An eerie buzz, a blinding flash, a cry of pain. These are the sounds and images that could soon characterize the battlefields of the future, thanks to the laser-armed drones developed by the visionary (or madman?) Chinese researcher Li Xiao. His drones, equipped with high-powered lasers capable of vaporizing tissue and melting metal, threaten to make conventional weapons obsolete and change the rules of war forever.
But how exactly do these laser drones work? And what countermeasures are the military studying to defend themselves from this new threat?
Drones armed with “all-cutting” lasers
Apparently, drones have a new weapon in their arsenal: not just lasers, but lasers powerful enough to vaporize human tissue on contact and cut through metal.
I've been looking at a lot of directed energy weapons lately, usually designed to take down drone threats in combat operations. Now, from a defensive tool, lasers are equipping aircraft for offensive purposes as well.
Hong Kong's South China Morning Post has just published an article which begins like this:
A squad of fully armed soldiers follows closely behind a Humvee armored vehicle, moving cautiously through the ruins of an urban battlefield. About a kilometer ahead of them in the sky, a small drone hovers motionless. Suddenly, a soldier lets out a scream, clutching his eyes with both hands as smoke billows out from between his fingers.
A horribly descriptive image of the potential of this new technology developed by researchers led by Li Xiao (who perhaps not coincidentally uses the prefix “crazy.li” for his email in the research paper) who have successfully tested the use of a 1 kilowatt laser at a wavelength of 1080 nanometers from a small drone.
Drones armed with lasers, devastating effects
Instant blindness would probably be the least of your problems if you were faced with such a weapon. A single millisecond of contact with such a powerful laser would cause tissue vaporization and carbonization. Materials such as plastic, wood and fabrics would catch fire or disintegrate almost instantly. Even sheet metal cannot withstand a 1 kW laser and can melt. in just a tenth of a second.
But be careful: 1-kilowatt lasers are still too heavy and bulky for a compact drone to carry. So how can Xiao and his team make these kinds of claims?
Let me explain how it works: The laser isn’t kept on board. The drones are equipped with a stabilization system that holds two telescope-like tubes in perfect position. One of these collects near-infrared laser light emitted by a mobile station on the ground and transmits it to the other tube, which reflects the powerful beam—“enough to cut metal,” according to Xiao—back at the target.
Other details
Near-infrared lasers are invisible to the human eye and would require special equipment to detect their source.
A 1kW 1.080nm laser is considered a Class 4 laser, typically used for welding, cutting, and drilling metals. The 1080nm wavelength is particularly well absorbed by metals such as stainless steel, carbon steel, and aluminum, allowing it to rapidly melt metals so they can be welded.
To put that into perspective, at 1 kilowatt, it would take about 17 seconds to melt a 2-inch-thick (1-centimeter) plate of steel armor if the conditions were right. While much more powerful lasers exist, seeing a battle drone wielding this type of technology would be truly terrifying.
Big Tech Goes to War
In the last month OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic have partnered with military defense companies such as Anduril industries e Palantir to fight (just for this?) this type of threat. There are already other energy weapons, such as those with radio frequency directed energy (RFDEW), to repel swarms of drones, where ballistic weapons may not be effective.
The arms race of the future seems to have already begun (and we are already been warned, but we didn’t listen). Laser-armed drones could be just the tip of the iceberg of a new era of technological warfare. Will we be able to develop effective countermeasures? And what will be the ethical and legal implications of using these weapons?
These are questions we should ask ourselves now, before it's too late.
