone out and looked at.

IOC, we're not going to buy the second airplane until 2009. I think the fastest I can get that second airplane done—you're probably looking at 2013. It takes about 18 months to build an airplane, about 18 months to two years to modify it. So it depends upon how well we do with the first airplane on how much risk Air Combat Command would be willing to accept in terms of when we need it by.

I also think the first airplane and the second airplane have some emergency operation capability; kind of like JSTARS. When this thing works and there's a hot spot in the world, I don't care if you're only working half the time, you load up the crew and get it over there, wherever there is.

Q: You talked previously about the IR sensors … Are these really picking up any ballistic missiles in the boost stage? What is the accuracy that you achieve with the IR sensors?

Colonel Daniels: I can't give you the exact number in this forum, but since we have six of them, we get some cross-reference with the IR sensors. We don't immediately go to a soda straw look in the turret. We have something called an “acquisition sensor” that's in the turret. So the IR sensors—which by the way are heavily modified from the F-14, their existing technology—they'll give me a point in space that's accurate enough to where my acquisition sensor in the turret can see what it needs to see and then it begins to neck down. I can't give you the specific number here. But they're accurate enough to do the job.

By the way, we took this airplane, and I think it was in 2001, it might have been 2002, but it was during a ballistic missile launch for MDA of an ICBM and we used ABL and our battle management suite along with the IR sensors to track a ballistic missile launch through the various stages. So we've actually shown that our sensor suite worked pretty well.

Q: I ran the lethality testing in '95 and '96. That was the Air Force-sponsored lethality testing… Has the contractor validated those results, and what's happened in the last couple of years? My second question is about big environmental hazards. At that time, in '95 and '96, we were talking about it. What can you tell me about environmental hazards that you’re facing in the coil laser today?

Colonel Daniels: The lethality testing continues on today. We've got a strong relationship with the Air Force Research Lab. They have continued doing what you were doing, expanding our look at what the threat set is out there. You were probably there when we did the third scale and half scale and the…

Q: Right. Using the laser down at White Sands…

Colonel Daniels: So that's actually been vetted well. We think we have a real good understanding of the failure and we are continuing on as the threat set evolves, because as you know, the Missile Defense Agency is very interested in us looking at all ballistic missiles.

When we were an Air Force program after Operation Desert Storm, they were very interested in us looking at joint range theater missiles, and now that's expanded quite a bit.

In terms of environmental hazards, with the chemical oxygen iodine laser which is the power plant in the back of the airplane, we've got a lot of safeguards in place. At Edwards, we've been operating that thing extremely well. The by-products of the reaction are very benign. It's mainly steam. A lot of vapor comes out of the airplane. So when you're in flight and you're lasing the exhaust that comes out the back of the airplane, back here it's primarily steam and some salts. It's fairly benign, but you wouldn't want to spill the chemicals on your hand, so there are many safeguards that are taken both on the airplane and on the ground at Edwards to make sure we're handling the chemicals properly.

The harder part of this, to be honest with you, is the eye safety and the collateral avoidance kinds of things of where we're going to shoot. For our test program we worked very closely with STRATCOM to make sure we had a shoot window in a cone and we were flying pretty hard, we knew where the other airplanes were, and we were shooting up, so we didn't worry about commercial airplanes or birds. Someone asked me about birds in an interview I had for the Discovery Channel. I answered flippantly, which was probably wrong, I said, “well it would be a bad day for the bird if it flew through the laser beam.” [Laughter] Then I corrected myself and I said but there aren't many birds that are flying around up there unless they're wearing an oxygen mask. So I'm not sure that part's going to make it in the interview. Probably the other part will go in and I’ll get some bad mail from somebody.

But the eye safety thing is important, and also protection of other assets. That's the bigger deal for something like a directed energy weapon. We're plowing a lot of new ground on that. The goal would be to be able to do decentralized predicted avoidance on the airplane, having information on board and having that in the battle management system basically so you know you're clear to shoot.

Probably the bigger issue right now is the chemicals themselves. These are industrial chemicals. They're used all over the world—hydrogen peroxide, chlorine, iodine, that stuff is used commercially a lot of places. But it is a complicated operation and we need to emphasize safety.

Q: Any danger of Boeing shutting down the 747-400 production line? And do you know when they do plan on shutting it down?

Colonel Daniels: It just so happens there's a Boeing guy in the audience. Jim, do you want to touch that? I don't want talk about your aircraft production.

Boeing Representative: We watch it real close. We're very hopeful to keep on selling Boeing 747 airplanes. In fact, we're having a pretty good year. But it's an issue we look at. It's not a slam dunk that Boeing will have that production line forever. Obviously, it depends upon the commercial business. But it looks like the business is stronger this year than we thought it was last year. So we're very optimistic about it, but we watch it very close.

Colonel Daniels: That's one of the unknowns of the universe, but there are a lot of airframes out there, too.

Boeing Representative: Also, you can read the newspapers, there's a discussion within the Boeing family about launching a new derivative of the 747, and if that takes place, they're not going to do that unless they're going to stick with it a long time. I don't have a precise answer because it's driven by the market and it's driven by the airline business.

Q: Is the fuel efficiency of the 747 an influence at this point with the current fuel prices?

Colonel Daniels: No, to be honest with you, it's one of the few airframes that can really carry the volume of stuff we need. One of the challenges we do have is we're not as aerodynamic as we'd like to be up here.

Q: I meant from the perspective of Boeing.

Boeing: That's a contest between us and the Airbus people. Boeing thinks the 747 is a competitive airplane and if they invest, and particularly in this new derivative, they'll have the capability that makes it a competitive airplane.

Q: Can you talk a bit about the targeting system; specifically how it handles multiple targets and how quickly it can access them?

Colonel Daniels: It's really fast. I can't tell you a specific number in here. First of all, the active range of the system on the top can handle many, many targets at one time, so you can go out very quickly on the operational airplane, go out and ping a target, download that vector and that information in the battle management system and very quickly pop between the ballistic missiles if there's a lot of launch.

The main turret you can obviously only engage one at a time, so the battle management hopefully will help you prioritize what you need to shoot at. If you go out there for a few seconds and you kill one, and you already know where you're going to kill the next, the turret and the ball rotates really fast, depending upon which way the airplane's pointed. But the recovery and the refresh rate in terms of the laser recycling is very fast. We fired it many times out at Edwards with ten-minute turns, and ten-minute turns are really a ground limitation at Edwards because we have to simulate altitude.

So if you were to go to Edwards, you'd see a giant sphere out there, about eight feet in diameter. You pump that down and simulate altitude by hooking some bellows up to the bottom of the airplane because the laser needs a vacuum to operate. So all we're doing there is simulating the airplane being at altitude. The chemicals are circulating the whole time, so when you get ready to do a laser engagement the only thing that happens is you increase the circulation of the basic hydrogen peroxide.

Q: I see you don't have any wings, and I wondered how you managed to be a Systems Program Office (SPO) Director. Did you come up through acquisition or…

Colonel Daniels: No, actually I was enlisted for six years, so my photograph got mixed up somewhere along the line and somehow I slid through the cracks and made colonel. [Laughter] I was a crew chief on C-141s starting out, and then I was an engineer up through major. I was a 6-2 guy. A very smart colonel that I worked for in the program office as a major said, “Daniels, you need to go over to the 6-3 ranks. There's an awful lot of great opportunities in the 6-3 ranks. The 6-2 and the 6-1 jobs for officers are a little bit more neck down if you look at the pyramids.” So that's kind of how I came up.

You're off to a great start if you're in school because you've kind of got the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on your butt there, so you're going to get a good job out of school. So learn all you can and you're off to the races.

SPO Director is an awesome job. I've got some operational time as a crew chief, and then as a lieutenant I flew back seat of a P-33 targeting pod and did a depot tour, working on C-130s. So I've got a lot of different experiences, which I like.

The SPO Director job, it doesn't matter what your badge is, by the way. I never really got hung up on that in my career. I've worked for some pilots that are just unbelievable leaders. General Bruce Carlson is the Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) Commander. I worked for him when he was a one-star. I'd jump of a cliff for that guy. He is awesome.

At school, I don't think you have the limits either. I envision a non-rated Chief of Staff certainly during your career. Females. A female President, female Chief of Staff. I believe the only thing that will hold anybody back today is their attitude and their willingness to make things better and be enthusiastic about coming to work.

Q: You mentioned the battle management system. Does that mean Link-16 with AWACS without radars?

Colonel Daniels: Uh huh. The airplane has Link-16 on it. We've got a message set already developed that we've demonstrated from the airplane to the ground station at Edwards and also from a virtual lab to Aegis. So we do have Link-16 in a dedicated message set.

We're also looking at Joint Range Extension (JRE) for maybe not this airplane but the following one. We're not funded for that right now. That will give us a little bit more capability.

Q: You said you can use the IR all the way around the airplane and still be able to turn around in time?

Colonel Daniels: You don't want to turn away from the threat, so typically you're in a part of the world you kind of know where somebody might launch from, so you generally always turn towards the threat. You do that by flying a figure eight. It would be unusual to have something behind you. Also, in an operational construct, you would hope to have two different airplanes. But it's usually not going to be an issue because you kind of know; if you think something might happen.

Q: What is the active distance of your targeting?

Colonel Daniels: I can't tell you that in here. What I can tell you is it's a long way, it's hundreds of kilometers. It varies on the type of missile you shoot. It's easier for us to shoot the high-flying missiles and the long-range missiles because they go really high and they burn a long time. So an ICBM, if we're in the neighborhood, is actually easier than a shorter range missile because they're very bright and they burn for a long time and they shoot up. With the laser, the more up I can shoot the better, because it goes through less atmosphere. They have less reduction for the laser power.

We're completely autonomous which means we don't need to get intelligence from anybody else like a satellite, but we are able to take cues. If somebody sees something before we do, they can cue us. So we could be cued from space if we needed to be. But, actually, I think in more cases than not we probably see it first, especially if it's not a cloudy day and you can pick it up.

Q: The way you envision this being used—would you consider using the ABL to help protect the USAF fleet from some of the high-flying, more strategic SAMs? I mean you wouldn't only go against ballistic missiles…

Colonel Daniels: That was one of the adjunct missions that Air Combat Command considered in the study when we were an Air Force program. I think that may come back. Some of the ground, surface-to-air missiles that go pretty high are fairly predictable flight paths, and they're certainly vulnerable to a laser. So I can't speak for the user, but I would think in the future Air Combat Command would look at that again. There are studies that have already been done on that.

Q: Can you shoot a satellite with the ABL? That may be classified. Next question, how many shots do you get out of a magazine?

Colonel Daniels: The second question I'll answer first. We can engage multiple missiles. I can't tell you in here how many seconds a magazine you have. And again, how many seconds you use for engagement depends upon the missile type, how far away I am, how high it is, etc. But you can have multiple engagements of a number of missiles with the system. That's as good as I can do with it in this forum. I apologize for that.

As far as your first question goes, we’re really focused on our ballistic missile mission right now. You can use your imagination for any variety of things that a laser might do in the future.

Our sensor package on this airplane is really optimized for that hot plume of a booster missile. So that's a different kind of a problem than you might have on some of the other things. That's probably as good as I can do on that one. But you can use your imagination. I think an airborne laser, a spaceborne laser, a ground laser, can be used for a whole bunch of things in the future and we'll just have to see what pans out. Right now, we're focused on our ballistic missiles and that's what our sensors are optimized for.

Q: A ballistic missile has a boost phase and then it has that coasting/free flight phase. Are you guys targeting only in that first phase?

Colonel Daniels: We're looking at it while it's boosted. That's the way our sensors are optimized. A boosting missile is under a whole lot of stress. It's pressurized internally, there's a lot of vibration, and we use that to our advantage. The missile basically destroys itself. We heat the side of that missile up really fast and because it's pressurized and under a lot of stress, it's a pretty catastrophic event. Once it starts to coast, it's hard for us to see and it's a whole different kill mechanism.

The other advantage to killing them in the boost phase is you can get them before you deploy any kind of submunition or decoy. So if you kill it early on, you eliminate an awful lot of the problems that the other people have. If you hit it early enough and it's got something nasty on it, it may fall back down in an area where enemy forces are located. Maybe they have shot it and it lands in their own country.

Thanks a lot. I appreciate you all coming.

# # #

Return to AFA Air & Space Conference Page