As expected, the U.S. armed forces are to request an increased budget to develop lasers, microwave beams, and other directed-energy defenses to fight off missiles and drone swarms, the Pentagon’s top weapons engineer said on 13 November. “You’re going to see, in upcoming budgets for missile defense, a renewed emphasis on laser scaling [meaning scaling up the power of lasers] across several technologies,” Michael Griffin, Defense undersecretary for research and engineering, said at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic International Studies, as reported by Michael Tucker on Defense One.
HEL-MD is designed as a C-RAM platform ) |