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US Fighter Jets Are Getting the Laser Cannons They've Always Deserved

• https://www.wired.com

It's been just a few months since Lockheed Martin gave the US Army the most powerful laser weapon ever developed, a ground vehicle–mounted system that can burn through tanks and knock mortars out of the sky. Now the US Air Force wants its own toy, so Lockheed's engineers are back in the lab, crafting the kind of weapon Poe Dameron could get down with. They're making a laser blaster for a fighter jet to swat down incoming missiles.

Decades after science fiction writers and directors imagined worlds of killer beams flying back and forth, reality is catching up. This spring defense contractor Raytheon became the first to destroy a target with a laser fired from a helicopter. At White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the Apache AH-64 shot a truck from more than a mile away, while on the move and from a variety of altitudes. Raytheon is also building a laser-firing, drone-killing dune buggy. Boeing has its own anti-drone laser cannon.

"This technology has been described as 'coming' for so long—with it never actually arriving—that people took to believing that it would never happen," says military analyst Peter Singer. "Well, now it's happening. After so many false starts, we're seeing real breakthroughs that are starting to make the idea viable."

The key enabler has been the development of solid-state lasers, which run on electricity. The previous frontrunner tech was the chemical laser, which requires large amounts of chemicals to generate the reaction that produces its powerful beam. In 2012 the US Missile Defense Agency shelved its Airborne Laser Test Bed, a Boeing 747-based chemical laser designed to shoot down ICBMs, because it was too costly and unwieldy.

In the past decade, solid-state lasers have grown in power and efficiency, to the point that they now represent a viable alternative, one with its own advantages. "We're now able to generate a focused, powerful beam and are able to hold it on the target long enough to disable it," Raytheon CEO Tom Kennedy says. "It represents a limitless magazine, as long as you have electricity."


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