Soon, the sound of combat may not be a thunderous boom but an electronic zap. The Office of Naval Research is in the early stages of putting a solid-state laser weapon onto a ship. If the project succeeds, it effectively will make all the sci-fi clichés about lasers — from death rays to “set phasers to stun” — a reality.
It means surface ships will have a new weapon that doesn’t require any space in the magazine, can rapidly target different enemies and costs about $1 per shot to use — less than the cost of a .50-caliber round.
The idea is that lasers will operate alongside traditional kinetic weapons on surface ships but will give skippers a new option for handling threats from small unmanned and unmanned aircraft, cruise missiles, fast attack boats and swarming surface vessels — “all weapons we may have to face in the Persian Gulf one day,” said Mark Gunzinger, co-author of a report on laser weapons for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank/.../