Photograph by Petty Officer 2nd Class Allen Mc

USS Preble: the most lethal warship in the U.S. Navy — or maybe not!

HELIOS hits and misses

Costly new high-energy laser weapons — installed and tested on San Diego-based ships — aren’t being used against deadly Houthi drones and rockets in the Red Sea, causing consternation in the Defense Department, according to a January 2 account by Defenseone.com. “The Navy isn’t having much trouble swatting down the Houthis’ Iranian-made drones, even when they’re launched by the dozen. 

But the Pentagon is beginning to worry about using $11 million interceptor missiles to take out drones that can cost as little as a few thousand dollars,” per the story. “That price disparity is why the military started seeking lasers and other directed-energy weapons, which promise cheap, all-but-unlimited ‘magazines’ to intercept drones in large numbers.” 

A December 20, 2023 Congressional Research Service report says costs of the so-called HELIOS lasers and other laser systems the Navy fancies still loom as a barrier to wide deployment, though you might not guess that from the PR push put on by the Navy and its contractor two years ago. “Lockheed Martin has installed the first operational anti-missile laser aboard a San Diego-based destroyer for testing over the coming year,” the Times of San Diego wrote on August 19, 2022. 

“The HELIOS laser was installed on the USS Preble and integrated with its sophisticated Aegis radar and fire-control system during maintenance at Naval Base San Diego. Lockheed Martin describes the laser as ‘a transformational new weapon system, providing deep magazine, low cost per kill, speed of light delivery, and precision response.’ Published reports indicate the weapon can be used to both ‘dazzle’ and destroy cruise missiles, drones and small boats. A post on the destroyer’s Facebook page said the ship is now ‘the most lethal warship in the US Navy!’”

But was the hype real? Maybe not, at least according to the Congressional Research Service’s recent analysis. “There are still technical challenges to scaling lasers up to be able to hit targets, particularly fast targets,” Defenseone.com writes. “While the laser beam itself is literally as fast as the speed of light, at current power levels, it takes multiple seconds of tracking to cause enough damage to take down a drone,” Whether or not to spend more money on beefing up the Navy’s laser strategy remains a longstanding issue. 

“The issue for Congress is whether to modify, reject, or approve the Navy’s acquisition strategies and funding requests for shipboard laser development programs,” notes the Congressional Research Service report. “Decisions that Congress makes on this issue could affect Navy capabilities and funding requirements and the defense technology and industrial base.”

Land rush

A key advisor to UCSD’s 21st Century China Center is married to one of the biggest foreign owners of U.S. real estate, per a January 8 dispatch by LandReport.com. Chrissy Luo and her husband Tianqiao Chen, a Chinese online gaming baron, have been snapping up American forest land since 2015, says the report. “In 2018, he and his wife paid $39 million for the Vanderbilt Mansion on East 69th Street in Manhattan. Three years later, the Seeley Mudd Estate in the Los Angeles suburb of San Marino sold for $25 million to unnamed buyers who were later identified as Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen. Built in 1934, the American Colonial-style mansion had served as the official residence of the presidents of the University of Southern California for more than four decades.”

Tianqiao Chen liked Oregon so much he bought a huge chunk of it.

A January 8 Bloomberg account adds that Chen’s “Oregon property makes him one of the biggest individual owners of American land by a non-U.S. citizen. Only the Irving family of Canada — No. 6 on the Land Report’s list, with over 1.2 million acres of Maine timberland — owns more.” 

The practice of Chinese nationals buying up American property has become controversial, notes Bloomberg: “About 40 million acres of American agricultural land was owned by non-U.S. interests as of 2021, according to the most recent Department of Agriculture, with entities from China owning the equivalent of .03% of all U.S. farmland. Some lawmakers have pushed for national rules restricting foreign investment in American agricultural property. The Senate voted in July to ban the sale of farmland beyond a certain acreage or value to people or businesses from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, but the measure wasn’t ultimately signed into law. Almost half of all states have some sort of restrictions on foreign ownership.”

At UCSD, Chen’s wife Chrissy Luo advises the university’s China Center on a host of policy matters, according to the center’s website, which says members of the board she sits on act “as informed advisors on issues of importance to the center as it continues to expand its international scope and efforts and provides advice on strategy, fundraising, policy and business engagement.” 

Chen and his wife are most noted in the United States for giving $115 million to CalTech in Pasadena for brain research, a move that drew criticism from some Chinese quarters. A May 15, 2017 report by China Development Brief noted, “Chen’s donation to an American research institute ignited widespread discussion in China, with many arguing that he should have donated to institutes in his own country. When asked what considerations he made in choosing Caltech as a recipient of his donation, Chen told reporters that he favored institutions that occupied the most optimal and unique positions in the field of neuroscience, while responding to critics that the ‘lack of funds for Chinese neuroscience is not my fault.’”

In July of last year, Susan Shirk, UCSD China Center’s head honcho since its 2011 inception, was replaced by Victor C. Shih...The San Diego Association of Realtors, which runs one of the nation’s largest multiple listing services, has finally hired a new CEO and director of its wholly-owned San Diego MLS: longtime Realtor insider Saul Klein. 

The move comes after the departure of previous CEO Mike Mercurio, said by a July 2023 lawsuit to have “collected unearned vacation pay, purchased luxury items on SDAR credit cards and sold them on eBay in [a] long-running embezzlement scheme,” per a July 27, 2023 KFMB account of the litigation, filed by four former association executives. In a statement reported by Housingwire.com on January 5, Klein said, “I am thrilled to once again participate in the operation and growth of the [Multiple Listing Service] at this critical period in the history of MLS nationwide.”

— Matt Potter

(@sdmattpotter)

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