The United States has unleashed the era of the laser weapon

The age of The laser weapon is finally upon us.

The U.S. military has officially sent a pair of high-energy laser weapons overseas to defend U.S. troops and their allies against enemy drones, the service recently reported. revealed, marking the first known public deployment of a directed energy system for air defense in military history. And, according to a senior official, those weapons are actively removing threats from the sky.

The weapon, known as a palletized high-energy laser (P-HEL) and developed by US defense contractor BlueHalo, is based on the company’s 20-kilowatt engine. Locust laser weapons systemIt first arrived at an unspecified location abroad and “began operational work” in November 2022, according to an April report. Press release Of the company. A second system arrived overseas “earlier this year.”

Although the army initially refused to indicate where the P-HEL systems were deployed and whether they had achieved a “kill” against an adversary drone, citing operational security concerns, the service’s top acquisition official recently confirmed that new laser weapons had managed to neutralize incoming threats in the Middle East.

“They have worked in some cases,” said Doug Bush, the Army’s undersecretary for acquisition, logistics and technology. said Forbes this month. “Under the right conditions, they are very effective against certain threats.”

News of the P-HEL deployment comes as the US military seeks to aggressively bolster its air defense capabilities amid a dramatic increase in drone and missile attacks on US troops by Iranian-backed militias in the Middle East, as well as against US Navy warships operating in the Red Sea by Houthi rebels in Yemen following the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas.

Since the beginning of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the US Department of Defense has been slowly but surely hinting at the use of laser weapons in shorter-range areas. But the arrival of the P-HEL in the Middle East for operational use is a technological victory for the US military, which has actively pursued research related to directed energy weapons since the 1970s. Even more significant is that it may also represent a turning point for the development and broader use of laser weapons by militaries around the world.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Following its creation in 1960 by American engineer and physicist Theodore Maiman, the laser (technically an acronym for “amplification of light by stimulated emission of radiation”) almost immediately became a futuristic weapon favored by both science fiction and science fiction writers. as by military planners. This was not surprising: while Maiman touted the potential scientific applications of his discovery when he first presented it to the country that same year, the laser immediately conjured up visions in the public consciousness of the Martian “heat ray” from the H.G. Wells telescope. war of wordsso much so that many of the contemporary headlines for his debut were variations of the Los Angeles Herald“Los Angeles man discovers sci-fi death ray” according to the book by Jeff Hecht Beam: the race to manufacture the laser. “Actually, the laser was more of a ray of life than a ray of death,” Maiman would later say. remember thinking of the medical applications of his invention, according to his memoirs.

The Pentagon began exploring military applications of lasers almost immediately, from relatively practical uses such as designators for laser guided bombs to more far-fetched concepts like the Strategic Defense Initiative of the 1980s, also known as “Star Wars.” But only in recent decades has the underlying technology advanced to the point where laser weapons are effective against their intended targets.

In the mid-2000s, the Air Force successfully used its YAL-1 airborne laser based on Boeing 747 to defeat ballistic missiles in flight during tests, while the Zeus-HMMWV Laser Artillery Neutralization System Mounted on Army Humvee deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq to remove landmines, improvised explosive devices and unexploded ordnance. By 2014, the Navy AN/SEQ-3 laser weapon system (LaWS) managed to disable drones and small boats during tests from the bow of the USS Austin-class amphibious transport dock. Ponce What does the service consist of? invoiced at the time as the world’s first “active laser weapon”. (When the Ponce was decommissioned in 2017, the successor system to the LaWS, the technologically maturing laser weapons system demonstrator, was installed on the USS San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock portlandwhich tested successfully in 2020 and 2021).