When all you have is a gun and a bunch of missiles, every problem looks like something to blow up. The Army’s Apache helicopters are very good at blowing stuff up, but there are times when they need more precision. Laser-like precision, even.

National Defense Magazine quotes the Army’s Col. John Vannoy:

“There is absolutely a niche I believe for use of directed energy weapons,” he said during a briefing at the annual Special Operations Forces Industry Conference sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association. “The lens we are looking at this through right now is: ‘Is it feasible to do this?’ We’re not at the point where we’ve laid out a business case to advance it.”

The office envisions using a laser weapon to destroy vehicles or generators versus sending in a missile that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said.

Better lasers and more lasers are one way the Pentagon plans to get around the cost imbalance of its weapons. Missiles and precision bombs, released from sophisticated helicopters and planes, are effective, but they’re not cheap, and they’re single-use. The cost of a weapon may make sense against a tank, but not against a truck carrying a machine gun. Lasers are expensive to develop, but their cost of use is expected to be very low, around $1 a shot. At that price, destroying trucks and buildings with lasers suddenly makes a lot more sense than using bombs.

Lasers aren’t without their limits. Powerful ones need a lot of power, and so far the only laser deployed by the Department of Defense had a ship carrying it. The current technology shows a lot of promise, but earlier laser weapons failed. And lasers, because they are beams of light, need clear air to work. That’s hard to get when there’s smoke in the way. Or lots and lots of dust, like the kind kicked up by helicopters flying in the desert.

Source: Popular Science