Home Military The Air Force is planning to start using laser weapons before 2020

The Air Force is planning to start using laser weapons before 2020

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Laser weapons have been synonymous with sci-fi entertainment for decades, but only is the technology for these weapons available to us now, the United States military plans to start using them within just a few years. It’s weird to think about. First the Army wanted to use lasers to clear landmines from a distance, then the Navy wanted to equip a battleship with a railgun, and now the Air Force wants to mount laser weapons on its warplanes in order to shoot down everything from drones, to missiles, to other aircraft. 

The Army has its HEL-MD (not to mention is working on GI Joe-style rifles and minesweepers); the Navy put a battleship-mounted railgun aboard the USS Ponce; and within the next five years, the Air Force expects to have laser weapons of its very own. These armaments, dubbed directed-energy weapons pods, will be mounted on American warplanes and serve to burn missiles, UAVs — even other combat aircraft — clean out of the sky. “I believe we’ll have a directed energy pod we can put on a fighter plane very soon,” Air Force General Hawk Carlisle said at a Fifth-Generation Warfare lecture during the Air Force Association Air & Space conference earlier this week. “That day is a lot closer than I think a lot of people think it is.” The 150 kW HELLADS system from General Atomics appears to be the current frontrunner for the USAF contract despite the system only having just recently entered ground tests. HELLADS stands for “High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System”. The third generation prototype measures just 1.3 x 0.4 x 0.5 meters — small enough to fit onto a Predator C UAV, exactly what DARPA wants to do by 2018 — and runs off of a single lithium ion battery pack.

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