Is the Army finally rolling out some frickin’ laser beams?
Dan Seitz 
We all dream of it: our very own, vehicle mounted death ray. Instead of bumper-to-bumper traffic, a few selective shots and BOOM! You’ve got your own lane. D-bag nearly kills you while yakking on his cell phone? BOOM! A phalanx of old people going 35 and holding up four lanes of traffic? BOOM!
Well, the military is making it a reality. No, you can’t have one.
Actually, a lot of branches of the military are making it a reality, although they’re mostly focused on making lasers to disable ordinance. In fact, currently there’s a laser in the field, with the manliest code name ever of “Zeus”, being tested that nukes mines and IEDs from 300 yards away.
This is key because disabling IEDs and aging mines is one of the most dangerous tasks in the military right now. Sometimes the IED isn’t even intended to go off, just to lure soldiers into the sights of snipers. But if you can fry the bomb with a laser, then, well, the sniper then has no target and is probably going to find himself facing a squad of Marines eager to chuck him out a window.
But that’s just one laser. Raytheon is working on a laser system that would blow rockets and mortars literally out of the air before they ever reach their target. The American Missile Defense Agency is working on the Airborne Laser, which would blow up ICBMs as they were leaving their launchpads.
And, yes, Boeing is developing the Advanced Tactical Laser, which would be used to destroy vehicles, sever phone lines, compromise enemy infrastructure, and, uh, spontaneously make every fluid in your body boil into vapor while you explode from the pressure, and which also happens to be invisible and silent. Yeah, they’re taking it slow on that last one. And no, you can’t have that one either.
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