Increasing the Kill Effectiveness of High Energy Laser (HEL) Combat System

A kill assessment system built into a High Energy Laser (HEL) Combat System will provide the U.S. Navy with a method to efficiently engage threats with an HEL effector, improve the weapon scheduling function, and help manage ships limited power resources. Near real-time Battle Damage Assessment (BDA) and Dwell Time determinations make up the new kill assessment system, which is simply called the BDA System. This system is a critical force-multiplier for ship survivability by limiting all HEL-target engagements to the minimum dwell time required for threat mitigation, while providing a mission kill interface to the Combat System for a calculated decision point to either re-engage the same threat or engage the next assigned target. This new BDA system concept for a shipboard HEL Combat System was analyzed in order to verify an expected increase in overall system efficiency and performance. The minimum desired increase of threat engagement efficiency was set at 25%. The proof of concept model developed for this project shows that adding a BDA system function to the HEL Combat System causes the system to exceed this threshold of efficiency.