A top US Navy fleet commander says the service should be “embarrassed” by the fact it hasn’t managed yet to scale directed energy weapons onboard its ships despite having experimented with the technology since the Reagan administration, Breaking Defense reports.
“There’s been many a thesis and dissertation written on building lasers on ships, but we’ve not transitioned that into a place where that’s an acceptable way to actually take out missile systems,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, commander of US Fleet Forces Command, told a group of reporters at the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium.
“These things are based on renewable energy, so I can recharge the system … I don’t have to worry about payload [or] volume with directed energy. All those things are appealing to a navy, [but] we just haven’t really matriculated that into a place … that’s ready for prime time,” he continued.
Caudle is not the first admiral to sound off about his frustrations with the service’s progress on directed energy, but he may be the most senior. During last year’s symposium, Vice Adm. Brendan McLane, the top surface warfare officer, and Rear Adm. Fred Pyle, who was the surface warfare requirements director at that time, both weighed in with similar sentiments.
“Sometimes we have a tendency to over promise and under deliver,” Pyle told attendees then. “We need to flip that to where, when we’re intellectually honest, when we’re honest with ourselves from a technology capability, that we have an agreed upon sight picture of what it’s going to look like to deliver that capability.”
Indeed, the service has had a myriad of scattered projects that resulted in functional lasers and even a handful of successful demonstrations knocking out practice targets. But all those efforts either remain stuck in a laboratory or as a one-off effort only sent and deployed to a single warship.
Pressed for what needs to change, Caudle was candid that it’s not clear to him what is continuing to go wrong.
“I just think sometimes something can stare us right in the face, but we just don’t go do it,” he said. “Directed energy is one of those things that either industry, politically, leadership — we’re just not on the same page of getting behind it with a sense of urgency and making it ready to go.”
