The operational employment of directed energy (DE) weapons by U.S. forces is coming on a significant scale, well within the tenure of most current service members. Several DE systems hold promise for incorporation into the inventory within just a few years. The unique features of these weapons provide both special advantages to the military force and unique challenges. A consideration of these advantages and challenges before deployment can accelerate the transforming power of these weapons and minimize the possible downsides. Therefore, it is important that the DoD community consider all aspects of operations, training, and testing of DE weapons. This should include an understanding of current efforts and the definition of areas where additional effort is required to ensure rapid integration of these systems into the active inventory as soon as they become available. As a forum for these considerations, a Workshop was held 11-13 May 2004 on the Employment of DE Weapons in the Joint Battlespace. The objective of this Secret level Workshop was to identify operations, training, and T&E areas/issues for DE weapons. Several diverse communities must participate for the Workshop to be successful. This included (to name only a few) T&E, training, modeling and simulation, safety, and operations communities. It also included representatives from both the high energy laser and high power microwave science and technology communities. After background briefings on DE technology and DE weapon systems, a series of briefs on
operations, training, and testing oriented attendees to efforts and views on the different
topics. For the Workshop, the three topic areas included (but not necessarily be limited to):
1) Operations - concepts of operations, tactics, techniques, and procedures, and doctrine; 2)
Training - exercises and wargames; and 3). Testing - developmental test and evaluation (T&E),
Live Fire T&E, and Operational T&E. Pervasive to the three topics were modeling and simulation
and safety. The three topics areas then separated into parallel working groups to consider
the previous briefings and identify issues, problems, and solutions. The identification of
unaddressed problems and suggested solutions were the most important outcome of
the working groups. The working groups debriefed their results to a panel of Senior Leaders
before the assembled attendees. The final product of the Workshop was a report reflecting
the findings of the working groups and the comments and findings of the Senior Leadership panel.
The final report also identified possible course of action to address the identified
shortfalls/solutions. Overview Agenda
Location The Workshop was held at the Virginia Advanced Shipbuilding and Carrier Integration Center (VASCIC), 4104 Washington Avenue, Newport News, VA 23607.
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