That's Right: We're Shooting Down Enemy Drones With Fricken Laser Beams

It's the headline I've waited since I was probably seven years old to read: "US military spending $500M on ‘war-ready’ laser weapons — and zapping drones in Iran, along US border."

That's 50 years, folks, and totally worth the wait.

According to the New York Post — your go-to newspaper for words like "zapping" in the headline — "Iranian citizens have witnessed some dazzling laser shows recently," because "US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware."

The Department of War said this week that lasers disable "drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles."

That's no joke, either.

The Pentagon is mum on the details, but my understanding is that most of the laser weapons currently in use merely "dazzle" incoming threats, sending them off course. So there aren't any cool vaporizations. 

The Israelis led the way on some of this antimissile stuff, despite our head start with President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (now the Missile Defense Agency and soon as Golden Dome) in the early '80s. 

And Another Thing: No sharks were harmed in the production of this column. That we're at liberty to tell you about, anyway.

Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile defense system can hit incoming threats at over 40 miles away, but each launcher holds a max of 20 missiles — and each missile costs up to $60 grand. But then there's Iron Beam, which uses fricken lasers. While Iron Beam is good only against enemy missiles close in (4-7 miles, roughly), each shot costs just five bucks or so. And there's no limit on how many shots it can take, just so long as the power stays on.

Ballistic missiles are cheap. Anti-ballistic missiles are expensive.

But drones are dirt cheap — like switching to Walmart from Tiffany's — and interceptors are still expensive.

Lasers are cheap to fire, but can be expensive to develop — if the military really did spend just half a billion dollars to put laser defenses in the field, that's something to cheer. It was a year ago almost to the day that the New York Times reported the Army would "soon" field lasers, and quoted Electro Optic Systems’ chief executive Andreas Schwer saying, “The Ukrainian war and the Gaza war were key trigger events that everybody thought, ‘It’s the time now to make this operational. We should not spend any more years in doing demonstrations, tests and prototyping.'"

Schwer certainly wasn't wrong.

Lasers also come with extreme power requirements and some serious limitations, particularly distance. But when it comes to point defense, there might not be a better solution to the drone problem, and it's good to see them getting a workout in Iran.

"Somewhat surprisingly," the Post claimed, "the laser weapons are operated by soldiers using reconfigured Xbox game console controllers." Laser Wars publisher Jacob Keller told the paper, “The video games industry figured out what the best controller was and now the US military is saying, ‘Well, why reinvent the wheel with a specialized control system where you can just use an Xbox controller or something really similar to do the job?'”

That's nice and all, but Navy submarines beat the Army to this one by years.

Old-school mechanical periscopes went the way of the dodo, replaced by high-tech "photonic masts," capable of seeing more while being much smaller and less likely to reveal the sub's position. But starting with USS Colorado (SSN-788), commissioned in 2018, the boat's complicated photonic mast controller was replaced with a slightly modified Xbox controller. The best part? The Navy didn't even have to train sailors how to use. Stick an Xbox controller in a 19-year-old's hands, and he just knows what to do.

Now that same durability and ease of use are coming to fricken laser weapons.

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