Israel has successfully tested the new “Iron Beam” laser interception system.

I’ll gladly give them the tax $$ of they keep developing these types of weapons and giving them back to us…. View this more as a outsourced weapons development program that gets to test in live fire environments well before we do and yet we end up with the best of the tech it produces in the long run.

Slicing the wing off that drone was some James Bond tech!

I need one

Israel spends 100’s of millions to develop laser to shoot down missiles. Yemen spends 15 dollars putting mirrors on their missiles.

Energy based weapons like this would end air superiority maybe even nuclear if the targeting systems advanced enough.

Make no mistake, the US has been working on crap like that since Tesla was around. We’ve had tech like this for a while

I’ve worked for Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos (Triad).

Do I trust them? Nah. Any doubt where weapons come from? Nah.

The directed energy based laser is not the issue. That's actually relatively easy to create. It's the tracking algorithms and data used to direct the energy to a single point, accurate tracking speed and amount of mass to impact, plus being able to move that laser at 180° as it tracks at speeds of up to one second across the entire arc, creating G forces of up to 8G on the mass of the optical systems. This is very difficult and required extensive new technologies in optics design to maintain the 99.99% accuracy of the optics.