US Congress Funds Laser Weapons

An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post reports that the US Congress is funding laser weapons for use in the near future. Low-power lasers called 'dazzlers' are already being used in Iraq to temporarily reduce a person's vision. High-power laser weapons would allow precision attacks that minimize civilian casualties. From the Post: 'The science board said tactical laser systems could be developed for broader use because they "enable precision ground attack to minimize collateral damage in urban conflicts." The report suggested, for example, that "future gunships could provide extended precision lethality and sensing." The board also proposed using lasers to protect against rockets, artillery, mortars and unmanned airborne vehicles by blasting them out of the sky. Last month, the Army awarded Boeing $36 million to continue development of a high-energy laser mounted on a truck that could hit overhead targets. But deployment is not expected until 2016, even if all goes well.'"

Comments

Re:Battlefield Use

[krystar]

Actually the Geneva Convention has nothing about weapon types. Geneva Convention covers the treatment of POW's and civilians. It's the Hague Convention of 1907 that covered weapon types.

It's not legal to shoot a human target with a 50 caliber sniper rifle. However, it is legal to shoot the helmet he's wearing.

Re:compact=gitmo

[Nyrath the nearly wi]

No, mirrors will not work. The weapon will use internally a wide beam that is just barely under the intensity level that will damage the weapon's internal mirrors. At the barrel, the focusing mirror will focus the wide beam down to a searing pin-point on the hapless target. The focused beam will be more than intense enough to defeat any mirror the target might be wearing. I have some notes here: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3l.html#laserpistol

GI-Joe style laser guns?

[SkOink]

As a kid, I always wondered - light moves so fast that it's (for all intents and purposes) not really affected by gravity at all. It would seem like this means that things 50-100 miles away from a battlefield could be hit by all of the missed laser shots before the earth curved away enough that they passed into space. And as they left orbit, what sorts of guarantees do we have that they wouldn't hit planes or low-orbit satellites? Since light moves very quickly, nobody would be able to see or dodge the laser before it hit them.

I can see the application of air-to-ground laser strikes, but it seems like the potential for collateral damage with any other form of laser weapons is huge.