Aviaton Week 14 Ottobre 2008

Raytheon is kicking off a U.S. Army program to mount Joint Silent Guardian non-lethal, directed energy weapons -- with a range of more than 250 meters -- on Ford 550 commercial trucks for crowd control.

The high power microwave (HPM) device heats water in a person's outer layers of skin to the point of pain. Tests have shown that the effects can reach through cracks in and around concrete walls and even through the glass of automobiles, company officials say.

A lot is still undecided about how the small fleet of vehicle/weapon combinations will be used. Among the decisions still to be made are which Army organization they will be assigned to, the maintenance scheme, the size of units they will be assigned to and whether they will go to urban areas of Iraq, officials say.

It is known that the effort is partially funded by $25 million in the fiscal 2008 defense supplemental budget as part of a July procurement for the global war on terrorism. The program is expected to be awarded by year's end. A year after the contract is signed, the combination vehicle/weapons will start be fielded at the rate of one per month.

Silent Guardian is a spinoff of the Active Denial System developed by Raytheon for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory as an advanced concept technology demonstration (ACTD) program (Aerospace DAILY, Sept. 12, 2007).

In an adjunct effort, the National Institute of Justice has expressed interest in a hand-held, probably rifle-sized, short range weapon that could be effective at tens of feet for law enforcement officials.

The 95 gigahertz part of the spectrum used by the HPM devices has other uses such as imaging. The Transportation Security Administration uses it for surveillance. There are hints that there is interest in a small-arms-like weapon that can be used for finding targets at long ranges and then used as a personnel deterrent at close range. Military planners also point out that an HPM weapon, unlike any kind of kinetic weapon, has no incendiary effects, which makes it useful for operations around high-value assets such as fuel or ammunition storage.

Raytheon's weapon is a derivative of the ADS, shown above in recent USAF testing. Credit: USAF

by David A. Fulghum

Source >  Aviatonweek.com | oct 09