Let There Be Light
I'm channeling my obsession with military laser weapons into something productive.
Before American physicist Theodore Maiman developed and demonstrated the first laser beam in 1960, before Han Solo’s BlasTech Industries DL-44 blaster and James Kirk’s Starfleet phaser made the laser pistol the sidearm of choice for the world’s favorite TV space captains, and even before Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon used “ray guns” to fend of exotic foes in the panels of their comic strips, it was science fiction luminary H.G. Wells who introduced the world to the laser weapon.
Writing in 1898’s War of the Worlds, Wells described his vision of a Martian “heat-ray,” a terrible weapon of immense power:
It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely proved these details. However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.
More than a century later, the heat ray of Wells’ fictional alien invasion is finally here. In April 2024, I broke the news that, after decades of research and development, the US Army officially deployed laser weapons overseas to defend American soldiers against the rising threat of weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles, the first known employment of such systems in military history. We’re still a long way off from infantry troops exchanging laser fire on a chaotic battlefield, but as I later wrote for Wired, the US military has ushered in the age of the laser weapon by making what had once been the province of science fiction into a tactical reality.
For me, this is extremely exciting. I’ve covered the Pentagon’s push to develop laser weapons since I first entered the world of military and defense journalism in 2017, mostly due to my long-standing interest in the people and organizations tasked with manifesting our wildest visions of the future. As a life-long sci-fi obsessive, I’ve relished the opportunity to write about advanced technologies from powered exoskeletons and electromagnetic railguns to the drone revolution that’s transforming battlefields from the Middle East to Ukraine, and I’ve closely followed the successes (and failures) of American laser weapons in recent years. My hope for this newsletter is to chronicle the development and deployment of these systems (and other futuristic ones like it) around the world and how they’re changing the face of modern warfare.
Welcome to the Laser Wars. Hope you survive the experience.