UA bringing military and academic together to defeat new threats

TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — Wars in Iran and Ukraine have shown the power of cheap, fairly simple weapons—and shown the need for our sophisticated military to adapt. At the University of Arizona, a program to bring engineers and military officers together aims for a faster path to new ways to defend ourselves.

Throughout the Iran War, the US has used multi million dollar missiles that take a long time to replace, against drones that cost less than a car and are easy to crank out by the thousands.

Riki Ellison of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance says, “Our ability as a nation and as a world to be able to defeat low flying drones that are cheap in massive scale is a challenge right now and we have to figure out how to defeat that.â€

Now the College of Engineering at the University of Arizona is teaming up with the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance to connect military officers with engineers for fast, flexible defensive designs with a strong understanding of what the military needs.

The modern military has to worry about slow, cheap, drones on the low end, and hypersonic missiles on the high end that fly so fast they're especially hard to hit. U of A's expertise with optics and lasers could apply the speed of light against that threat.

Engineering College Dean David Hahn says, “We took our high-powered lasers, and we had a hypersonic model with the airflow over it. We hit it with laser energy, we disturb the boundary layers that produces instabilities, and so that’s kind of toward the approaches of using lasers to affect and maybe destabilize a hypersonic weapon.â€

U of A hopes the merger of military and academic will change the culture of defense programs to turn out fast flexible programs able to keep up with fast changing threats.