Airborne laser passes missile defense test

Investors Business Daily:

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Fortunately, another answer to the threat posed by rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea has just passed a critical milestone.

That answer is the YAL-1A, a modified Boeing 747-400F equipped with the Airborne Laser (ABL) system, which includes a high-energy chemical laser designed to destroy ballistic missiles in their very vulnerable boost phase, missiles such as Iran's Shahab series.

The ABL program places a megawatt-class, high-energy Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) on a modified Boeing 747-400F aircraft to detect, track and destroy all classes of ballistic missiles. ABL also can pass information on launch sites, target tracks and predicted impact points to other layers of the global ballistic missile defense system.

This week, Boeing and the Missile Defense Agency announced another successful test — the first ground test of the entire weapon system integrated aboard the aircraft, including the firing of a high-energy laser through the ABL beam control/fire control system. Earlier tests had unit-tested other components of the system, particularly the ability to find, track and target missiles in flight.

Last July, a YAL-1A took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California and actively acquired, tracked and targeted a simulated ballistic missile.

It used its infrared sensors and a tracking laser to zero in on a "target board" aboard another aircraft, firing its two solid-state illuminator lasers at the NC-135E "Big Crow" test aircraft to verify the ABL's ability to track an airborne target and compensate for atmospheric turbulence.

On Sept. 7, the COIL was successfully fired for the first time. Missile defense supporter Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., said that test was "proof positive that this weapon system is no longer the stuff of science fiction — it is scientific fact."

A test intercept of an actual in-flight ballistic missile is set for early 2009, unless a Democratic Congress and a President Obama, both hostile to missile defense, shoot down the program first.

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One of the things I like about this weapon is that it can attack enemy missiles in the boost phase. This is important because they are more vulnerable in that stage and also because they do not have to be concerned about dummy multiple warheads during that phase.

One of the things that would be required with this weapon are long range escort aircraft to defend a pretty big target. They would need protection similar to an aircraft carrier. It is definitely a weapon that assumes air superiority. You would probably want a few F-22s in the area.