US seeks to fund Israeli laser as Army considers Iron Beam’s potential

By Jen Judson, Defense News, Nov 13, 2023

https://www.defensenews.com/battlefield-tech/directed-energy/2023/11/13/us-seeks-to-fund-israeli-laser-as-army-considers-iron-beams-potential/

Israeli company Rafael has created Iron Beam, a high-energy laser weapon. (Courtesy of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems)

WASHINGTON — The Biden Administration’s budget package of roughly $106 billion in emergency supplemental funding includes a $1.2 billion investment in Israel’s directed energy weapon system, “Iron Beam,” which the U.S. Army could consider as an alternative laser weapon for its own needs, according to the service’s acquisition chief.

The Iron Beam technology is “intriguing,” Doug Bush told reporters last week. “If [the Israelis] are successful, that certainly could be something the Army could think about leveraging.”

Congress has yet to pass the supplemental funding aimed to support U.S. and allies’ defense needs, including Ukraine and Israel. A growing number of House Republicans oppose additional Ukraine aid and have instead pushed for a stand-alone $14 billion Israel supplemental.

Bush said he’d seen the first prototype of the directed energy technology meant to augment the Iron Dome air defense system capability in Israel on his last trip to the country, and added that he was “pleased” to see the supplemental include the U.S. investment in developing Iron Beam.

The Army is working on its own high-energy laser weapon capability as part of the Indirect Fire Protection Capability, or IFPC, to defend against rockets, artillery, and mortars as well as cruise missiles and drones. That system overall has experienced delays due to supply chain issues, but the Army is in the process of receiving the first prototypes from its maker Leidos’ Dynetics.

Army’s laser weapon pursuit

The laser weapon portion of the IFPC system is being developed by Lockheed Martin and the Army awarded a contract to Lockheed last month to deliver two 300-kilowatt-class laser weapon systems for the IFPC prototypes program with an option for two additional units.

“The Israeli system is a slightly different approach technologically,” Bush said, “so, it’s actually a nice complement because we’re kind of going down one path, they’ve gone down a slightly different one. I think, yes, there’s potential, if theirs works well, it could be something we could think about leveraging for our needs in that space, so that’s really a benefit of that funding is, I mean, we can explore multiple paths here and see what works.”

While Bush said he could not go into specifics about the technology, the differences have to do with “how the laser beam is formed and aimed” and each uses different power levels.

“They have a very specific problem they’re trying to solve with rockets and things like that, where the Army system goes a little broader — cruise missiles perhaps, things like that,” he added.

Rafael's Iron Beam system

Israel’s laser development

Mark Montgomery, a defense analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington said he hopes that if the supplemental funding is passed that the U.S. has a deal with the Israeli government that intellectual property needs to be owned by both American and Israeli companies involved – presumably US-based RTX and Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, which worked together to co-develop Iron Dome.

Those companies should be able to “immediately turn it around and build stuff for us because this is a serious investment in laser and non-kinetic directed energy weapons,” Montgomery told Defense News in a recent interview.

Then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced in early 2022 the country’s plan to create a “laser wall” to shift from investing in large numbers of interceptors to using less-costly lasers and said the system would be operational by next year. Later in 2022, the Israeli government said it could likely deploy the system in two years.

While the system is not yet operational, Israel announced in April 2022 that it had successfully intercepted mortars, rockets and anti-tank missiles in recent tests in the Negev Desert the month prior. And Iron Beam was displayed in February 2023 at the IDEX defense exhibition in the United Arab Emirates.

Experts have highlighted the technological challenge lasers have handling large salvos of rockets because lasers take time to heat up a target to destroy it. A laser might need to hit a target steadily for two to three seconds to kill a rocket, for instance.

The Hamas-Israel war has already shown, according to reports from both sides, that Hamas has potentially doubled its rocket rate of fire compared to the war between Israel and Hamas in May 2021. In 2021, Hamas could fire roughly 125 rockets in salvos over several minutes. In the attack on October 7, reports state that Hamas fired anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 rockets into Israel over a 20-minute time period.

Rafael's Iron Beam system