Defense & Intelligence Policy, Business and Technology

DoD Drafts Guidelines For Laser Design

Breaking Defense: As the military rushes to deploy new laser and microwave weapons, it doesn’t want to end up buying a welter of incompatible systems that don’t work well together, as happened so often in Afghanistan and Iraq. So the Pentagon’s directed energy chief, Thomas Karr, has tapped a veteran of Navy laser programs, Christopher Behre, to draft technical guidelines for all the programs to follow.

The directed energy “reference architecture” now in the works will not impose mandatory technical standards, Behre said. Instead, he told a Booz Allen Hamilton webinar today, the goal is to get in on the ground floor, before different services buy a host of different systems from different manufacturers that use incompatible components, and establish a modular open systems approach that all the programs can abide by.

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