High-Energy Laser Weapons: Overpromising Readiness

Abstract

This article recounts some of the basic history of laser weapons in the context of the great-power rivalries of the United States, Russia, and China. The author then offers his perspective on the current escalation of investments in high-tech warfare. D efense professionals increasingly believe high-energy lasers (HELs), which achieve continuous power output of at least 20 kilowatts (kW), are technologically mature enough to become the mainstay weapon of advanced militaries. 1 An examination of past efforts to develop such weapons, however, suggests caution. The history of actualizing lasers as a weapon can be summarized as one of repeated attempts to develop ambitious, big-ticket laser weapon systems before the associated technologies were sufficiently mature. This article argues the impetus for these premature-and ultimately disappointing-efforts was overexuberance within America's national security establishment about the potential military applications of lasers. This imbalance between promise and readiness resulted in the United States losing time and significant sums of money. To support this claim, the article examines the role of technological hype in the American experience of developing powerful laser weapons. Current optimism about laser weapons is far from novel. At the end of the last millennium, the Chinese "Academy of Military Science, the People Liberation Army's leading think tank on future warfare, believe[d] lasers would likely become an integral aspect of twenty-first century combat." 2 At about the same time, the US Defense Science Board noted in a comprehensive review that such weapons had "the potential to change future military operations in dramatic ways." 3 For more than half a century, several countries-and as with most cutting-edge, defense-related technologies, the United States is the exemplar case-channeled significant sums into developing antimateriel laser weapons. But overall, these attempts yielded disappointing results.