I do not *say* that only bad people don’t want the USA to have laser cannons…

…but, let’s face it: I’m almost certainly thinking that right now.  I mean: laser cannon.  This is why we all signed up for the Twenty-First Century, right?

Boeing is building a laser cannon for the U.S. Army, and the new weapon has now proved it will be as capable at sea as on land. The High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD)—basically a high-energy laser mounted on top of a big truck—was successfully used to blast some UAV drones and 60mm mortars out of the Florida sky earlier this year, Boeing announced Thursday.

I will pass over lightly the minor detail that what’s being actually reported may not really live up to the promise implied in the above paragraph, and instead note, again: laser cannon.  If we’re not getting it today, it’s going to be soon.  The future does seem determined to arrive, whether we particularly want it to, or not.  Although if it’s bringing a laser cannon with it then it could have arrived last week and I wouldn’t have minded…

11 thoughts on “I do not *say* that only bad people don’t want the USA to have laser cannons…”

  1. This is why, though I don’t want us to get complacent in military R&D, I’m also not in the “ohnoes China is totes building shipkiller missiles!!!1!!” camp either. In a decade or two, I’m thinking our Navy might be looking at China’s and saying “Missiles? How 20th century of you! Thanks for the target practice. Sulu, arm phasers.”

    1. Interesting take on it, quite frankly it would be a lot easier (depending on how cumbersome the laser system is), to target a missile with a laser, than with another missile.

      1. The whole missile defense conundrum (“it’s like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet”) does get a lot simpler when you’re shooting something that thinks of a bullet as “glacial”.

        1. Well .. there’s “glacial” and there’s “glacial” .. some of those suckers are supersonic.
          .
          Mew

  2. Wouldn’t mind if that was tested on some ISIS targets…might help them understand what “stop being evil” means. (Not likely, but would influence their recruitment.)

  3. I dunno…I’d hold out for a weapon that robs the enemy of all dignity, like subsonics that would make them crap their pants…It’s classier to sign up for “Fight the Amercans and die gloriously” than “Fight the Americans and die of terminal diarrhea”.

    1. Pretty sure the Lefties would argue that this is against the Hague Convention.
      (Of course, they’d invoke the Geneva Convention instead, because they don’t actually bother to learn anything…)

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