High-tech weapons get even smarter

Oct. 24 - In the 1991 Gulf War it was Patriot missiles, smart bombs and stealth technology that helped win the day. If and when the U.S. fights in the region again, it will be with an even bigger arsenal of cutting-edge weaponry.

“THIS WAR IS really high tech,” says L-3 Communications CEO Frank Lanza - and he should know. Lanza’s $4-billion-dollar firm is one of the military’s leading suppliers of advanced technology, selling everything from secure communication equipment to attack aircraft simulators.

“The deployment now is a lot on intelligence resources, reconnaissance resources, communications, the buildup of our smart munitions, and that’s a big change over what the focus was in ’90, ’91 which was really on people and munitions,” says Lanza.

In the next Gulf War, improved spy satellites from TRW will allow U.S. air and naval forces to see more clearly through bad weather than they could a decade ago.

Unmanned aerial vehicles from Northrop Grumman will be used to monitor enemy troop movements and strike elusive targets. Smart weapons will be even smarter, guided to their targets by an advanced global positioning system made by Boeing.

But the most powerful and most sophisticated weapon of all will be the ability to link a variety of intelligence and surveillance assets together to see and share a real time picture of the battlefield.

“In the future, the United States military does not believe that a bigger tank for example is going to win the war,” says Andrew Koch of Jane’s Defense Weekly. “Information … is going to win the war. Knowing where your enemy is and knowing where your friend is very precise and being able to share that information in real time … is going to be the vast difference in winning a war and losing a war.”

Technology is changing the military from what analysts call a platform-centric fighting force of separate weapons systems to a network-centric structure based on information and communication.

It’s also improving the capabilities of fighting forces on the ground. Take advanced ceramics in the ’91 Gulf War — this technology created the radar-evading skin of the stealth fighter; today, it’s being used to make body armor plates for U.S. troops.

“This is the way the plate comes out, this is very light weight, it’s the lightest ceramic, it’s the hardest ceramic and we’re making them by the thousands really,” says Ceradyne CEO Joel Moskowitz.

California-based Ceradyne has just received a big order from the military for its ceramic chest and back plates which can stop multiple rounds from a 30- to 50-caliber machine gun at point blank range.

“We did about $45 million in shipments sales last year and this year we’ve already come very close to that in the first 9 months,” says Moskowitz.

While hundreds of smaller defense suppliers with advanced technology are seeing a boost in business from the latest military buildup, industry watchers say most of the military’s money is flowing to the major contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

“Prime contractors, especially the prime contractors that have survived through the consolidation of the ’90s, have a competitive edge an ability to track the money, to be every place the Pentagon wants them to be, because they sit every day thinking about threats and thinking about programs that come down the road,” says Jon Kutler of Quarterdeck Investment Partners.

As in the last Gulf War, any future conflict in the region will be an opportunity for big defense firms to show off early versions of future weapons.

“One new capability you may see used in Iraq is the use of high-powered microwave missiles,” says Jane’s Defense Weekly’s Koch. “These are the first of what are called ‘directed energy weapons,’ things like high-powered lasers, microwaves and radio frequency bombs.”

Boeing has already outfitted a 747 with a powerful chemical laser that might see some action if the U.S. goes to war with Iraq. Other high-energy weapons that can fry the enemy’s electronic circuitry are well beyond the concept stage and reportedly ready for battle testing.

And if U.S. forces encounter chemical weapons stockpiles, they may try and incinerate them with a newly developed type of ordnance known as “agent defeat.”

“That is a weapon that can go in and destroy the chemicals or biological weapons without spreading those germs or gas to the outside world and thereby producing a threat to say a local population,” says Koch.

But technology doesn’t win wars, strategy does. And like America’s last battle in the Persian Gulf, the next conflict will depend less on weapons themselves and more on how and where they are used.