US Air Force Special Operations Command Lt. Gen. Marshall Webb considers himself to be in the camp of advocates for conducting a demo of HELLADS sooner rather than later, he told reporters at the Air Force Association’s annual conference at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, a town along the Potomac River in Prince George’s County about 10 miles south of the White House.
"If you put out a questionnaire to those scientists involved in lasers, you find about half and half – half of them are skeptics, the other half are zealots," Webb explained. "I remain an enthusiastic support of doing this demo."
Webb is interested in testing how HELLADS can be controlled from an aerial platform and how well it handles aerodynamic and aeromechanical “jitter,” Defense Tech, a subsidiary of Military.com, reported.
HELLADS originated at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of the agency’s goal of creating “a 150 kilowatt laser that is 10 times smaller and lighter than current lasers of similar power,” according to government archives.
Webb managed to sneak in a complaint about program financing, stating, “it’s a little bit of a challenge with respect to funding, from a priorities standpoint.” Webb’s Wednesday comments follow the passage of a $700 billion Pentagon budget for 2018 – $150 billion more than the Defense Department’s FY2017 budget.
