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    Friday, June 6

    UK to Rush Experimental ‘Dragonfire’ Laser Weapon Into Service to Deploy in Ukraine

    Updated: Politics No Comments
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    According to the American government, Ukraine will be a massive testing surface for a revolutionary new light weapon, which, if successful, will fundamentally change warfare’s economics.

    The” sovereign” British Dragonfire laser was successfully tested earlier this year at an Army range in Scotland. Defence procurement regulations are being changed right now to make it easier to deploy it five years first and perhaps even sooner in Ukraine. The Royal Navy vessels ‘ implementation of the anti-air light was being delayed five years, from 2032 to 2027, according to British Defence Minister Grant Shapps, but it was made clear that it might start to take place sooner.

    Shapps said,” Let’s say that it did n’t have to be 100 % perfect for Ukrainians to get their hands on it,” during a visit to the national Defence Science and Technology Laboratory ( DSTL ). Yet for American deployment on warships, he said it would be better to get to “70 per cent” perfect and therefore field- test it to learn from actual- world experience, more than wait a decade for it to reach “99.9 per cent” completion.

    Shapps said in a statement:” ]Dragonfire is ] the UK’s first laser weapon. It could change how we fight war because it enables us to take down robots and missiles with amazing accuracy. We’re not building this concept decades away; we’re already putting it on our ships in just three years.

    Beyond being a light weapon, the revolutionary aspect of the weapon is how affordable it promises to be. Now, shooting down missiles and drones over Ukraine is a very costly business, with each of the four intended shootdowns costing$ 4 million. Patriot Missiles chargers selling for a billion dollars each. By contrast, using the Dragonfire laser is claimed to cost just around £10 ($ 12 ) in electricity per shot.

    If it were to work, this may fundamentally change the nature of war, as seen in Ukraine, where low, mass-produced violent drones costing only a few hundred thousand dollars each could be shot down with rockets costing hundreds of thousands or millions. If Ukraine is able to shoot down robots with a$ 12 power burst, this protracted style of warfare becomes less attractive.

    The UK government claims the Dragonfire may be good for an exactness of hitting a” gold from a kilometre away” with an “intense beam of light” even though it is limited to line of sight. That frame, it is claimed, you” slice through the goal, leading to architectural failure or more effective results if the warhead is targeted”. A professional aircraft that has been melted and a hole that has been slit into a mortar shell are examples of the demonstrations that DSTL has displayed.

    All in all, the weaponry program has the potential to be a “potentially low-cost, long-term substitute for some current tasks, such as shooting down attack drones,” according to the claim.

    Not only is Dragonfire the just brand-new American technique that could be rushed out to Ukraine earlier for testing in the real world. &nbsp, The Times notes&nbsp, identical treatment is being given to ‘ Project Ealing ‘, another directed- strength tool funded at the same time as Dragonfire in 2021. The “radio speed weapons” has been compared to a science-fiction device from Ocean’s Eleven, which uses a focused beam of power to destroy drones.

    Similar techniques are already in use by Russian and Ukrainian forces in Ukraine, but it’s unclear how much of Project Ealing represents a step-change in this technology. DSTL energy weapon expert&nbsp, Matt Cork told&nbsp, The Times:” Just turning things off when we choose to turn things off leads to a potential where actually they]the enemy ] stop trusting their own equipment. It adds that little bit of fear to their capacity to use their tools when they need to do so.

    The increase in the pace of development in the Ukraine conflict itself, which is plainly seen by American military officers and politicians as the most important conflict for future planning, is reflected in the change in the speed of American defense procurement to accelerate the deployment of experimental weapons to the battlefield. While the fast development of satellite warfare has been most frequently discussed, low-cost guided munitions are also on the rise, taking advantage of large companies of “dumb” bombs from the Cold War by mating them to satellite navigation kits and primitive wings.

    Russia is learning quickly with its own variation of the UMPK while Ukraine has the JDAM-ER, which is a concept that is already 30 years older. As reported this week, the Russian version is plentiful and powerful, given it can be mounted on legacy freefall bombs up to 1, 500 kg ( 33, 000 lbs ), turning them into a rudimentary guided weapon, and it is already being felt on the battlefield. According to The Guardian, 500 of them are being dropped each week and “played a significant role in the Russian-occupied Avdiivka’s death and the death of its remains”

    According to a Russian supply who spoke about the fly bombs, which allow Russian bombers to “drop” up to 37 miles from their targets,” Russia uses UMPC bombs mainly to reach its targets in frontline areas, reducing the chance that its own aircraft will be hit by Russian air defenses,” the paper quoted a Russian source. They are successful primarily because they are so numerous, being able to completely devastate Ukrainian air defense in any given sector, and being comparatively difficult to shoot down compared to missiles.

    However, Ukraine is developing its own strategy to defeat the UMPKs by using drone strikes to attack Russian military airfields, sometimes comparatively deep inside Russia, to ensure that the kit-converted heavy bombs never land, given that by the time they are being carried into battle on the wings of a Russian bomber, it is already too late.

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