Determining performance limits for directed energy weapons in collaborative active protections systems

Abstract

The application of directed energy effectors, and in particular high energy lasers, is of considerable importance for the future land fighting force. Such weapons have the utility for long distance precision strikes against targets, and so merit investigation for potential application in future emerging technology. Collaborative active protection systems is an emerging capability which is designed to provide automatic threat defence for an armoured fighting vehicle team. Performance prediction analysis of such future systems is thus of considerable importance to defence stakeholders.Recent studies have shown that the performance analysis of such systems can be very complicated, although in some cases this complexity can be reduced. The latter is certainly the situation when the number of threats the combat team is facing is smaller than the number of available countermeasures.Hence this paper proposes a methodology where this restriction can be eliminated. The key to this is to focus on the likelihood of at least one threat being eliminated, and examining performance prediction curves to assess this likelihood. Once consequence of this is that it becomes necessary to introduce a "rule of thumb" to interpret these performance prediction curves relative to the threat. To illustrate the potential of the methodology, an illustrative example will be analysed. This hypothetical example assumes some generic properties of a high energy laser directed energy weapons, operating in a collaborative active protection system context. It will be shown for this example that threats travelling at speeds significantly smaller than Mach 1 are likely to be countered through the collaborative active protection system, while the rule of thumb establishes that threats exceeding this speed are unlikely to be defeated.