The Secret Laser Weapon the UK Deployed During the Falklands War
The Royal Navy sent a laser weapon to the South Atlantic during the 1982 conflict between the UK and Argentina.
It never fired a shot, never made the front pages, and was kept secret for decades. But in 1982, the United Kingdom quietly sent a laser weapon into the Falklands conflict with Argentina — one of the earliest battlefield deployments of a directed energy system in military history.
In a “top secret” January 1983 letter to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine wrote that the Royal Navy had “developed and deployed with great urgency a naval laser weapon, designed to dazzle low flying Argentine pilots attacking ships, to the Task Force in the South Atlantic” at some point during the 10-week undeclared war over the Falkland Islands.
The unnamed laser dazzler “was not used in action,” Heseltine noted, and knowledge of its existence was “kept to a very restricted circle.”
Unlike high-energy laser weapons, which are designed to outright destroy incoming threats, lower-power laser dazzlers are intended to temporarily blind human adversaries and electro-optical sensors.
The Falklands War, fought over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands and remembered for its naval clashes and amphibious landings, lasted 74 days and left 907 dead.
Declassified by the UK’s National Archives in 2013 under the so-called “thirty year rule” that governs the release of official records, the Heseltine letter offered the first public acknowledgment of this obscure chapter in the history of laser warfare.
While Heseltine’s letter did not provide any details regarding the unnamed laser weapon, a June 1998 report from defense and aerospace market intelligence group Forecast International (now part of GovExec) suggests that it was likely the so-called “Laser Dazzle Sight” (LDS) that, also known as the Outfit DEC, had been in development since 1981.
The Forecast International report claims that several Outfit DEC systems were installed aboard several high-value Royal Navy warships during the Falklands conflict and were purportedly “instrumental in the destruction” of three Argentine A-4B Skyhawk light attack aircraft during the course of the British campaign. However, Heseltine’s letter explicitly states that the system was not used in combat, casting doubt on those claims.
Outfit DEC proliferated widely across the Royal Navy following the conclusion of the Falklands War, according to the Forecast International report. By the late 1980s, every warship that deployed to the Arabian Gulf did so with the system installed, as did those engaged in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In the intervening years, the UK Ministry of Defense even reportedly mounted dazzlers on the gun barrels of several Challenger main battle tanks for testing.
Growing concerns among human rights advocates over the danger of laser weapons causing permanent blindness led the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to accuse the MoD of pursuing such systems through the development of Outfit DEC. In 1995, United Nations issued the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, which prohibited the development and use of laser systems specifically designed to inflict permanent blindness on human targets. (The UK acceded to the treaty in 1999.)
“The UK has no plans to develop, test or procure a laser weapon designed to permanently blind human targets,” the MoD said in a statement in response to the ICRC, per the Forecast International report. “The feasibility of making use of temporary blinding effects was investigated in 1983 and tests on one system were conducted which were subsequently discontinued.”
Beyond the revelation that the Royal Navy had quietly made directed energy history during the Falklands conflict, Heseltine’s letter also sheds light on the early decades of the UK government’s directed energy research and development efforts, tracing back to initial studies in the early 1960s and then accelerating from 1972 as part of a “continuous information exchange” with the United States.
The letter also states that Western intelligence believed the Soviet Union had already deployed its own shipboard laser weapon aboard the nuclear-powered battlecruiser Kirov (later renamed the Admiral Ushakov in 1992), although such claims were never confirmed. Years before US Defense Department officials sounded the (false) alarm over a growing US-Soviet “laser gap,” the UK was already assessing how directed energy weapons might reshape future warfare.
“The present position is that British operational analysis and battlefield simulation studies have confirmed American conclusions that the deployment of laser sensor damage weapons (LSDW) by the attacking Warsaw Pact forces would confer a benefit to them, in particular enhancing the effectiveness of the attacking armour,” the letter reads. “The studies show that countermeasures can assist defenders and tactics are possible to minimize the effects.”
Those countermeasures included two secretive research programs, code-named “Raker” and “Shingle,” which aimed to “think up every possible way of protecting sensors” and, at the time of Heseltine’s writing in 1983, were “proceeding at high priority.”
Still, Heseltine was careful to temper Thatcher’s potential expectations around laser weapons’ battlefield utility, cautioning the prime minister that such systems “cannot replace existing weapons” due to their dependence on good weather and line-of-sight targeting — scenarios where conventional systems were likely just as effective.
While Outfit DEC never fired a shot in anger during the Falklands conflict, the concept of shipboard laser dazzlers didn’t fade away. Indeed, the US Navy now fields the Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN), a laser dazzler designed to blind or disable the electro-optical sensors of hostile drones and surveillance systems, aboard eight Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers. In December 2022, American sailors even used handheld laser dazzlers to ward off an Iranian patrol boat that harassed a pair of Navy warships in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Navy isn’t the only maritime force unleashing laser dazzlers on the world. As recently as this July, a Chinese warship targeted a German surveillance aircraft operating over the Red Sea with a laser, the latest instance of the People’s Liberation Army Navy employing such systems to harass adversary military assets.
The Royal Navy’s laser dazzler may have gone unused in the Falklands, but modern shipboard lasers owe a debt to that unnamed system that sailed into the South Atlantic ready for a fight.
Read the entire UK National Archives memo here:
