When we talk about the future of warfare, a lot of people think of drones or hypersonic weapons.
That's reasonable, but one facet of future war that often goes overlooked is laser weapons.
The U.S. military first began experimenting with lasers in the 1960s.
However, after a series of tests, some of them brutal, it was determined that laser weapons had limited use in combat.
In fact, in 1995, the Geneva Conventions were updated to ban their use as a means of blinding enemy combatants.
But with the advent of drone warfare, they're making a comeback.
Directed-energy weapons can scramble a drone's circuits, disorient them, or burn them out completely in just a fraction of a second.
They have other key advantages as well.
Lasers don't run out of ammunition, making them more reliable and cost-efficient than multimillion-dollar missiles.
They can be swept around broadly to disable swarms.
And they can act as both a targeting mechanism and a weapon, which reduces the sensor-to-shooter timeline.
That is, a laser beam can reach a target almost instantly, eliminating the need to calculate an intercept course. And because it's not kinetic, there's no explosion, less debris, and, therefore, less collateral damage.