Why the new laser weapons will not work

The US Navy just deployed its first shipboard laser weapon to the Persian Gulf. Here are 14 reasons why it won't be good for much in real war.

LaWS, Laser Weapons System

1. Everything vibrates, even if the vibration is minimal and can be dampened. Because laser weapons shoot photons in a perfectly straight line, due to geometry the tiniest motion of the gun will cause giant motions at long distances. Point a strong flashlight at a distant object. The smallest move of the light source causes a giant move at the object. This increases the farther you go. All demonstrations currently being done for promotional purposes are fired at close drones within visible range. But drones can fly over 60,000 feet in altitude (11+ miles).

2. Such drones they are using to promote with demonstrations move at very regular slow speeds. This is part of the nature of an unmanned drone. It flies slow and steady. The drones fired upon have no evasive maneuverability. So they are shooting at sitting ducks. Hardly a test of real world situations, but great for public relations pictures.

Drone fuel ignited by laser

3. The reason that the test drones burst into flame is they are filled with fuel. Solar-electric drones, which carry no flammable liquids, have achieved flight times of several weeks.

4. A stream of photons must be pointed entirely from the location of the gun. There is no way to give the photons any 'smart' capability or autonomous control. It all must be done at the point of the gun by the shooter at the time of firing. The photons themselves are 'blind.' This means that optical sighting (augmented by infrared) is necessary. Once the photons leave the gun, they are going to strike the optical target. But in modern war, most targets are not in optical range. And radar is not exact enough to determine point of aim alone. Hence, for targets outside of optical range, it is like pointing a very long spear into the dark.

5. A laser fires in a straight line, irrespective of the curvature of the earth. This means that only targets in the line of sight can be fired at. Only a few miles from a ship the earth curves below the line of sight.

Here are the specs on that. At a particular height (left) the horizon is at a particular distance (right).

Height (meters)	Distance (km)	Height(feet)	Distance (miles)
0	0.0	0.0	0.0
1	3.6	3.3	2.1
2	5.1	6.6	3.0
3	6.2	9.8	3.7
4	7.1	13.1	4.3
5	8.0	16.4	4.8
6	8.7	19.7	5.2
7	9.4	23.0	5.7
8	10.1	26.2	6.1
9	10.7	29.5	6.4
10	11.3	32.8	6.8
20	16.0	65.6	9.6
30	19.5	98.4	11.7
40	22.6	131.2	13.5
50	25.2	164.0	15.1
60	27.6	196.8	16.6
70	29.9	229.6	17.9
80	31.9	262.4	19.2
90	33.9	295.2	20.3
100	35.7	328.0	21.4
1000	112.8	3280.0	67.7
2000	159.6	6560.0	95.7
5000	252.3	16,400.0	151.4
10,000	356.9	32,800.0	214.2
12,000	391.0	39,360.0	234.6
100,000	1,132.7	328,000.0	679.6
500,000	2,572.0	1,640,000.0	1543.2
1,000,000,000	1,006,344.9	3,280,000,000.0	603,806.9

So unless you are planning to shoot visual targets within a few miles, a laser is not going to work.

6. As sophisticated as 'laser' sounds, a laser gun is still an inertial weapon that follows the laws of physics. It is a 'dumb' weapon in that sense, not a 'smart' weapon that can change course and make decisions after firing.

7. Lasers can be reflected with mirror-like surfaces. These could be added to drones.

8. The above issues are compounded when you fire from a moving platform like a jet. That is why we see them first displayed on ships.

9. Firing at a high speed missile that arrives before radar can detect it, such as low-flying hypersonic (Mach 5 and above) anti-ship missiles, would require citing and aiming at the target in too short a time. Multiple warheads would also pose an increased problem, especially in modern warfare where many incoming missiles are decoys.

10. The best that these lasers can likely shoot down is visible (at least by infrared) slow-moving fuel-filled drones that catch on fire. Yet in January 2016 Iran demonstrated it could take precise pictures of a U.S. aircraft carrier from a high flying drone without being detected at all. U.S. ships can't always detect drones, let alone shoot them down.

11. The apparent advantage of a laser gun is misleading. While it is true that photons travel to their target at the speed of light, and that this means if the gun is aimed properly there is no way that a target could move out of the way of the incoming photons in time, this assumes you can first lock slights onto a target. Missiles today come at twirling and chaotic trajectories that can't be predicted. Making matters worse, the laser must remain steady on the target for some time to ignite it. Staying locked onto such an evasive twirling target would not be feasible. That is why they are talking about hitting stationary or very smooth-flying targets like tanks and drones. Thus it is extremely limited what this gun could be used for.

12. While a laser beam is silent and invisible, the heat it generates is detectable. It will not be long before the skin of planes, tanks, and drones, are outfitted with heat sensitivity to detect lasers being fired at them. A laser must remain constant on one spot for a few second to build up heat. Once the target detects it is being heated and moves, it defeats the laser's entire method. Effectively the target must stay still, at least in relation with the motion of the gun, to be sufficiently burned. It takes some seconds for the object to burn or ignite.  

13. For all the reasons stated above, the laser gun is a close-quarters weapon. The problem with this is that modern war is not so close quarters. Planes can fire missiles from far over the line of sight in today's military situations.

Hold very, very still. I'm going to burn you with my $40 million dollar gun. Don't move. Hold it! Almost there. Gotcha!!!! 

Sounds more like 19th century photography than modern warfare. Doesn't it?

What we are seeing is more of a publicity stunt than anything else. The U.S. is capitalizing on a public raised on a diet of science fiction movies, and conspiracy theories about death rays. The fact is that within a very short time all militarized armies will have these silly rayguns.

Meet 'Silent Hunter' - China's New 'Armored Vehicle Slicing' Laser Gun

Russia's New MiG-35 Fighter Jet Could Sport Laser Guns 

There are applications in war that lasers would in fact be able to perform better than any weapon previously. One is blinding satellites. Russia is already quite advanced in this technology on a testing level. Satellites are, by nature, sitting ducks (as their trajectories are constant), and cannot quickly evade something as instant as light from the earth or another satellite hitting its arrays.

Also, destroying stationary objects such as ammunition depots or sensitive mechanical equipment on the battlefield might be an application for lasers.

14. However, and here is the final reason lasers don't mean much on a battlefield, laser guns are themselves huge hulking sitting duck targets in plane site. Because the trajectory of a laser is a perfectly straight line, if the gun can see you, you can see the gun. This makes the gun visible to its targets. Also, due to its optical nature, a laser can do nothing about a threat that is not optical, such as electronic information jamming, EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapons, or low-flying hypersonic missiles with multiple (mostly decoy) warheads. And all this is merely 'conventional war' we are talking about.

A laser gun is effectively a $40 million dollar gun that shoots extremely hot, extremely fast bullets. They must be aimed and held on the target. They are not 'smart' weapons. They are vulnerable to EMP and EW weapons. They are certainly vulnerable to anti-ship missiles. This is demonstrable. If you read the articles I listed above, note that no one has even mentioned this as part of a defensive shield against missiles, SAM or surface-to-air-missile-defense-system. Yet that is precisely what they were originally fantasized to be. These lasers are the final fossil of Reagan's STAR WARS system, that scared the Soviet Union so bad. This was meant to be the central weapon of our nuclear defense shield. But note that China is talking of it being used on lumbering tanks, and the US on slow-moving low-flying drones, and Russia about using it to blind satellites. NO ONE is mentioning using this against a Russian Zicron missile. The Zicron can travel 250 miles, is a smart weapon that can adjust itself to a moving target, and travels 5 times the speed of sound. That means it can go from Washington to New York City in 3 minutes.

So in reality the release of these relics of the defunct STAR WARS pipe-dream of the 1980s, after 30 years, only to be able to shoot slow-moving or non-moving targets, is a sign of U.S. technological failure, and its ambitions being far outside the parameters of real physics. And the fact that the Russians and Chinese are so close behind with the same thing is more proof of the same.

Hype, hype, hype, no delivery. The end of the world, if there is to be one, will go boom boom, not pew pew pew. The entry of the shipboard laser weapon system shooting at slow drones is an embarrassing story of U.S. policy failure and military industrial corrupt capitalism.

Cover of Amazing Stories, January 1934

What does all this have to do with Meher Baba or philosophy? Nothing. But you have to admit it's entertaining reading. (: