The drone swarm we fretted would darken the skies, overwhelm our antiaircraft defenses, and rain death? Yeah, we got that. That’s the message from Northrop Grumman, the second biggest U.S. defense contractor. Northrop’s Counter Unmanned Aerial Systems (C-UAS), which detects, engages and shoots down drones with a combination of “directed energy and kinetic effectors,” is in operation today. Northrop doesn’t say where. Ukraine would be our guess.
How about rockets, artillery shell and mortar rounds. Check. That’s Northrop’s Counter Rockets, Artillery and Mortar (C-RAM), which is able to fire its ray gun from a turret mounted on a Humvee. Details on whether it is operational or where it might be being tested are not forthcoming.
Air Land and Sea? Yup.
Northrop Grumman appears to be at the forefront of directed energy weapon system design, showing such weapons on fighter aircraft, ships and ground vehicles.
A 150 kW laser weapon system “demonstrator” was deployed on the USS Portland and saw action in December 2021 with the U.S. 5th Fleet. Donna Howland, Northrop Grumman’s acting business development director for Directed Energy and program manager Laser Weapon System—Demonstrator, was happy to have moved the laser weapon “from science fiction to science fact.”
Recently, Northrop Grumman announced that it had reduced a directed energy weapon, the Phantom, a ray gun with enough power (10 kW) to zap an aircraft out of the sky, to a package the size of a dorm room fridge.
Weighing in at 200 pounds, the Phantom can be carried onto the battlefield by two soldiers, who would also set it up and fire it—a big improvement over previous directed energy weapon systems.
With the Phantom, the future of the ray gun may have arrived. A ray gun may be the best defense against multiple threats that even rag-tag militaries of the world can summon, such as a swarms of drones discussed in a previous article. While the sophisticated defenses of the superpowers (like the interceptors and antiaircraft missiles) are more than a match for individual drones, they can be overwhelmed by the sheer number of drones that can be launched.
Clearly, a laser weapon that is able to acquire, lock on and disable multiple threats in short order is the only hope against swarms of low-tech, low lethality drones. But a laser weapon could also be effective against hypersonic (Mach 5 or greater) missiles that can, with blinding speed, race past normal defenses. A Patriot missile is credited with downing a Russian hypersonic missile—a bit of a surprise to Raytheon, which supplies the Patriot to the U.S. military and has been sending them to Ukraine. And while it may make sense to send a $4 million Patriot missile up against a highly destructive hypersonic missile, it makes far less economic sense to send it toward a drone worth a few hundred dollars.
Northrop’s Skunk Works
Over the years, Northrop Grumman has developed its own Skunk Works. The original Skunk Works was a Lockheed operation that developed the U2 spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird and the stealth technology that made the F-117 appear as small as a ball bearing on radar screens. The Skunk Work’s extreme engineering and success with a small team operating under the tightest security was the envy of Northrop, which tried to lure away Ben Rich, second in command at the Lockheed facility, as told by Rich in his 2015 book “Skunk Works.”
Rich describes the U.S. military and the Air Force, in particular, as spreading contracts and technology around its main defense contractors to maintain healthy competition. This irritated Rich as Lockheed’s Skunk Works was the first to develop stealth technology and felt it had been their intellectual property.
Rich died in 1995 at the age of 69. He was not alive to see Northrop Grumman leapfrogging Lockheed in its own game, with the development of game-changing, futuristic technology as it has done with directed energy weapons.
Reference
Ben Rich and Leo Janus, Skunk Works, A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed, 1996.