Project Butterfly

Project Butterfly was a project at Lambdatron for US Navy. The word "butterfly" didn't mean anything, it was just randomly assigned by a computer in the Pentagon. The idea was to use an incredibly powerful and very, very narrow radio beam to disable enemy aircraft or missiles by overloading to the point of damage the avionics / electronics.

After a couple of years with little success, the Navy canceled the project. As a result, both the Navy and Lambdatron ended up losing money with no results; but even more, the company was losing some reputation as a result of the failure.

In May 1999 Stan Warshawski assigned Tanisha Chladek and Jon Chladek to work on it, as a last ditch effort to salvage the effort and the firm's reputation.

The young couple figured out a way based on completely different technology to make it work.^AT13

Since the Navy officially canceled the project by that point, and the new approach was radically different from Butterfly, the resulting design was named Monarch; and the first prototype was called Swallowtail (both names of butterflies). The new system was acquired by the US Air Force.^MC28