by Paul Rogers
Scud B. A tactical, mobile, ballistic missile, it could deliver
a conventional, nuclear, biological, or chemical warheads to a target about 320
kilometers (200 miles) away.
(Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Author: Dennis Mosher, 1978).
The United States, Israel and
other military powers continue to seek the perfect weapon - from "unmanned
aerial vehicles" to "directed energy". They forget how the story
ends.
The occupation of Kuwait by
Saddam Hussein's Iraq in August 1990 was followed by the United States-led
assault of January 1991 which expelled the Iraqi forces. The coalition
assembled by Washington enjoyed great military superiority, but among the
problems it faced was Iraq's ability to fire Scud missiles, initially against Israel and later against coalition forces in Saudi Arabia. The Scuds,
based on crude Soviet missile technology of the 1950s, were highly inaccurate, but when aimed at large enough
targets such as military bases or ports still had some potential to do damage.
This was shown when a Scud hit a
US marines’ depot in Saudi Arabia, killing twenty-eight soldiers - the worst loss of life for the Americans in the
war. And in another incident which did not enter the public domain at the time,
a Scud landed in the sea within 300 metres of a US navy support-ship moored at the
Saudi port of Al-Jubayl alongside a large jetty laden with munitions and fuel. It was a narrow
miss; if the military depot had been hit the effects would have been
calamitous.
This incident was among the
factors that prompted the Pentagon to invest heavily in missile defences, with missiles such as the Scud prominent
in its thinking at the time. An early centrepiece of this effort, which continued
to develop even amid the winding down of the cold war, was a weapon that seemed
to come from the realms of science fiction: the airborne-laser (ABL) (see
"Directed energy: a new kind of
weapon”, 31 July 2002).
This project consumed hundreds of
millions of dollars in the late 1990s, and by early in the new century was
moving into the testing phase. At its centre was a modified Boeing 747 housing
a powerful three-megawatt chemical oxygen-iodine laser with a highly accurate
optical system, which could be aimed at missiles soon after their launch. The laser,
travelling at the speed of light, had a reported range of up to around 650
kilometres; thus it could patrol outside the airspace of an opponent such as
Iran or North Korea. It was calculated that the casing of these missiles, under
gravitational stresses as they rapidly accelerated in the boost phase of their
flight-path, would be subject to the intense heat of the laser - and thus
crumple and collapse.
The system was soon attracting
considerable interest. By 2003, the US air force was thinking about the
possible use of airborne lasers to hit ground-targets such as barracks, depots
or fuel-tankers. Indeed, the very idea of “directed-energy” weapons seemed, for military planners, to amount almost to a perfect weapon.
For if, the planners thought, the function of a weapon is to deliver energy to
disrupt a target, then ideally it should be very long-range, ultra-fast and
impeccably accurate.
Yet even at that stage there were
signs that the dream was beginning to turn sour. The entire programme was
proving far more difficult to execute and much more costly than anticipated,
with too many of the technologies simply too experimental. A couple of
successful tests were finally carried out in 2010. But by then support in
Congress was slipping; funding was cut at the end of that year, and the whole
project was cancelled in late 2011.
That might have been the end of
the story: an “ideal” weapon that was just too difficult to develop. But there
is a sequel. In mid-April 2013 the US navy announced that a fully operational laser-weapon is to be mounted on a
command-ship, the USS Ponce,
deployed in the Persian Gulf. Its main purpose is to provide defence against
armed drones and small speedboats (see Grace Jean, ”USN to deploy solid-state laser
weapon on USS Ponce”, Jane's Defence Weekly, 17
April 2013).
This laser-weapon system (LaWS)
is on a much smaller scale than the airborne laser; it has kilowatt power
rather than megawatt, and uses commercially available components. But it is
part of a much wider move to develop tactical directed-energy weapons, with
this time the US navy at the forefront (see Richard Scott, “Rays of light: can shipborne laser
weapons deliver”, Jane's International Defence Review,
March 2011).
Moreover, the idea is still very
much alive beyond the United States. Israel and China are among other countries getting in on the act, and there is
every indication that a number of new directed-energy weapons will be fielded
in the coming decade. The airborne laser may have been a technological step too
far, but for militaries around the world the overall concept retains great appeal.
The drone link
There is, though, a catch. What
works for the military may also work for the paramilitary, especially as the widespread use of quite
powerful lasers in industry means that civil laser technologies can readily be
modified by sub-state actors.
There is an analogy here with the
development of armed-drones. In this area the United States and Israel are in
the lead, several years ahead of western European countries as well as Russia and China. But others,
including Iran, are following suit (Israel said on 25 April 2013 that it had shot down yet another
drone, launched from southern Lebanon - presumably by Iran's ally Hizbollah). So too, with directed-energy weapons. For now, the United States and
Israel are in the front rank; but within a few years there will be a
proliferation, first to middle-ranking powers and then to non-state actors (see "An asymmetrical drone war", 19 August 2010).
What links armed-drones and directed-energy
weapons is that neither is subject to any kind of international arms-control process. Nor is one envisaged. Once again, the armourers are way ahead
of the arms controllers. That will almost certainly remain the case, which
reinforces the significant of the USS
Ponce's deployment. Almost
without noticing it, the world is creeping into yet another era of warfare. The
outcomes of this new era are unpredictable, though one thing is almost certain:
it will involve proliferation to multiple actors - both states and
paramilitaries alike.
Paul
Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford
University, northern England. He is openDemocracy's international-security
editor, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September
2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford
Research Group. His books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity,
2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century(Pluto Press, 3rd
edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogers
This
article first appeared on openDemocracy 2 May 2013.
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