Talking lasers and endless flashbangs: Pentagon develops plasma tech

 

Instead of beaming a flashing light or shouting over a loudspeaker to keep people away from sensitive areas, new technology being developed could allow troops to fire a laser that can form a “plasma ball” that talks to the potential intruders.

The Laser Induced Plasma Effect program is part of the Joint Non-lethal Weapons Directorate program to find ways to deter, stun, basically stop adversaries short of killing them.

Use of directed energy, or lasers, includes heating up a target’s skin to extremely uncomfortable levels without burning them, blasting confusing noises or giving voice commands such as, “Stop or we’ll be forced to fire upon you.”

It can pass through glass into a building but not yet penetrate other solid barriers, so in its initial stages, the technology would be best used to protect static areas such as forward bases or permanent installations.

But with the right power source setup, a device could be mounted to a small vehicle and make for mobile crowd control or another tool for vehicle patrols to keep people away from convoys.

Researchers such as Brittany Lynn, a scientist with Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, are fine tuning how to pass sound waves through the laser and they recently completed another round of testing in June.

Part of that involves tweaking algorithms to create human speech in the right wavelengths.

The next steps, said Dave Law, chief scientist with the directorate, is to push distances out of the short range of a laboratory setting to 100 meters, then to multiple kilometers. Law gave an optimistic timeline of about five years before the tech could be through readiness levels and passed on to troops.

This past year, Lynn told Military Times, they’ve been adjusting high and low frequencies to mimic human speech.

Early speech mimicking this year has provided a boost to the program that Law sees as promising. That’s because once that is solved, the distance problem is much less difficult.

“Now I can put it anywhere. Range doesn’t make any difference,” Law said in an interview with Military Times last year. “Put plasma at a target, modulate it and it can create a voice.”