Unmanned aerial systems can benefit from recent advances in laser technology, but at least one set of the maturing technologies poses a new threat: high-power laser weapons, which can set them ablaze at the speed of light. In a prominent demonstration last year a U.S. Navy ship fired a 32-kilowatt solid-state laser weapon guided by a Raytheon Phalanx close-defense system's sensor suite and destroyed four UAS over the Pacific Ocean. This Laser Weapons System (LaWS) combined the power of six fiber lasers to illuminate and burn the target UAS.
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