Category: U.S. Army

FORT BELVOIR, Virginia — The Army is now running its Soldier Integration Facility, a kind of crossroads between the high-tech conceptual ways in which scientists go after warfighting problems and the different programs that actually build gear.

Much like a race car garage, where mechanics might pull down high-engineering ideas to continually tweak cars for test runs and races, those running the SIF want to see it testing ideas in the virtual world and then making physical versions of gear that can be handled.

Those items would then continue in development by the larger programs that get gear built in quantity.

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WASHNGTON: After years of lower-power field tests and more than one thousand hours of soldier feedback, the Army is on track to field-test two different types of high-energy lasers in 2022: a 50-kilowatt weapon to destroy enemy drones and incoming artillery rockets, and a 300-kW weapon that could potentially shoot down cruise missiles.

Key components are now under construction for both systems, the directed energy chief at the Rapid Capabilities & Critical Technologies Office said. And, Craig Robin told me ahead of today’s Space & Missile Symposium, the service plans many more “soldier touch points” to come on both programs, especially once the prototypes are built and available for field tests.

Furthest along is the 50-kilowatt laser, to be mounted on an 8×8 Stryker armored vehicle. It’s known in Army jargon as DE-MSHORAD (Directed Energy – Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense). Four prototype laser Strykers – a full platoon – will be fielded to an actual combat unit in 2022.

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The lieutenant general overseeing the Army’s hypersonic weapons program said the service will soon accelerate testing of the ultra-fast missile effort to compete with Russia and China in the race to field the deadly new technology.

In a joint effort with the Navy, the Army has been designing the Common-Hypersonic Glide Body, which will be used by all U.S. services, and is preparing to transition it to the defense industry, which will mass produce the technology.

The Army will soon begin ramping up the testing schedule so it can field the first operational hypersonic missile battery by fiscal 2023, Lt. Gen. Neil Thurgood, director of Hypersonics, Directed Energy, Space, and Rapid Acquisition, said Wednesday during a Defense News space and missile defense webinar.

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The Army’s security force assistance brigades are preparing for more global missions in the coming months, the outgoing commander of the SFAB enterprise, and his successor, said in interviews last week.

Some new missions will dispatch SFAB advisers to more austere and far-flung locations where the U.S. military footprint is less developed. That presents opportunities to work with new foreign militaries, but it can also complicate how advisers are protected and sustained.

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