The long-predicted end of Air Power has already arrived. But the battlefield reign of the drone, first evidenced in the brief Second Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020, then subsequently confirmed by the NATO-Russian war in the Ukraine, looks to be a very short one.
An industry team has for the first time destroyed an aerial target using a high-power shot with its DragonFire laser, the British Defence Ministry announced Friday. The trial with the direct-energy weapon is considered a significant milestone toward the deployment of the system, possibly within five years. Efforts to quickly field such weapons are partly driven by conflicts in Ukraine and near the Red Sea, where expensive air defense missiles are used against cheap but effective drones. The cost of operating the laser is typically less than £10 (U.S. $13) per shot, the ministry noted.
So, the question of who is going to dominate the future battlefield can be reduced to the question of who can make more vehicle-mounted laser platforms, more cheaply, than anyone else. The technology isn’t especially difficult, which means it will be a matter of industrial capacity and efficiency.
So this is clearly not a development that favors the military wing of the neo-globalist order.
On the plus side, this brings us one step closer to laser-equipped cyber otters for the home.
