Mobile Laser Project: Developing High-Energy Lasers for the Battlefield with Colonel John Hartke

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Dean: Welcome to Inside West Point, Ideas That Impact. I'm Brigadier General Shane Reeves, the Dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Through a series of discussions, we will show you a different side of West Point where we will make even our most complex initiatives accessible to broad audiences and give you an inside view to our cross-disciplinary work, which is being applied throughout the world.

So today's spotlight is on the mobile laser project, which really does have it all. I was looking for a project that is interdisciplinary, applicable to the army and the nation, and illustrates the intellectual capital that faculty and cadets bring through research.

So earlier last week, I had an opportunity to go to the basement of Barlett Hall and see an interdisciplinary project that was being worked on by cadets across all types of disciplines with faculty from the great department of Physics and Nuclear Engineering in the Photonics Research Center.

And inside this small trailer was a chiller and a laser, and they were getting ready to fire a five kilowatt laser through a metal plate. So based on that, I decided naturally this is the topic I wanted to talk about . And so I wanted to talk to John Hartke, the head of our department of Physics and Nuclear Engineering , where the Photonic Center is housed.

Just tell us a little bit about the mobile laser projects. Okay, John, so let me just ask you this question. How did you as an engineer officer become one of the Army and the nation's leading experts on lasers and physics.

Colonel John Hartke: Sure it was an accident. , to be honest, when I was selected to come back as academy professor, I decided to specialize in optical sciences.

So my PhD is in optical sciences from the University of Arizona. And while I was there, I actually worked on infrared focal plane arrays and hyperspectral imaging.

Dean: You have to explain what that is cause that sounds like something in Ghostbusters.

Colonel John Hartke: So what it was is in the infrared, we would look at the different colors of light that are at different places in spatial locations.

So at a different point in space, what are the different colors of light that are present, and from that, you can do a lot of information gathering and detection. That was my PhD and that's what I was working on. But when I got here to West Point, that was something that would've been hard to do here.

Then I was invited to attend a meeting with the high energy laser joint technology office, and they were the ones that were doing some work in high energy lasers. And as soon as I walked into the room, there were some folks in there that the director of the organization who was an Air Force Academy grad grabbed me and was like, hey, what are you doing here and who are you?

And when I explained who I was, he's like, I've been waiting for somebody like you. And I saw immediately, as I was listening to what was going on in that organization, that this was an area that I could make a real contribution to and that I thought we as West Point could actually have a large voice in what was possible, and I've even continued that work.

Not only do I do the research here at West Point, but I've also been a part of that organization, the Joint Directed Energy Transition Office. I've been a part of their Advanced Concepts work, so I've been a part of the team that included Navy Air Force Officers, Marine Missile Defense Agency folks.

Who have been looking at the technology associated with developing high energy lasers across all of the services, and we do the technology assessment. We identify where the biggest gaps are, and then we recommend funding initiatives through the Department of Defense to try and fill those gaps. Having that vision of what the entire Department of Defense is doing has been incredibly helpful for me to bring that back here to West Point and make sure that the projects that we're working on are first rate in making a difference.

And so, by accident. I went to the right place at the right time, got the right person to meet me, and then they inspired me and brought me into the community that allowed me personally to grow, but then to drag all the other faculty and cadets with us.

Dean: Well, that accident was fortuitous because here we are now with West Point, leading the effort to bring lasers to bear on the future Battlefield.

Colonel John Hartke: Absolutely.

Dean: So you all are known as PANE and the non-mobile laser is in HELL inside of pain. So you gotta clarify that, like what is PANE and what is HELL?

Colonel John Hartke: Yes sir. So PANE, department of Physics and Nuclear Engineering, we're in the house of PANE. P A I N is often called weakness, leaving the body. P A N E is knowledge entering the mind.

And of course, you know, in our department we also have a space science major, and so we're shooting rockets up into the heavens and we reach all the way down to HELL the high energy laser lab.

Dean: That's great. So tell me a little bit about the Photonics Research Center. As you know, the Academy has 28 research centers, all of them doing a different work on different things, but oftentimes they connect with each other. And so just tell me a little about the Photonics Research Center and some of the disciplines that are tied into it and some of the ongoing research projects it's working on.

Colonel John Hartke: The Photonics Research Center is one of the oldest centers at West Point. We were established in the late eighties, and it was established with the memorandum of agreement between the United States Military Academy and the Army Research Office.

It is truly interdisciplinary in that there are three departments that have permanent folks assigned to it. So the Department of Physics and Nuclear Engineering, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the Department of Chemistry and Life Science all have permanent members associated with or assigned to the center.

And most of our funding historically has come through the Army Research Office. Over the last 10 years or so, where we've been doing more interdisciplinary work and we've been including folks from outside those three departments.

So on this particular project and in other projects, we've had systems engineers, we've had mechanical engineers, we've had folks from BSNL who were looking at the human dimension of some of the light. When the Army was transitioning from the ACU, the Army Combat Uniform, to the OCPs that we're wearing now, the Operational Combat pattern. Members from BSNL and our chemistry folks down in the Photonics Research Center actually studied how the pattern could be detected by the human eye or by cameras.

And so there was a melding there of interdisciplinary work where the BSNL folks were looking at the human dimension, the human eye ability to detect the human brain's ability to detect the patterns. And then the chemistry folks were doing the science behind how a camera might see it. And so the Botox research Center really has become a center of synergy in the area of lasers and optics and photonics for all of the work here at the Academy, regardless of which discipline it is.

And it really fills the mission for, the reason it was established was to provide a class of officers to the United States Army who were generally familiar with lasers and laser technology, because even back in the late eighties, it was pretty obvious to many of the folks in the research and development community that high energy lasers or lasers were gonna become part of the modern battlefield.

And so having officers, whether they're the graduating cadets or the rotating field, great officers that passed through as a rotating faculty. Having that knowledge set as it moved as those individuals moved out into the army was critical to the eventual development. And as we're seeing today, lasers being on the modern battlefield.

Dean: Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about the use of lasers on the modern battlefield and and tangentially related. One of the things that we're talking about when we talk about warfare going forward is the ubiquity of sensors. And so I see the photonics research center both addressing, as you pointed out, some of the ubiquity of sensors and also how that affects camouflage, but also the use of lasers on the battlefield, so can you address both of those?

Colonel John Hartke: The lasers started showing up on the battlefield during the Vietnam War, and they took the original form as laser range finders, and so they were placed to be able to detect the range from a particular position to another position, either to target artillery eventually also put on our tanks and other armored vehicles to help guidance systems to be able to be more accurate with our targeting.

Then you start to see the lasers that would allow for smart munitions to be used so that as the munitions were being dropped either from our Air Force and Navy to some of the artillery that was guided, that the laser signal bouncing off of the target could be used to be more accurate. It's evolved to, even now, we see lasers on our M4s.

The lasers that where you saw in the late sixties were in the visible range, so you could actually see the spots sometimes, but now we're getting more into the infrared, the invisible lasers, they're at wavelengths that not visible to the human eye, but visible to some of those detectors. And so now you see that the lasers on the rifles so that when we're using night vision goggles that are only visible to the night vision goggles, you see some of the laser work that we're starting to do is actually laser weapons that are used to shoot down rockets, artillery, mortars, UAVs.

And that ties to the detectors in our ability to own when we own the night, we do detectors in the visible range so that we can enhance our own vision. But now we're using detectors that are able to pick up heat signatures or other forms of electromagnetic radiation in the infrared, mostly in the near, mid, and far infrared that then allow us to do better targeting.

Some say you can see through walls. It depends on the thickness of the wall and the nature of the object on the other side, but it helps our ability to see things either from space or on the ground or just from aircraft.

Dean: So I know the Photonics Research Center also works a lot with sensors. So can you explain how you see sensors and the use of sensors on the battlefield evolving and how your center is working to get ahead of that trend.

Colonel John Hartke: Having availability of information. Even just think about the cars nowadays. So now you have cars that have the ability to show 360 around as they put the car in reverse.

And on the screen you get images that get sewn together all the way around you. That's clearly gonna be one of the things that will be possible, and that technology of those sensors, and they're getting small enough now that they can be placed, for example, in your helmet or on smaller UAVs. And so now we have the ability, or these sensors have been miniaturized to such an extent that we can put these things on small aerial platforms.

That are unmanned and we can send them out deep to get better intelligence about what's going on around us. So that can clearly change the way we fight because we know a little bit more about where the enemy is, what he's doing, and how then we can mass our forces against it. And then we also are expanding the wavelengths in which we are able to see.

So it's not just the visible wavelength, but by being able to see in the both the mid and far infrared, different things pop out and are more visible to us. You can see through forest canopy if you have overhead sensors that are flying and they can identify armored vehicles or massing of troops, and that can then trigger military action.

Dean: Let me go back to the mobile laser project. What got you all involved in this? Because again, there's this bunch of cadets from a bunch of different disciplines on a trailer. They're inside the trailer, they're sweating, they're plugging chords in. It looks like it's directly from either a Frankenstein movie or, or a movie where they're creating a laser to, to fire for some sort of prank and, and it was fun just to see that cadet's energy and the faculty's energy.

How did that all come about?

Colonel John Hartke: This project has evolved over 15 years, at that time, the army had the goal of building a 100 kilowatt solid state laser that could be used to shoot down rockets, artillery motors.

It started as a project that had a physicist who was trying to understand the physics of the laser and how the laser light was generated and sent out to a mechanical engineer who was looking at once the light hit the target, how did the light interact with the target to blow up a mortar? We had a systems engineer who was trying to herd the cats and make sure that we were focused.

And then we had a law major. So he actually challenged, why is it that we can't use lasers for the purpose of blinding? Can we use lasers against human targets? And he actually did some of the analysis that I get called for that paper. Every, every couple years I get a call and says, Hey, can we see that paper again on the the legal implications or why we can't use lasers for blinding?

And so we started to bring this together. And, and one of the things I thought was interesting about this project is, and this, this speaks to how brilliant cadets are. So the cadets had the challenge of why a hundred kilowatts? And then they also had the challenge of can we take a particular laser design and fit it on an armored vehicle?

And so the mechanical engineer, the physicist and the system engineer, and we actually had electrical engineer come in and join us as well, and they started looking at how can we physically lay this out on a system? And during the work, they started to compare it to what was already out in the Army. And what the army had at the time was one kilowatt of laser power that was being tested on a hum bee.

Whenever we do this project, we present at a national conference and we, we presented, and the conference asset has the ability to go classified, but they're presented at the conference. And of course we rehearsed before we went and at the conference, the cadet made the statement that the system that the Army had under test was not soldier friendly.

And as soon as he said that, I was like, oh my goodness. See, that wasn't in the rehearsal. I didn't even get back to West Point. And the project manager for that system called me and said that he, he wanted a public apology, . And I was like, okay, stand by. So I went to the cadet, like, dude, you did not say anything about the other system not being soldier friendly.

Where did you get that? And because he was a great cadet, he pulled out his references, were excited and said, I talked to Sergeant somebody at the National Training Center when they did the testing, and he said it wasn't soldier friendly. I'm like, okay. So I called back the project manager and I said, Hey, you know, I stand by my cadet's work.

He did his research and I don't think it's soldier friendly. And the, so the PM invited me down to where the system was. So I go down there, I walk in and I just take one look and go, yeah, this isn't soldier friendly, and let me tell you why. And so I went down three or four things with him. The great thing about our cadets is they don't just identify a problem, they also propose a solution.

And so he proposed a solution and then about two years later, I got another call, said, Hey, can you come down? We wanna show you another system. So I go down there and it looks almost exactly like the cadet had been proposed. Now, I'm not saying that they took the cadet's idea. But it, the cadet didn't know that they were doing that, and that team that came together and they put it on the vehicle that looked like a striker vehicle.

And in that kind of organization that the cadets proposed, like, all right, so these young men and women are actually thinking outside the box. They're forward thinking, they're applying things. And even with the system that they showed me, I, I got a cadet on it and it was controlled by joystick. And the connect goes joystick.

Nobody uses this except old people. And I'm like, well, I felt pretty comfortable with it. So they said, you need a, either an Xbox or a PlayStation controller. Now the system that the Army is fielding is controlled by something. I don't know if it's Xbox or PlayStation, but it's that type of controller because that's what what we needed.

And that's how this has evolved. It's actually taken us four yearsof trying to get this actual system in place. The laser we have came off of the striker vehicle that was being tested. So they pulled the laser out of that, cleaned it up a little bit, sent it to us, and then we just started to do the engineering work to say what do we need to do to chill it?

this project is, in March of: 2019

They sent it here to West Point, and so we had it displayed out in the cadet area for about a week so that the cadets could see and understand that it was happening. Then we took it out to the range at West Point. We were the first ones to fire at a regular tactical range. All of the other laser firing has occurred at White Sand's Missile Range, or Red Stone arsenal.

But we demonstrated to some of the folks working on these problems in the Army that first of all, the cadets knew what they were doing. That we have the ability to shoot this at West Point at a range so that now not only the technology that's gonna pump out of this, but now we have some tactics, techniques, and procedures that we can export to the rest of the army so that when these systems show up at Fort Hood, they're not reinventing the wheel.

They can just say, oh, what did West Point do? And we can give them our, our processes to keep everything safe and, and not burn down the range. Although we did have a few fires, but how to do it safely. And so, I kept proposing the idea of putting it on a trailer. They're like, you know what? We have the right people.

West Point has figured out how to shoot this thing outside. Fills a gap in testing that we don't have. We have these great cadets working on the future of the Army, which will be these high energy laser weapon systems. And so I think we're getting a lot more synergy from places like the Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technology Office, the Army Research Office, the Directed Energy Transition Office, the Space and Missile Defense Command, all of those folks have had a hand in allowing us and enabling us to make this project happen.

Dean: Yeah, and you know, you just hit on something. I think that's really important, the synergy, because you just described what is the great strength of West Point, which is the breadth of academic programs here that range between STEM and humanities bring something to bear on a project like this that you can't find in, in pretty anywhere else in the army, really.

And then you throw in the fact that you have the future of the army in terms of cadets and they're gonna own the problem. And you've got a motivated faculty who have disciplinary depth in a particular field, and they happen to also know that they're going to go back into the operational army. And this is gonna be useful.

You put cadets and that type of faculty together. Across a range of academic disciplines. And I think you start to get a holistic solution to, to some very big problems. And you don't look at it just from a technical perspective. You look at it also from the ethical, the legal, the historic perspective.

And as a result you have this multifaceted solution to a, a really complicated problem. Okay, so let me just segue way into the trailer cuz this is how I remember this happening. Recently, you gave me a call.. He's like, sir, you gotta get down here right away. There's some, there's something unbelievable happening in the basement of Bartlett.

I think I said, awesome. There's awesomeness happening in the basement. I said, all right. So I ran down there. I get there and I'm like, there's this trailer, right? And inside the trailer is this chiller, and inside there's this laser from the striker as you described, and you're like, we're gonna fire a five-kilowatt laser right now.

I was like, awesome. This interdisciplinary team gives me this fantastic brief. The faculty members are excited. They give me the brief. They're plugging things in. They're turning switches, and bam, nothing happens,

Colonel John Hartke: Sir. Science happen.

Dean: No. No. So then we said, let's let the science work, let me let the geniuses go to work.

So I sat there, looked around, talked to some more people. Bam. Nothing happened. Three times. Three times to the point where you're like, Hey, we got some more work to do. I leave, and then of course, 30 seconds later, oh, hey, it worked. Here's a video of the laser. Fine. Explain yourself.

Colonel John Hartke: So if science happened that that was planned, you know, it was really your intimidating personality that scared the, the technology and that we need to have available to us.

So it was actually perfect, right? Disappointing that we couldn't give you one shot, one kill . But what it did do is it showed what. The cadets are facing, so we're taking this complex laser. We're putting it on a trailer, right? We need to put it on a trailer so we can take it out to the range. So we can do the, we'll calibrate it.

We'll test it down down there in the basement of Barlett Hall. Then we'll roll it out to the range. Take some shots. But this is exactly why this project is so great, is that the cadets had to exhibit problem solving processes and techniques to understand what happened, why didn't it work? How is the system supposed to work?

How are things supposed to be put together? And then when they fail, how did they troubleshoot to come up with a solution to make it work? And so I was ecstatic. Like, yeah. Okay. Right. A little disappointing. Didn't get to put a hold in something for the Dean, but we'll have more chances. We'll get it working, but then acting under pressure.

The Dean standing over you. What the heck going on? I can't believe this. That's it. You're all fired. . That was great pressure, right? So. You know, the cadets are gonna feel that pressure as lieutenant. Let's do it.

Dean: So you did make it up for by, by shooting a two kilowatt. I'd like to highlight in the basement of Barlett Hall, but let's pivot back to the setup.

So when people think of laser, they think of one of two things. They either think of a storm trooper in Star Wars firing some sort of laser beam, or they think of some gigantic apparatus that's required to file laser. I of course, think of Austin Powers and Dr. Evil saying, fire the laser. Right. But try to explain the size that we're talking when you, when you talk about the laser itself, what it's required to support the laser and how big this trailer is that I keep referencing.

Colonel John Hartke: Right. So we have a 20 foot trailer. It's a car trailer, is what is originally designed for. We have some of the cabinetry up front so that we can carry our tools with us. The laser head is a little bit bigger than a soup can. Maybe two soup cans tape taped together. The laser is a fiber laser, so it's, I think the laser length is a couple three meters long of optical fiber.

And then there's the laser pump where the energy comes from. That powers a laser that creates a laser light is not much bigger than two feet by two feet by maybe six inches. Seven inches thick. Now the chiller's a little bit bigger, right? So the chiller is heist, an office size refrigerator, and that's to take the excess heat out of the laser as it's operating, and so the laser itself is not that big.

What you haven't seen yet is something that we're still working on, is that the laser output. Which is those soup cans will have to go through a bit of a telescope so that we can focus it down to the range that we're gonna shoot at here at West Point, we'll be about 700 meters to a kilometer of propagation distance.

That should be good enough for us. Eventually what you'll see is a nice lens on the front of that, that we can focus it. And then you'll also see what's not been put on the trailer is some test equipment that will measure what is actually coming out of the laser beam. And so you'll see some diagnostics.

There'll be a camera there, there'll be. A power meter, there'll be a bunch of turning mirrors and a bunch of scientific stuff that we then use to measure what the beam looks like before it leaves the trailer. And then we're gonna have another trailer at the other end, at the target, and we'll have a place to catch the beam and measure how the laser has changed as it's propagated or gone through that one kilometer.

And so it's perfect about the trailer is that we can do all the setup, testing, calibration in the basement of Bartlett Hall in the loading dock. Then we can drive it out to the West Point range. We can fire it. If cadets need to use that same range, which is the range they use to qualify on their M4s, then we can lock everything up, bring it back, and go back and forth and use it anytime.

One of the goals is to fire it in the snow, and so when I see the forecast for snow, I'm gonna put a trip section in. I hope you approve it, and then we're gonna roll out there and we're gonna stand out in the snow and we're gonna fire the laser in the snow and see what happens.

Dean: My goal is to get a laser strap to a shark's head like in Austin Powers. Is that how far away? Away from that?

Colonel John Hartke: That's the Navy's problem. , you know, the Air Force, they're working on a falcon, right? So they wanna strap something onto the leg of a falcon. So we're all working on it different ways.

Dean: Let me ask you about the laser in this regard. What makes it a better weapon system to counter uas or for air defense artillery versus say something conventional?

Colonel John Hartke: Right. A couple things. One is if I wanna shoot down a mortar round, it takes about a quart of diesel. So if we think about right now what we're doing to shoot down a mortar round is we've got a Gatling gun type system. So they're just shooting as many bullets as they can, and they just hope that one of 'em knocks into the mortar and knocks it down.

Incredibly inefficient. If you just think about all of the diesel and the risk of life that it would take to move all those munitions from a rear area forward to the place where we're defending. Where for the laser, you're just moving fuel. That's all you do.

Dean: And you just hit on, again, the brilliant thing about West Point is you're talking about sustainability and you immediately bleed over into another discipline.

You talk about geography and environmental engineering and the problem sets they're trying to solve, which is whether it's climate change or it's trying to make the US military much more energy efficient. And so again, you can just see how this is a multifaceted problem. All right, so now the big question, and you have to be able to explain this so that even a lawyer like myself can understand it.

Obviously I can see the applicability to the army in, in the way we've talked, but can you see broader application of the army or even outside of the Army as, as this technology continues to evolve. How is this potentially gonna change, not just war fighting, but even have other societal implications?

Colonel John Hartke: Yes, sir. So the laser that we have in the basement of Barlett Hall, the two kilowatt laser is really a laser cutter. It's a commercially available laser cutter. And so the work that the folks are doing to make those lasers better will just en enhance the laser manufacturing capability so that, that those kinds of capabilities can be more efficient, better, stronger systems.

I think the other one, as what we're doing when we look at the atmospheric propagation, how a beam changes, I think that will actually have some help with the telecommunications and the ability to do open space coms using lasers. So we just shoot the laser through the atmosphere, put another detector someplace else, and we can modulate the laser and send signals over the lasers that really can't be interrupted.

It can't be stolen. You can't, if you do try to, to intercept it, everyone will know because the laser light won't get to the detector. So it'll be a very secure means of communication that I think will have a lot of impact going forward.

Dean: So let me ask about your faculty. So your faculty are heavily involved in, in both the research and the Photonic Center as well as on, on the, the laser, you know, the projects that are dealing with laser.

And, and so how is this research making them better in the classroom? Of course, our primary mission is to educate, train, and inspire the core cadet. And again, how does this research that they're working on get back into the classroom and help them become better at that, that primary mission that is of the academy.

Colonel John Hartke: When we're doing the, the research, it just naturally bleeds into what we're teaching in the classroom. So we teach lasers in, in core physics. So if the instructor is actually a core physics, when we get to the, to the laser component of it, then they'll talk about, hey, this is what the cutting edge application of the physics that you're learning today.

And, and it bleeds throughout the entire curriculum, and not only in physics, but in some of the other places as well. In the mechanical engineering when they're teaching thermal dynamics or heat transfer, they can use the example of the research that's going on in the photonics research Center in mechanical engineering to demonstrate heat transfer and make it a real problem that the cadets can, can wrap their arms around.

Instructors who are even teaching in the introductory physics program that every cadet has to take in the core physics program. When they're teaching the lasers or they're teaching how light propagates or what light is they're gonna bring in, what? What happened there in the lab with the lasers and then in our Department of military instruction, the Department of dmi, when they're teaching the defense and Street strategic studies major in one of their courses, they talk about the future of warfare.

And so here's an opportunity. For them to plug in what's going on in the development of lasers, the research that we're doing on how the nature warfare is going to change.

Dean: So as, as great as the whole system sounds, we're only as strong as our weakest link. What is the greatest limitation on implementation of the system?

Colonel John Hartke: So there's a couple things that we're working on. One is, can we get more power out? How much power can we get out? And then the other one is, how do I get the most laser beam to the right place on the target? Then we are gonna end up having to have, how does this get integrated into all of the other army systems?

Which is something I think. We at West Point have an ability to help with one of our faculty members who had just gotten back, had come back from Iraq, went to grad school and showed up. We did an analysis of alternatives and we used where he was fighting in Iraq, and he used an actual scenario for which he and his soldiers were subject to inbound mortars, and that's how we did a bit of a modeling to demonstrate that the laser would be more effective than the Gatling gun system.

Dean: It's fascinating. All right, so I know much more about lasers now after our conversation, but I still don't know much about lasers, but I do know a lot about getting the truth out of people in a courtroom. So I'm just gonna start asking you some rapid fire questions. What was the hardest class you've ever taken?

Colonel John Hartke: Law .

Dean: If you could have lunch with any historical person, who would it be?

Colonel John Hartke: George Washington.

Dean: What's the best advice you've ever received?

Colonel John Hartke: Don't do it.

Dean: On an empty Saturday. What do you do?

Colonel John Hartke: Go fishing.

Dean: How do we encourage future officers to major in, in a, uh, science, technology, engineering, or math?

Colonel John Hartke: I think the important part of that is have them see that it's not unobtainable. You don't have to be a genius to be able to major in STEM. You just have to be able to work hard and endure through it. Just work through it.

Dean: Thanks so much for listening in, and thanks to my good friend, Colonel John Hartke for sharing this important work.

Catch us next time as we discuss more academic excellence at West Point, although I can't promise the next episode will have anything to do with lasers.