Raytheon Delivers First Anti-Drone Laser Weapon to U.S. Air Force

https://gizmodo.com/raytheon-deliver...u-s-1839284326

Raytheon has announced that it delivered the first publicly acknowledged
anti-drone laser weapon to the U.S. Air Force earlier this month. The military
contractor said the Air Force will deploy the weapon in a year-long experiment
overseas in order to train people how to use it and test its effectiveness out
in the real world.

Drones, also known within the military community as unmanned aerial systems
(UAS), have seen a tremendous jump in use by terrorist organizations like ISIS
in the past decade. And while the U.S. Navy has been testing an anti-drone laser
since at least 2017, this is the first public handover of such a weapon to the
Air Force.

The “directed energy” weapon uses an electro-optical/infrared sensor to identify
potential threats before using a laser to knock dangerous drones out of the sky.
The laser can be powered using a standard 220-volt outlet and when it’s hooked
up to a generator it can provide a “nearly infinite number of shots.”

“Five years ago, few people worried about the drone threat,” Roy Azevedo,
president of Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, said in a statement published
to the company’s website. “Now, we hear about attacks or incursions all the
time. Our customers saw this coming and asked us to develop a ready-now
counter-UAS capability. We did just that by going from the drawing board to
delivery in less than 24 months.”

Video posted by Raytheon to YouTube back in the summer of 2018 shows how the
weapon system works to engage potential threats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j-E...ature=youtu.be

Despite the declaration by Raytheon that this is a “first” anti-drone weapon
given to the Air Force, lasers have been used by the U.S. military on the
battlefield for over a decade. The ZEUS laser system has reportedly been used by
the U.S. military to destroy IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan dating back to 2003.

Research into laser weapons started almost immediately after lasers were first
developed in the 1960s. The U.S. military began experimenting with anti-drone
laser weapons since at least the 1970s. ARPA (now DARPA) first blasted a drone
out of the sky in 1973 using a laser weapon that worked by heating up the engine
of an aircraft, causing it to explode.




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