U.S. Army to show-off 50-kilowatt laser weapons against manned and unmanned aircraft at Fort Sill, Ala.
FORT SILL, Okla. – Stryker armored combat vehicles will incinerate enemy unmanned aircraft, helicopters, piloted aircraft, and maybe even incoming enemy missiles, rockets, and artillery with 50-kilowatt laser weapons during an upcoming combat shoot-off at Fort Sill, Okla. Kris Osborn at The National Interest reports. Continue reading original article
The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:
3 March 2021 -- During the shoot-off the laser-armed Strykers will face scenarios designed to test the system and establish threshold requirements for this class of laser.
For quite some time, the Army and other laser weapons developers have been working on engineering power-scaled lasers able to fire with greater strength, power, precision, and range. This requires exportable sources of power, the proper form factors or hardware configurations and specially engineered laser-firing technologies built to optimize firepower.
Lasers are quiet, meaning they can fire without a large acoustic signature which could give away an attack position, should a large missile or cannon be fired. They can offer a kind of silent attack. They are also scalable, meaning they can fire off to fully destroy and incinerate or merely stun or disable an enemy target, depending on the power setting of the weapon.
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John Keller, chief editor
Military & Aerospace Electronics
