The Navy is rethinking what a laser weapon looks like

A new research program would separate laser sources from their beam directors, giving the military another possible way around the power and cooling problems that have dogged the weapons.

[Photo: U.S. Navy/Wikimedia Commons]

This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.

The U.S. Navy has a unusual proposition for the U.S. defense industry: take your high-energy laser weapons and break them into pieces.

In a draft request for solutions (RFS) published on August 12 through the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL), the Office of Naval Research (ONR) detailed plans to explore the development of “distributed” laser weapons, where a system’s laser source and the beam director that actually delivers........

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