
Mysterious Laser Turret Appears on US Navy Destroyer USS Dewey - smacktoward
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30941/mysterious-laser-turret-appears-on-us-navy-destroyer-uss-dewey
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jameshart
This new US Navy acronym is going to make googling for Linux installation
issues a lot more tricky:

"Ruggedized High Energy Laser (RHEL)"

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raxxorrax
That is actually a good way to hide public information. Even the best search
engines might fail you here.

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rapnie
Wonder if there are more examples of this hiding, intentionally or not. I
recently could not find the Trinity and Beyond [0] movie on DDG, because all
hits were of some family vlog (though I still find it on Google first page).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_and_Beyond](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_and_Beyond)

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lmkg
Rudy Giuliani's company is named Fraud Guarantee. This was apparently chosen
to push down search results about one of the co-founders' legal issues.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/giuliani-associate-left-
trail-o...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/giuliani-associate-left-trail-of-
troubled-businesses-before-ukraine-probe-push-11572527608)

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mattkrause
Seems incredibly...apt in retrospect.

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ttraub
Eventually, the Navy will be doing more than "dazzling" and "blinding" enemy
optics. The Tactical High Energy Laser project[1] demonstrated that incoming
mortars and Katyushas could be shot down. It seems unlikely that this
technology was abandoned, albeit it's probably much bulkier and more expensive
than the RHEL.

1\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Energy_Laser](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Energy_Laser)

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umvi
Couldn't you just start putting a reflective coating on your mortar rounds?

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dogma1138
You need a coating that won’t burn off even if it reflects 99.9% of the beam,
and rugged enough to survive being field handled.

Those don’t exist, it will be scratched off well before it’s even used.

Not to mention the cost of such material and the cost loss of scrapping or
converting existing inventory won’t make it a viable solution.

The majority of mortars fired at US troops today were likely made in the 60’s
and 70’s.

You are better off with simply using mortars in large volleys to saturate the
system or simply attacking unprotected targets.

Most rounds fired at US troops can’t penetrate their body armor either it
doesn’t stop them from trying not did it force them to switch to armor
defeating projectiles.

They just are less effective and hope they’ll either land a lucky shot to the
face or lower limbs or a debilitating shot to unprotected areas such as the
arms and shoulders.

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yellowapple
You don't necessarily need the round to survive. If it's reflecting 99.9% of a
destructive laser beam, then that poses a risk of that beam bouncing back at
the ship and causing damage. It might be a minuscule risk in isolation, but
dozens or hundreds of rounds with retroreflectors designed specifically to
bounce lasers back whence they came could wreak havoc on all sorts of fragile
sensors (including the squishy ones in sailors' eye sockets).

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coredog64
That would make this an illegal weapon system according to the Geneva
Convention. Weapons that are intended to injure rather than kill are
prohibited.

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slededit
That’s not the right reading of the convention. The rule is against
unnecessary suffering and even excessive lethality. For example hollow point
rounds are more effective at killing but solid rounds have the same disabling
effect and give the recipient a chance of survival. Hollow point bullets are
banned by the convention.

Its also illegal to use excessive calibre bullets against human targets. Even
though such large projectiles are much more likely to kill.

The exact phrasing is:

“It is prohibited to employ weapons, projectiles and material and methods of
warfare of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.”

[https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...](https://ihl-
databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule70)

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PostOnce
Can thedrive.com/the-war-zone please stop calling stuff "mysterious",
"shadowy", and "secretive"? 80% of everything on their site is one of the
three.

"New laser turret" doesn't have the same cachet as "mysterious laser turret" I
guess.

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SkyMarshal
Also it's not really "mysterious" if we know what it is.

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nexuist
This is a super stupid question, but in the rendering it looks like the turret
only has a ~180 degree turning range. It can't point behind the ship because
there's a giant wall behind it. So as the enemy...can't I just shoot the back
of the ship?

Obviously the solution here is to put another turret behind the ship, but is
that actually the plan or am I missing something? Do missiles always come from
the front of the ship for some reason?

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vonmoltke
Each _Burke_ as a fore and aft mounting point for a point defense system.
Flight I and Flight II ships have a 20mm Phalanx system mounted there. Flight
IIA ships (which the _Dewey_ is one of) were originally built without point
defense guns because they were fitted with the Evolved Sea Sparrow point
defense missile system (carried in the vertical launch cells), but the Navy
later decided to retrofit a Phalanx turret onto the aft mounting point of the
Flight IIA ships. I have no idea why they only felt the need to have the gun
on the stern arc.

Presumably if a point defense laser reaches operational status it would be
fitted to both PD mounting points.

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angry_octet
They are constrained by ship design and efficiently tradeoffs. It's a big
space/weight/manning requirement for each system. No one is really worried
about missile attacks except from on the beam and above, so mounted high and
aft is a decent compromise. Personally I rather carry more ESSM reloads in the
magazine than cwis rounds.

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dazzlerink
> _The system is likely the service 's new "ODIN" laser dazzler that is meant
> to blind enemy optics on ships, boats, aircraft, and missiles._

Couldn't you now just home in on the laser? I feel like I'm missing something.

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hannasanarion
Not if your optice are totally saturated by the laser. Point a laser at a
camera some time, and see if you can tell where it is in the resulting
picture. The image will probably be solid red

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serioussecurity
Sweep a physical occluder across the lens, measure abatement?

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bufferoverflow
So you want your lens covered 99.9% of the time, just in case someone points a
laser at it?

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CharlesColeman
>> Sweep a physical occluder across the lens, measure abatement?

> So you want your lens covered 99.9% of the time, just in case someone points
> a laser at it?

Don't some missile seekers already work that way?

[https://www.ausairpower.net/TE-
Sidewinder-94.html](https://www.ausairpower.net/TE-Sidewinder-94.html):

> The Sidewinder's seeker used an ingeniously clever optical arrangement, with
> a Cassegrainian mirror fitted with a tilted secondary mirror. The secondary
> mirror rotated in unison with a reticle, projecting the whole instantaneous
> field of view of the mirror through the reticle onto a filter/detector
> assembly. Because the mirror secondary was tilted, rotating it about the
> missile's axis swept the cone of the mirror's field of view about the
> missile's axis in a fashion analogous to a conical scanning radar seeker
> (see diagram).

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AWildC182
Modern systems are Focal Plane Array which is aerospace speak for a typical
camera.

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4rt
Title: Royal Navy deployed laser weapons during the Falklands War

[https://newatlas.com/falklands-laser/28574/](https://newatlas.com/falklands-
laser/28574/)

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baybal2
[https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/images/...](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/images/aquilon-1986-image01.jpg)

That one is stationed in my hometown

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elkos
Can't that baby burn retinas? If that's the case isn't a violation of the
Geneva Convention to use that?

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waste_monk
AFAIK it's a war crime to deliberately blind people. Incidental blinding is
acceptable, as long as the intent is to cleanly kill whatever's being lased.

Similar to how shooting to kill is ok, but shooting to maim is not.

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Havoc
Not sure i see the point. Surely gyros can just keep it on track for last
known good reading?

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AnimalMuppet
How good was that heading? Good enough that the missile can hit the ship _with
no further adjustments for the rest of the flight?_ Probably not.

(This is less important if the missile has a nuclear warhead...)

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Havoc
Given how fast missiles are and how slow ships move I can't imagine it being
hard.

Between a good gyro, some satelitte positioning I can see it getting a good
hit rate even if blind.

And even if you miss just triggering an explosion in roughly the right area
will do a fair bit of damage to ship antennae etc

The whole thing strikes me as a bad stopgap till lasers are powerful enough to
take down missiles

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AnimalMuppet
When I was a kid, we drove up I15 in southern Idaho. There was one place where
we topped over this rise, and the road was straight for miles. Way down there
in the distance there was an overpass across the interstate. I remember
wondering how my dad could aim the car precisely enough to go under that
overpass way out there. Now, as an adult, I understand. He didn't aim it that
precisely. He steered along the way.

But if you don't steer along the way, and you're off half a degree, say, and
you go blind 10 miles out, you miss by 10 miles times sin(1/2 degree), which
is 0.09 miles, which is 460 feet. I don't know what the effective radius of an
anti-ship missile is, but 460 feet seems to me to be a rather long distance.

That's assuming you _just_ have to worry about aiming accuracy. You could also
have things like wind gusts. And the ship could be not just moving, but
maneuvering.

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chiefalchemist
Pardon my non-HN tone but...remind me again how this would have prevented
9/11; is useful against cyber-warfare; or can prevent the public's beliefs and
decision-making from being influenced by a fistful of dollars and some well-
placed digital ads.

We keep spending more and more, and are being outsmarted with less and less.
Three-quarters of a trillion dollar (i.e., the USA's DOD budget) is a
significant amount of money.

~~~
angry_octet
That's a valid criticism of budget allocation favouring existing modes of
conflict. However, things like jamming maximize the technical advantage the US
has against adversaries seeking to develop asymmetric threats -- it is
possible to make all the (cheaper) missiles miss.

One school of thought is that cyber/IO is like the air force -- it prepares
the environment for ground action but doesn't hold territory. So once the West
is weakened and divided enough, kinetic operations (Taiwan, Ukraine, Georgia,
Syria/Iraq) become possible. So it is still very valuable to have a kinetic
defence.

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chiefalchemist
Valuable? In the sense that we keep getting beat with less and less? Where
does value end and Military Industrial Complex begin?

The USA out spends the next 10 or so nations __combined__. Most of those are
allies.

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angry_octet
Much of the spending is pork. Existing programs that are hard to cut. The US
has very expensive tastes when it comes to capability. However, modern EW
techniques are far more bang for buck than most programs.

The US doesn't get beat in the fight, they get beat by the strategy the US
govt chooses. They keep wanting what is almost impossible (like a peaceful,
democratic and tolerant Afghanistan that does grow opium) and half committing
to do it.

