US Army officials say the safety protocols for soldiers using lasers are surprisingly simple: don’t stand too close to the target and don’t look into the weapon.
Directed-energy weapons are seeing more operational use, particularly at the US southern border, where the Army has employed them against cartel-linked drones. The service envisions these systems operating on different vehicles and being easy for soldiers to learn and use safely.
At the Association of the United States Army, or AUSA, convention last week in Washington, DC, officials and industry partners spoke on developments in directed-energy weapons.
Asked about personal protective equipment, or PPE, and any concerns about specular reflection from lasers, Kirk Williams, chief engineer of the Army’s directed energy project office, said the rules were similar in some respects to those for other weapons.
“Well, the short and sweet of that answer is: unless you’re within ten feet of the target, a specular reflection is eye-safe, so the soldiers don’t need the eye protection from the laser,” he said, explaining that “it’s like any other weapons system: don’t look into it.”
“We tell the soldiers the same thing about an M-16. Don’t look down the barrel. Same thing with lasers, don’t look down the barrel.”
Specular reflections occur when light bounces off a surface. In the case of a laser weapon, reflected light can bounce off a targeted vehicle or drone. While the target absorbs most of the energy, some reflections might stray and cause eye or skin damage to soldiers near the target.
Williams said that part of the reason the Army likes these weapons is their relatively low risk to soldiers and the limited need for protective gear. “They are safe,” he said, adding that “the great thing about a laser is we can also turn them off instantaneously.”
The weapons also have safeguards that shut them down if there is a risk of hitting something other than the intended target.
During the panel, Williams and others also talked about the Army’s priorities for deploying more laser weapons, an area of growing importance for the Army and the broader US military.
Brig. Gen. Guy Yelverton, the capability program executive for defensive fires, said the service wants to integrate high-energy lasers onto “any vehicle in the motorpool.” He said the Army’s Enduring High Energy Laser, or E-HEL, is mounted on a sled, allowing it to be integrated onto multiple types of vehicles.
The E-HEL is an Army directed-energy weapon program using AeroVironment’s LOCUST laser system.
Yelverton said that making weapons compatible with different vehicles and usable by soldiers across military specialties will allow the Army to deploy them more widely.
The general said that this flexibility would allow the Army to deploy laser weapons “across all Army formations,” giving commanders more options for where to put them and which soldiers should operate them.
“It’s a great dilemma to have,” he said.
Officials also said part of disseminating the weapons is making them easy to train on. “Most of our training sessions, we can train somebody in like, five minutes, to be able to use this system and start shooting things down,” Williams said, adding that using standard controllers like those for an Xbox made it intuitive.
The Army’s testing of laser weapons and other counter-drone systems at the southern border has reinforced the idea that the US will need layered defenses to counter a range of drone threats. Drug cartels are increasingly using drones to support operations, and the Army has already used lasers to shoot some down.
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