Members of Congress want to know how the Air Force plans to defend remote or forward-deployed airfields as part of its Agile Combat Employment strategy. By February 1, the House Armed Services tactical air and land forces subcommittee expects a report outlining the Secretary of ...
The Air Force Research Laboratory has already experimented with airborne lasers on the virtual battlefield. Now the lab’s latest test has combined those lasers with next-generation kinetic weapons to see how they could work together. Seven pilots, weapon systems officers, and air battle managers took ...
Air Force Research Laboratory Commander Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle is bringing fresh eyes and outsider perspectives to the storied lab, and she's hiring a new executive to ensure that it will serve the newly created Space Force as well as it serves its traditional ...
The Air Force Research Laboratory is looking for contractors to build a fieldable high-powered microwave counter-drone system to defend air bases, AFRL announced July 29. It will spend $20 million on the program, the prototype for which it wants in 2023. The program is called ...
Air Force officials are still looking to perfect directed-energy weapons to use against the low-tech threat of small drones before scaling up lasers and microwaves to take out cruise missiles. The Air Force’s high-power microwave weapon known as the Tactical High-Power Microwave Operational Responder, or ...
The Air Force Research Laboratory announced April 6 it has kicked off its overseas demonstration of directed-energy weapons dispatched to take down threatening unmanned aircraft. While the demo has long been in the works, AFRL revealed that its Tactical High-Power Operational Responder (THOR) system will ...
When the Air Force Research Laboratory’s experimentation office was chartered in 2016, the idea of ‘try before you buy’ hadn’t picked up much speed. Nearly four years later, the office is using momentum and top cover from leadership to institutionalize experiments as regular practice in ...
Military research on how to protect against threatening unmanned aircraft has so far focused on two ends of the drone spectrum—store-bought products like small quadcopters and large, advanced aircraft akin to the MQ-9 Reaper. But Evan Hunt, high-energy laser business development lead at Raytheon, argues ...
A recent set of experiments with laser and microwave weapons in Oklahoma is shaping how the Air Force moves forward with its plan to protect bases from drones using directed energy. Five systems participated in the Air Force portion of the Maneuver and Fires Integrated ...
High-power microwave weapons, like the Raytheon system shown here, are being vetted to fry electronics for a variety of uses like base defense. Raytheon photo. The US military has doubled its spending on directed energy weapons over the past two...