To better understand modern directed-energy weapons, it’s important to take a step back from the science-fiction idea of a laser weapon. High-powered beams of light are expensive to develop and deploy, but they offer a kind of cost-savings once they are up and running. Provided a ship can generate the electrical power needed, a laser is, shot for shot or threat for threat, a cheaper mechanism than anti-air missiles or potentially even .50 caliber bullets for destroying incoming attacks.
If the threats the Navy wants to defeat are cheap, such as Qasef-1 drones, then what the Navy needs to deploy is a countermeasure that’s also cheap to use.
Drones, especially loitering munitions that fly like drones but attack like missiles, are a durable and increasing threat in modern warfare. Some of the groups fighting in Yemen have used expendable drones as missiles in far-reaching attacks, and plenty of modern anti-air defenses, like anti-plane missiles, are at best cost-ineffective against drones, and sometimes even unable to detect and intercept drone attacks.
A laser does not solve the detection part of the threat, but it does give commanders a cheaper alternative than shooting a missile at a drone. If the laser can burn through an attacking drone quickly enough, it can then be turned to face another target, and by expending only generated electric power, it can protect a ship from a host of attacks.
“You can do everything in the world to understand how you think laser weapons are going to be used, but you put this controller in the hands of a sailor who’s going to play with it and do the thing they do with the operational interface, and then they’re going to decide to use it in ways we can’t imagine,” Frank Peterkin, the Navy’s Senior Technologist for Directed Energy, told USNI News in 2019, after the selection of the USS Portland for the weapon was announced.
Source : https://www.popsci.com/technology/us-navy-laser-weapon-test/
