The weapon, mounted on a warship’s missile, shot down four unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in secret testing carried out off the California coast, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

In a joint enterprise between US Navy and Raytheon Missile Systems the technology has now got to the stage where lasers will be deployed on warships as part of their short-range defence.

For the first time a ‘solid state’ 32 mega watt laser beam of directed energy has been fired from a warship to a distance of more than two miles burning into a drone travelling at about 300mph.

The laser is mounted on a Phalanx close in weapons system that has a radar detection system. The targeting system was used in Iraq, to train fire from a Gatling onto rockets and mortars raining down on British bases.

Raytheon developed the system after buying six off-the-shelf commercial lasers from the car industry and joining them to make a single, powerful beam guided by the Phalanx’s radars. Unlike other tests which have been conducted on aircraft it uses a solid state laser rather than a chemical generated beam.

Mike Booen, vice president of Directed Energy Weapons at Raytheon, said the tests off San Nicolas Island were “a great day for the laser”.

“This is more real than Star Wars,” he said, speaking at the Farnborough Air Show. “Our lasers destroyed the UAVs lighting them on fire.

“This is the first successful shoot down over water. We are now on the path to deliver the first battlefield lasers integrated into real weapons systems.

With drones being used more frequently to spy on or attack fleets in future warfare it is necessary to make defences against them.

The laser system, which is mostly situated under the deck, fires an invisible beam that is only seen when it strikes an intruder. The system is also being developed to tackle small boats and potentially anti-ship missiles and will be ready for full military development by 2016.

“This will proceed to production because it is solving real problem,” Mr Booen said.

Raytheon have steadily been developing laser technology for several years developing a land system that can shoot down mortar rounds.
 

20 July 2010
A laser that works when wet
Super-weapon has long featured in science fiction – but now it's for real
By Jon Henley
The Guardian

Unsurprisingly, this super-weapon, capable of killing any human target and destroying all mechanical objects, caught the imagination of the reading (and, later, viewing) public. Ray guns (Dan Dare), deathrays, phasers (Star Trek), laser pistols (Lost in Space), plasma rifles, blasters (Star Wars): we've known and loved them all, in fiction. Only now, reader, they're for real.

At the Farnborough Airshow in Hampshire, the American firm Raytheon has unveiled its Laser Close-In Weapon System (LCIWS). This is a solid-state laser whose 50kw beam is capable – and the company has video film to prove it – of shooting down, from a couple of miles away, an unmanned aerial vehicle. In May, the system, mounted on a US warship, shot down four UAVs off the coast of California. You don't get much more real than that.

Rather more prosaically, Raytheon apparently developed the system after bolting together six bog-standard commercial lasers used in the car industry. "This was a bad day for UAVs, and a good one for laser technology," Raytheon Missile Systems' vice-president, Mike Booen, told a presumably excited audience at the show. On board a ship, he said, the laser can be mounted inside and the beam fed up through fibre cables; on land, it could be trailer-mounted and used "across the globe" to target mortars and rockets. This is, says the editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, the beginning of a new era in missile technology.

The system's sheer power helps overcome two problems that have long hindered laser weaponry: it works in wet weather (rain and damp marine air have previously absorbed much of the laser's energy), and it can destroy even targets fitted with reflective surfaces. "Set phasers," as the good Captain once said, "to 'Kill'."