One of my guilty pleasures is lurking in the comment sections of various media outlets, either arguing with regular members of the community or, occasionally, trying to provoke them into a credibility-destroying emotional tirade.
Yes, I am an internet troll… well, sometimes, anyway. But I do it for reasons beyond the brief bit of pleasure I get from making somebody with an opposing viewpoint question his convictions.
I do it because it is the best place to get a feel for popular opinion — a setting where anonymous posters can spew their thoughts, unfiltered and undiluted by the fear of having to account for them later.
Quite interestingly, I’ve found that the attitude among non-Americans, particularly Europeans, is that the U.S. military is ineffective, a shadow of its former self.
Their reasoning: Look at the ongoing insurgency in Iraq. Look at the Taliban in Afghanistan. They still exist, they continue to fight, and, by all accounts, they are finding new converts each and every day to join their ranks.
Clearly, the army that once beat the Japanese and the Germans in a two-front war has seen better days.
Destroying Empires, One Homemade Mortar Shell at a Time
This oversimplified thinking, regretfully, is more the rule than the exception these days.
What these commenters fail to understand is that fighting a guerrilla resistance is not like fighting a conventional army — an army that marches under a very visible, very prominent single flag.
Instead, when a modern army such as ours fights insurgents, guerrillas, or freedom fighters, as the locals typically know them, the modern army finds itself bogged down, subject to gradual attrition of troops and hemorrhaging of finances — a problem the guerillas do not have — with little or no actual gain.
To the guerillas, the fight is to the death, and the only financing they need comes in the form of popular support from the locals.
They’re never gone… never defeated… never sapped of the willingness to continue. When well supported by the locals, they are almost unstoppable.
Asymmetric warfare has brought down empires, including the Romans, when the Germanic tribes first bankrupted the city-state and then dismantled it piece by piece.
It happened to the British Empire as well, when the American militias — many using ambush and surprise tactics to wear down the occupying forces — made the cost too great for the Crown to hold on to the colonies.
Asymmetric warfare was a plight on Hitler’s Wehrmacht as it patrolled occupied Europe and tried to gain footholds in the East.
It created the quagmire American forces were forced to withdraw from in Vietnam in 1973… and it did the same to the Russians in Afghanistan a decade and a half later.
And it has continued to do the same today — twice in just over a decade — to the army that destroyed Saddam’s armed forces, once the fourth-largest in the world.
Has Technology Finally Turned the Tables on the Table-Turners?
Well, for the first time, it’s possible that guerrilla warriors have hit a wall… a limitation to what they can do.
The solution wasn’t a system built around a specific task, as almost all weapons systems are. It wasn’t built to destroy an airborne threat, to engage ground targets, or to repel attacks from the sea.
Instead, this system was designed to deal with the element of surprise — whatever that surprise might be.
On a battlefield where an enemy can come at you in a plain, unmarked white van or a motorboat or can fire improvised projectiles from mobile launchers and then escapes into the shadows, a tool can only be effective if it can react quickly and to a multitude of threats.
And that is exactly what Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) has done.
The product currently in testing is the Area Defense Anti-Munitions system, known by the catchy acronym ADAM.
With a portable 10-kilowatt laser at the core of the system, ADAM is designed to engage everything from Qassam-variety unguided rockets to small watercraft such as powerboats and inflatable fast-attack boats.
Earlier this month, Lockheed put ADAM through its first tests against maritime targets, during which the prototype successfully disabled two boats at a range of approximately 1 mile.
The ground-based system’s high-energy laser burned through multiple compartments of the military-grade small boats operating in the ocean.
The company previously demonstrated the system’s capabilities in engaging airborne targets, including small-caliber rocket targets and an unmanned aerial system target.
The system can reliably track moving targets at a range of more than 3 miles, and its 10-kilowatt fiber laser can engage targets up to 1.2 miles away.
“Our laser weapon initiatives leverage commercial products and processes, focusing on affordability for the user,” said Dr. Ray O. Johnson, Lockheed Martin CTO. “Lockheed Martin continues to invest in advancing fiber laser and beam control technologies, as these successful ADAM tests demonstrate.”
The ADAM design couples commercial hardware components with Lockheed Martin’s laser beam control architecture and software to affordably deliver the performance required to rapidly dispatch close-in threats with a virtually inexhaustible ammunition supply and low per-engagement cost.
“Our ADAM system tests have shown that high-energy lasers are ready to begin addressing critical defense needs,” said Tory Bruno, president of Lockheed’s Strategic and Missile Defense Systems. “Putting revolutionary technologies to work in practical applications is a hallmark of innovation at Lockheed Martin.”
Not Too Big to Succeed
As the biggest government contractor in operation today, Lockheed is always a good bet for that slow, conservative play.
Delivering close to 150% gains over the last four years, it is definitely a popular way to go as a portfolio cornerstone… but that is not why I’m writing about it today.
The development of products like ADAM, with the company’s multi-faceted approach to solving an age-old problem, shows to me that despite its size and success, Lockheed is not the big, cumbersome, rigid giant that so many cynics like to think it is.
Yes, it makes tens of billions off of government contracts, which it is almost guaranteed to land simply by virtue of its reputation and the amount of cash it can throw into product development.
But the company is still pushing the envelope and still working towards solving problems — not just prolonging the market for its products.
Systems like ADAM and its successors will change the way modern armies fight wars. These changes will certainly render many currently used systems obsolete — a double-edged sword for a company that stands to lose revenue from other product lines.
However, progress is progress, and it’s good to see that a company this big and this powerful is still pursuing it.
Lockheed currently trades in the $163 range, or about 3% off its all-time highs, which came earlier this month.
However, as its flagship product, the F-35, nears operational status, and with projects like ADAM, the future for continued growth looks about as good as the prospect for continued unrest across the world.
Morbid, perhaps… But true, nonetheless.
To your wealth,
Brian Hicks
Check us out on YouTube!Brian is a founding member and President of Angel Publishing. He writes about general investment strategies for Wealth Daily and Energy & Capital. For more on Brian, take a look at his editor’s page.
