HEL I.

This is coolbert:

'I’m extremely skeptical that we can put a large laser on an aircraft and use it to shoot down an adversary missile even from very close.'” - - Mike Griffin.

HEL = High Energy Laser.

Directed energy weaponry hardly NEW. Been around for some time.Some additional info as relevant to a prior blog entry. From several sources and thanks to the tip from Darwin.

1. "Army Works on a Blinding Laser".

"Officials at the Pentagon said today that the Army was developing a portable laser beam weapon capable of blinding enemy soldiers."

"Known as C-CLAW, for Close Combat Laser Assault Weapon, the system uses low-powered beams to blind the human eye, even through such mechanical optical sensors as tank periscopes, at distances up to one mile."

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES AS OF 1983!. NOT A DEVICE INTENDED TO BLIND! MORE OF A DEVICE TO "BLIND" IN A FIGURATIVE SENSE AND RENDER INEFFECTIVE HIGH-TECHNOLOGY ELECTRO-OPTIC MILITARY SYSTEMS.

CAN BLIND AN ENEMY SOLDIER YES BUT NOT WITH INTENTIONAL EFFORT!

2. From the Quora question and answer Internet web site comments by Arthur Zwern.

"I helped develop laser weapons like you speak of in 81-83 at Hughes Aircraft Company, and built the world’s first CCM  [Counter-Counter-Measure] to protect our FLIR [Forward Looking Infra-Red] sensors from these weapons in case the USSR [Soviet Union fielded them [FLIR]. We were NOT out to fry eyeballs.

"But HELs were not practical yet (size, weight, power source/efficiency, cooling, etc) [1918-1983] so we settled for sending enemy FLIRs a missile."

AGAIN, DIRECTED-ENERGY WEAPON NOT FOR KINETIC KILL BUT RATHER TO RENDER INEFFECTIVE ENEMY SOPHISTICATED ELECTRO-OPTIC MILITARY SYSTEMS.

High-energy lasers not so highly advanced at the time. Kinetic kill as it was referred to understood as not feasible at the time but lasers still serving a useful role.

coolbert.