Armoured Fighting Vehicle Team Performance Prediction against Missile Attacks with Directed Energy Weapons

Abstract

A recent study has introduced a procedure to quantify the survivability of a team of armoured fighting vehicles when it is subjected to a single missile attack. In particular this study investigated the concept of collaborative active protection systems, focusing on the case where vehicle defence is provided by high power radio frequency directed energy weapons. The purpose of the current paper is to demonstrate how this analysis can be extended to account for more than one missile threat. This is achieved by introducing a jump stochastic process whose states represent the number of missiles defeated at a given time instant. Analysis proceeds through consideration of the sojourn times of this stochastic process, and it is shown how consideration of these jump times can be related to transition probabilities of the auxiliary stochastic process. The latter probabilities are then related to the probabilities of detection and disruption of missile threats. The sum of these sojourn times can then be used to quantify the survivability of the team at any given time instant. Due to the fact that there is much interest in the application of high energy lasers in the context of this paper, the numerical examples will thus focus on such directed energy weapons for armoured fighting vehicle team defence.

Guarantees of Minimum Performance Levels With Directed Energy Weapons

“…Suppose that there are a series of N DEWs deployed on AFVs within the theatre of operations, and that they are focused on a single threat. A DEW's peak power density can be used to measure the applied power incident on the target [19]. It is assumed that these DEWs strike the target's surface area in different positions, and that the target has a vulnerability threshold U, such that if any of the resultant power densities of the DEWs on the target exceed this threshold then the target has been disabled.…”

“…It is assumed that these DEWs strike the target's surface area in different positions, and that the target has a vulnerability threshold U, such that if any of the resultant power densities of the DEWs on the target exceed this threshold then the target has been disabled. Hence one can consider the target defeated if at least one DEW's resultant power density exceeds the surface area vulnerability threshold [19].…”

“…Hence the distance to the target at time t is R j (t) = max{0, ν j (T j −t)}. The DEWs are assumed to operate in the same setting as applied in [13,19], whose models for propagation have been based upon that in [20]. The key operational parameters are that all DEWs operate at a wavelength of λ = 1.045 × 10 −6 metres, with a power level P j Watts and duty cycle C j .…”

“…An APS permits a series of armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs) to be equipped with an automatic threat detection and defeat system [14,15]. Studies at DSTG have investigated the concept of collaboration between AFVs equipped with APS which utilise DEWs [16][17][18][19]. The framework in which collaboration for APS has been studied at DSTG has been to assume that a fleet of AFVs consist of a subset of vehicles with a target detection, classification and tracking capability, while a second subset contains DEW capabilities.…”