Page 182 - MY STORY

same thing and were going to deploy huge HEL’s at

ground-based sites as weapons.

One morning Don K dropped by my office and wondered

if MDAC should somehow be in the game. He said:
“Here’s a few thousand bucks. See if you can figure out if
we can find a place.” One of my engineers, Doug R, and

I took a quick look and realized that everyone else in our
corporation was so involved with weaponizing HEL’s that
no one was looking at system vulnerability and

countermeasures (hardening). Hmmmm – what could we
do with our very limited resources?

We knew that a west coast company had a multi-kilowatt
laser range, so we took a radome from an existing weapon
system and whacked it with the laser. The damage was

significant and made the plastic radome non-useable. We
started looking for laser reflective coatings that were

transparent to radio waves (RADAR) and coupled up
with an optical coating company, We pitched a potential
program to the Navy, won a small sole-source contract,

and our HEL Vulnerability and Hardening (V&H)
Organization was born! We went on from there to bid and
win a competitive program from the Air Force Research

Labs (AFRL) to study the vulnerability and hardening of