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Welcome to the Laser Wars
Amid a rising tide of adversary drones and missile attacks, laser weapons are finally poised to enter the battlefield.
This wasn’t surprising: While Maiman touted the potential scientific applications of his discovery when he first unveiled it to the country later that year, the laser immediately conjured up visions in the public consciousness of the Martian “heat ray” from H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, so much so that many of the contemporary headlines from its debut were variations of the Los Angeles Herald ’s “L.A. If successfully developed, high-energy lasers in particular could prove highly effective at short-range air defense missions against helicopters and low-flying attack aircraft, as well as blasting incoming rockets, artillery, and mortars out of the sky, according to a 2023 Congressional Research Service report on the US military’s directed-energy weapons programs. The development and fielding of directed-energy weapons like lasers has taken on such new urgency among world governments in recent years due to the rapid proliferation of relatively cheap one-way attack drones among both professional militaries (see: the 2020 conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine) and irregular forces like Yemen’s Houthis in the Red Sea, ISIS cells in Iraq and Syria, and Iran-backed militias across the Middle East.
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