Message posted by Chris McDowell on June 06, 2011 at 3:29:16 PST:

I was reading a paper recently (link below) and there's a paragraph in there that reads:

"The Low Cost Autonomous Attack System (LOCAAS) program, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Air Force, set out to do precisely this. By 2005 it appears that the program
succeeded in developing a robotic system that could loiter in a small area and use a laser-detection-and-ranging (ladar) sensor together with automatic-target recognition algorithms to find and attack a range of targets, including mobile missile launchers. However, due to unease among senior airmen with autonomous battlefield robots, the Air Force walked away from LOCAAS. The technology was preserved for a time as the Loitering Attack Munition (LAM) in the
U.S. Army’s Non-Line-of-Sight Launch System (NLOS-LS). But in April 2010 the Army terminated NLOS-LS. The reticence regarding LOCAAS and LAM appears to stem from a cultural inclination to maintain tight control over kinetic attacks, combined with an intellectual failure to grasp the importance of being able to address imprecisely located targets. So, while the technology to deal with them has been demonstrated, the U.S. military Services have not chosen to field
autonomous robotic weapons."

Sorry for any format/spacing problems; Firefox likes to do that. My question is, are LOCAAS and/or LAM likely to have been tested at Groom Lake, or elsewhere? Reading between the lines a bit, LOCAAS seems like it was an airborne system, which is why I'm speculating. Thoughts, anyone?

- Chris M.

Replies:

• Re: Would this have been tested at Groom? JoenTX 06/07/2011, 20:32:43 PST (0)