1966, 1990, 2017
DECADES TO ‘ZAP’
The theoretical possibility of a silent beam of energy that turns enemy weapons to toast has been explored in the pages of AL&T magazine for decades. With high- energy lasers on Stryker combat vehicles and an Apache helicopter downing drones in tests, it now seems a mat ter of time before they’re in use in the field.
L
asers, synonymous with precision from eye surgery to targeting, have long held out the pos- sibility of an elegant and cheap solution to some of the messier, more expensive problems of war.
A bomb is a single-use weapon; a laser is reusable. A laser weapon can disable a vehicle at a distance without blowing it up, preserving lives and intelligence, and can do a host of things a bullet can’t, or that a bullet can do but with a big risk of collateral damage. It can blind a surveillance cam- era, disable communications networks, shoot down a rocket fired from an approaching boat.
A laser weapon needs a lot of power but doesn’t need ammu- nition, which frees up a whole chain of resources. No need for bullets means fewer vehicles in a supply convoy and less storage space needed. Teoretically, a weapon that travels at the speed of light could also shoot down a missile travel- ing faster than the speed of sound, boosting the ability of current missile defense systems to intercept new hypersonic missiles.
Tese benefits eluded the defense community for decades. In the July-August 1966 issue, Army AL&T predecessor Army Research and Development Newsmagazine ran a summary of a paper presented at the Army Science Confer- ence by Feltman Research Laboratories exploring the ability of chemical reactions to power a laser beam. “Te detona- tion of a cyanogen-oxygen mixture in small test vehicles looks promising as a pump with military applications,” the article noted.
Interest in and the feasibility of laser weapons has waxed and waned since then, and the magazine archives chart this: In a May-June 1976 article, Dr. George H. Heil- meier, then-director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), said that whether the Soviets could use lasers to disable the American satellite network was the No. 1 question DARPA was exploring. Tangen- tial references to directed-energy weapons (the technical name for high-energy laser weapons) and particle beams crop up throughout the ’70s and ’80s. In the July-August 1990 issue, Army Research, Development and Acquisition
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THEN & NOW
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