Quantification of Combat Team Survivability With High Power Rf Directed Energy Weapons

Abstract

Modern combat teams face an increasingly complex battlefield, where threats may arise from a number of different sources. Examples include not only conventional attacks through rocket propelled grenades but also improvised explosive devices and weaponised unmanned aerial vehicles. Combat teams can now be equipped with sophisticated surveillance and reconnaissance capability, as well as automatically activated defences. The focus of this paper is to consider the utility of collaborative active protection systems, which are designed to provide an active defence against threats to a combat team. Specifically, a general statistical framework for the analysis of such systems is introduced, with a particular focus on high power radio frequency directed energy weapon countermeasures. The mathematical model allows for a subset of the combat team to be responsible for target detection and tracking, and a time-varying subset of team members with suitable countermeasures to be specified separately. The overall probability of threat defeat and team survivability is then derived. Some examples are provided to investigate the utility of such systems.

Performance Prediction of Directed Energy Weapons

“…The context for the example considered is a land-based armoured fighting vehicle with a HEL DEW, facing a series of homogeneous threats, as in the studies reported in [11,16]. Here it is assumed that a series of 10 threats are fired toward the DEW's platform, and that each threat travels at a constant speed of 50 metres per second.…”

“…The general results derived will then be applied to a HEL DEW with parameters sourced from the open literature, to illustrate how DEW performance prediction can be quantified using this approach. It is worth remarking that the general methods can also be applied to HPRF DEWs; a suitable reference which contains a relevant expression for the probability of HPRF DEW defeat of a target can be found in [11]. Additionally, the framework developed can also be applied to any situation where a weapon system faces a series of targets, provided that a suitable expression for the arrival process and probability of defeat can be stipulated.…”

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

“…Additionally, it will be assumed that the C-APS has the maximum number of effectors available to eliminate the threats. This case, where each AFV is assumed to have a HEL DEW, has been shown in Weinberg (2021a) and Weinberg and Kracman (2021) to provide the maximal probability of defeat of threats. Hence this provides a best case result: as will be shown this best case result will not be effective against certain threats in a particular illustrative example.…”

“…Such a system utilises sharing of information between different vehicles and then coordination of effectors to defeat the threats. Some recent examinations of C-APS in the context of interest can be found in Weinberg (2021a) and Weinberg and Kracman (2021). Figure 1 provides an illustration of the combat situation under consideration, where the combat team consists of five vehicles and is facing an attack from three threats.…”

“…In order to achieve this a number of simplifications are adopted. Firstly, in contrast to the approaches in Weinberg (2021a) and Weinberg and Kracman (2021) the number of threats is assumed to be unknown. Hence the number of arriving threats will be modelled through a stochastic process.…”