Next Big Future September 5, 2023
The Pentagon has been spending about $1 billion per year researching directed energy weapons like lasers and microwave weapons for decades. They have bought a few demonstration systems for Navy ships and mounted on trucks. In July 2023 Lockheed Martin announced they will scale its laser technology to a new benchmark: a 500 kW-class laser. This is the second phase of the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative. After spending tens of billions on combat laser research over the past few decades, they are finally seeing some real progress to usable combat lasers in the past few months with the new Grumman and Lockheed combat lasers. With directed-energy research now coming to fruition, the Missile Defense Agency is putting “increased emphasis” on development of directed-energy weapons for shooting down adversary missiles. The US military and MDA were willing to spend a $1 billion per year on lasers and directed energy weapons when they were not mature and did not have a real chance of being useful defensive systems… read more.