Instead of star wars …
… it’s laser wars versus drones:
Ballistic missiles are cheap. Anti-ballistic missiles are expensive.
But drones are dirt cheap — like switching to Walmart from Tiffany’s — and interceptors are still expensive.
Lasers are cheap to fire, but can be expensive to develop — if the military really did spend just half a billion dollars to put laser defenses in the field, that’s something to cheer. It was a year ago almost to the day that the New York Times reported the Army would “soon” field lasers, and quoted Electro Optic Systems’ chief executive Andreas Schwer saying, “The Ukrainian war and the Gaza war were key trigger events that everybody thought, ‘It’s the time now to make this operational. We should not spend any more years in doing demonstrations, tests and prototyping.'” …
Lasers also come with extreme power requirements and some serious limitations, particularly distance. But when it comes to point defense, there might not be a better solution to the drone problem, and it’s good to see them getting a workout in Iran.
“Somewhat surprisingly,” the Post claimed, “the laser weapons are operated by soldiers using reconfigured Xbox game console controllers.”
Winning wars is about many things, but one of them is technology. That goes way way back into antiquity. For example, there was the crossbow:
Thought to have been invented about the time of the First Crusade by western Europeans, the crossbow actually arose around 500 BC simultaneously in China and Greece. The impetus for its creation was the desire to improve upon bows of the time. It would come to later redefine war in the Middle Ages. …
The medieval crossbow, or “arbalist” as it was called during the Middle Ages, was resurrected in the form of a hand-held weapon in the 10th century, and its use spread rapidly across Europe. From 1200 to 1480 it evolved through several stages to become a powerful and deadly weapon. Its popularity had much to do with the ability of its missile, called a bolt, to penetrate mail body armor at close range. As such, the crossbow became a class leveler—a man of even modest means could afford one, it was very easy to mster, and unlike the knight who had to maintain armor, horse, and retainers at enormous expense, the owner of a crossbow needed only bring bow strings and bolts to the field of combat.
The medieval crossbow and its user were disparaged by the era’s military elite, i.e., the horse-borne knight. But aristocratic disdain could not erase the fact that the mounted warrior of the Middle Ages was at great risk from this plebeian, generally infantry, weapon.
Sounds as though the crossbow was slightly analogous to the drone in terms of lowering the expense of a weapon.
Before the crossbow, there was the chariot:
The first evidence of humans using vehicle in warfare are Sumerian depictions of four-wheeled wagons pulled by semi-domesticated onagers. These war wagons were slow and cumbersome, but provided a protected elevated platform for javelineers and slingers. Chariots with spoke-wheels pulled by horses were lightweight and fast which made it feasible to outrun light infantry and wagons. Although horses have been ridden as from at least the 4th millennium BC they were most likely largely relegated to transporting warriors, who fought on foot. Until the invention and widespread adoption of the saddle, chariots remained the primary form of cavalry, as they offered a controllable and reliable platform from which fighters could rapidly manoeuvre around the battlefield and engage with projectile and melee weapons, dismount and fight on foot or climb on to make a swift retreat.
The list is long and I don’t see it ending any time soon, unless it ends catastrophically. About the latter – I grew up thinking I wouldn’t grow up, because of nuclear weapons, but fortunately that turned out to be untrue.
Laser weapons have long been a military interest. Though with little rather fragile drones, I can see where the utility of lasers could get an immediate boost.
A guy I worked with briefly had contracts with the Air Force, and he had a very high security clearance. So he never told me much about the actual weaponry. The big thing he & I were looking at is how the laser beam spreads out as it propagates through turbulent air. And air is always turbulent to widely varying degrees. Techniques and devices to measure the turbulence was our focus.
A basic and not new concept is to use adaptive optics to fire the laser beam, and if you can measure the effects of the turbulence in real time, you can adjust the adaptive mirror to compensate. Astronomers do this to obtain better imagery. Here is a pic of them shooting a laser beam (called a Rayleigh laser guide star) out of an observatory. In this case, the laser is part of the turbulence measurement system.
https://present5.com/presentation/126a49e495c16678a25b3e8d247db896/image-1.jpg
https://journals.rcsi.science/2686-7400/article/view/309482
Another guy I knew, but never worked with, was a hot-shot in the field of free electron lasers. I idea was to eventually put a big one a Navy ship as their primary short and medium range weapon.
Studying the evolution of chariots in ancient warfare provides many interesting parallels to the evolution of tanks in modern warfare in the last century (plus). In both cases it is a constant struggle to balance mobility, armor and firepower.
The simplest chariot was drawn by one horse and carried one warrior/driver. The charioteer had to both drive the vehicle and wield his weapons (these might include a bow and javelins for attacks at a distance and a lance, sword or ax for hand to hand fighting). To improve mobility the most obvious solution was to add horses. With two, three or four horses having a driver devoted solely to managing them became a more appealing arrangement. The driver drove, the warrior commanded and fought. And with more horses to pull it became tempting to add a warrior(s) to the payload. So a chariot might carry two, three or even four warriors. But adding warriors with armor and weapons to the load the horses had to pull cut down on mobility again. So the most common arrangement for war chariots was usually one unarmored driver, two or three horses and one armored warrior.
I could ramble on about this topic at considerable length but in the interests of not boring everyone to death I will just add that the name for the current Israeli main battle tank “Merkava” is Hebrew for “chariot”. And its design has been optimized for the protection of the crew since the Israelis give the lives of their soldiers a high priority.
Thanks for that.
FWIW, “Merkava” is the word used to describe the image in the dream of the prophet Ezekiel (IIRC) and as such has been the subject of many Kabbalist musings and interpretations…
I believe the lasers are more dazzlers than killers, they blind the drones, not melt them.
Crossbows in stone fortifications and in ambushes were effective against the Mongols. Along with plate armor they allowed the Hungarians to defeat the Second Mongol invasion. It was a disaster for the Mongols.
Abstracts and introductions for papers on chariotry and chariot warfare I presented at academic conferences, subsequently published in the conference proceedings books:
This paper analyses the technological development and combat employment of Hittite and Egyptian chariotry in the Late Bronze Age from a military history point of view. The discussion is premised on the assumption that chariots were Ground Combat Vehicles (GCV) designed and built to incorporate a trio of essential attributes (or capabilities) collectively known in contem- porary military engineering parlance as the ‘Iron Triangle,’ and consisting of (1) protection, (2) firepower and (3) mobility. As with modern GCV (e.g., main battle tanks and lesser tracked and wheel fighting vehicles) it was not technically possible to simultaneously maximise the performance levels of all attributes at the same time due to the natural conflict that exists between them; one attribute perforce always takes precedence over the other two. The decision as to which attribute will be dominant arises from the complex interplay between technology and tactics and is determinative in formulating a warfighting methodology that will maximise the combat strengths of a particular chariot design while minimizing its weaker aspects. The Battle of Kadesh will be analysed as a paradigmatic example of a clash of chariotry forces involving two technologically different types of chariots with different tactical objectives predicated by their respective technical characteristics, governing their combat employment.
***
In warfare technological innovation is a both a determinant of tactics and tactical doctrine and a product of tactical need. Weapons and weapon systems are developed in response to the requirements of the battlefield, even as tactics are formulated to maximize the use of new and evolving military technologies. The question of which comes first – technology or tactics – has no fixed answer. Tactics may be conceived as part of a vision for fighting future wars, followed by the invention of technologies designed to realize that vision. In this instance, tactics drive (or determine) technology. Conversely, innovations in weapon technologies will demand the formulation of tactics for maximizing their use: an instance of technology driving tactics. In the Near East during the Late Bronze Age, chariot technologies and the tactics of chariot warfare had evolved considerably in the centuries since the advent in the region of the spoked-wheel horse-drawn war chariot. But these developments were by no means uniform. In particular, the development of chariot technology and chariotry tactics in New Kingdom Egypt and the Hittite Empire took divergent paths that produced substantive differences in their respective warfighting methodologies. At the Battle of Kadesh, in 1275 B.C., these paths violently intersected in what proved to be the greatest known chariotry battle of the era, fought with the utmost skill and courage by the ancient world’s foremost practitioners of chariot warfare.
***
More than three millennia before the advent of the main battle tank, armies organized into groupings of massed chariotry and dedicated close-support infantry were conducting mobile, mechanized combined-arms operations on the battlefields of the Near East, using the combat power intrinsic to their mixed force composition and their capacity for rapid maneuver to concentrate against enemy formations and achieve decisive overmatch at the point of contact. This was tactical-level maneuver warfare of an exceedingly high caliber, matching in form and complexity its execution by modern armored formations, enabled by machines that anticipated in certain key respects the design and function of present-day main battle tanks and lesser tracked and wheeled ground combat vehicles (GCV).
Some other chariot/chariotry facts:
Chariots crewed by only one man who steered the chariot with the reins tied around his west while using his hands to work a bow were used for ceremonial purposes only, not for combat. Images of a single occupant steering with the reins tied around his waist is a visual trope used exceptionally to display and glorify the prowess of the inevitably royal personage so depicted. Such an arrangement was entirely inappropriate for combat.
A team of two horses was the optimal configuration for chariotry combat. More than two, and things become sub-optimal, in a number of ways and for a number of reasons. Images showing chariots with four horses (or, more rarely, three) depict vehicles that were, again, used only for ceremonial purposes — and Roman chariot racing.
CR Harris – you don’t need to melt them. You need to punch holes in them. The shorter the pulse, the more energy you deliver on target per unit of time – the functional equivalent of swatting one with a 2×4 rather than showing it. Note that the adaptive optics was first created for lasers, declassified a decade or so later for optical telescopes, and apparently coming back to the weapons world. Cheers –
The longbow was very effective against the crossbow. The longbow excels at a high rate of fire and open field range. An experienced longbowman could fire off up to 12 bolts per minute compared to 2 bolts per minute for the crossbowman. The longbow was the “secret weapon” used at the battle of Cresy in 1346 in which the English longbowmen inflicted devastating casualties on the French and Genoese crossbowmen. Commager’s single volume arrangement of Churhill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples has a dedicated chapter on the Long-Bow.
Lasers have come a LONG way since the early ’60s. Power density is WAY up, Semiconductor emitters are far more powerful than their initial micro/milliwatt outputs. As agimarc noted these tend to be pulsed. This has two purposes 1)if the pulse is short enough, successive pulses ionize the path to the target meaning less atmospheric disspersion. Also successive pulses on the target ablate/ionize surface materials and the follow ons can make the gases expand rapidly acting like a small explosive. These are likely being used as CIWS like the 20 MM Phalanx CIWS (known sometimes as sea whiz or c whiz).
I also know various manufacturers had been looking at bands at the high end of the radio/ radar spectrum. The goal here is to induce currents in the electronics and fry them. Most current drones are derivatives of commercial models (which is why they are cheap). But commercial models don’t tend to worry about putting faraday cages around their electronics or using radiation hardened chips.
This will be like always in war. Someone invents some technology to defeat an existing technology and then the existing technology is upgraded to deal with the new threat. Already the Russians are making changes to improve their tank survivability in an environment with hordes of drones. It may be that they took too long and so the Ukraine got inside their OODA loop. And life as an infantryman seems to have gotten worse than it’s been since the early days of WWI. With the Russian (ne Societ) Army’s love of mass attack and maneuver they’ve been spending troops at a ridiculous rate. Heck they’ve hired North Korean soldiers to fill the ranks of cannon fodder.