In 1983, when US President Ronald Reagan announced a plan to study how to defend against the Soviet Union’s missiles called Star Wars, no one believed that using laser technology in war was a long-shot possibility. However, just a few decades later, the laser is about to become the star weapon of war. And not only: sound jets, microwaves or electromagnetic pulses can be directed like bullets against missiles or people to leave them out of combat or against cities to literally return them to the stone age by frying their infrastructure. They are called directed energy weapons. «Almost all of them are in the experimental phase. Sonic cannons have been used as a deterrent against pirates in Somalia or to break up demonstrations. Although the ones with the most future prospects are lasers. They can stress electrical circuits and disable and paralyze the operation of enemy instruments. “War is no longer about causing deaths, but about causing injuries and disabling infrastructure, so that the enemy is busy and spends money rebuilding and caring for its combatants instead of thinking about the front,” explains Fernando Cocho, an analyst at intelligence and risks to national security.
We are seeing it in different conflicts such as the Middle East. Israel says it has successfully tested this laser technology. He Iron beam is your laser anti-aircraft defense system which is being incorporated as a new layer to the already famous Iron Dome, which also has conventional systems such as surface-to-air missiles. The laser uses a fiber optic system to generate pulses and achieves enough energy to destroy an aerial threat by striking it for about five seconds. Its development, the country claims, has cost 1 billion dollars.
The United States has also opted for the development of laser technology and currently has 31 projects underway. In 2023, the Department of Defense announced it would spend approximately $1 billion per year in these directed energy weapons. One of the best-known projects is Helios, from the manufacturer Lockheed Martin, which is already installed on the bow of the Navy’s USS Preble. In addition, it recently announced the addition of a defense system called Leonidas to its arsenal. An energy shield based on microwaves (high frequency energy too, but less than laser, in the range between 100 Mhz and 40 Ghz) designed to locate and shoot down detected drones and missiles. The United Kingdom has also made public its own development; DragonFire will be operational in 2027 to defend against missiles or unmanned aircraft for only $13 a shot.
And the price is one of the operational advantages of these new weapons. A conventional missile launched from the Israeli Iron Dome costs between 40,000 and 50,000 euros per shot. “The cost of air defense missiles has become a topic of great interest in defense circles in recent years, as low-cost drones have proven effective on the battlefields of Ukraine and in the attacks by Houthi rebels against commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. “Low-cost drones and rockets have altered the economic calculus of offense and defense in favor of those that use large volumes of unmanned systems and cheap munitions to overwhelm more sophisticated air and missile defenses,” says CNN in a reportage. We have also seen massive missile attacks at the beginning of the current conflict in Gaza (as well as the use of electronic devices to attack by Israel in the recent beeper explosions). «The advantages of these weapons are multiple because they simplify logistics since they do not require supplies beyond electrical current to provide energy to the device and to cool it, eliminate artillery waste (metal sheaths) and, in addition, They can attack both physical and logical targets, that is, electronic equipment or communications networks. to cite the two most common examples. We also found an additional advantage due to the lack of preparation to prevent this type of attack, particularly microwave attacks. However, the cost is still very high and the technology tends not to be licensed to other countries because it represents a competitive advantage. Furthermore, there are still many systems in testing and those already available have generally not been sufficiently tested on the real battlefield. But like all advances in weapons, if it works (and this technology seems to work) it will end up becoming popular in all domains of combat,” says Juan Cayón Peña, rector of UDIT, University of Design, Innovation and Technology and member of the Academy of Military Arts and Sciences.
One of the problems that lasers present today is that rain, fog and smoke disperse the light beams and reduce their effectiveness. Outside of military use, in fact “it is being studied for satellite communications with land, although there is no work because the atmosphere greatly attenuates the signal with these high frequencies. It is a technology with a great future that is already being used for communications between satellites. It is useful because they store a lot of information and sometimes it does not have good visibility with the ground stations, so it is sent to another satellite,” explains Vicente Boria, professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and president of the executive committee of the Space Consortium. Valencian (promotes research in the field of directed energy).
Furthermore, the professor recalls, when we talk about directed energy, “we are talking about many industrial applications based on microwaves or lasers, for example that used by microwave ovens that heat food because they remove the water molecules inside. If electromagnetic energy hits the water, it heats it. We also talk about telephones, navigation aid systems, such as GPS or Galileo, meteorological information that comes through satellite images, sports broadcasts… The laser works at higher frequencies and allows communications with a lot of bandwidth. On the ground we use it through fiber optic cables and at a space level, as mentioned, for communications between satellites.