A U.S. defense company wants to take drone wars to a new level with a laser weapon capable of shooting down unmanned aircraft.Raytheon today touted its new weapon, which brought down four drones over the Pacific Ocean during tests conducted with the U.S. Navy this spring.
"One of the Navy's problems is that the bad guys have [unmanned aircraft] now -- they can give away ships' positions," explained Mike Booen, a Raytheon official, according to USA Today. "So we wanted to do a more real-world test of the laser over water."
The test involved tracking the drones with sensors used as part of a Raytheon-built ship defense system, and then destroying the aircraft using a high-powered fiber laser.
"The Raytheon-Navy team demonstrated the systems' capability to detect, track, engage and defeat dynamic targets at tactically significant ranges in a maritime environment," Taylor W. Lawrence, president of Raytheon Missile Systems, said in a statement.
The idea of laser weapons has been around for decades, but so far few ideas have progressed beyond testing. Scientists have long struggled with creating a device that can produce enough power to be useful but packaged in a system that is compact enough to be deployed.
Fiber lasers, like the type Raytheon is using, have been gaining traction in recent years as a possible weapon candidate because of their efficiency, which makes them less complex and more compact than other types of lasers.
Raytheon's announcement coincided with the start of the Farnborough Air Show, the aerospace industry gathering taking place this week in the U.K. There's no word from Raytheon, however, on how soon such a weapon would actually be ready for use.