RONALD REAGAN, VINDICATED.

Two score and three years ago, the Smart People scoffed at his Strategic Defense Initiative ideas as "Star Wars."  Stay the course, the Gipper said.  Or perhaps it was Star Trek they had doubts about.  Zap a missile with a laser?  Perhaps that's still a challenge if it's an intercontinental ballistic missile.  An Iranian flying gas main is another matter.  "US military spending $500M on ‘war-ready’ laser weapons — and zapping drones in Iran, along US border."

Iranian citizens have witnessed some dazzling laser shows recently — but they’re not the kind you’d see at a Metallica concert.

The US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware, taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles,” the Department of War recently confirmed.

The US project to harness laser power has been 50 years in the making and outstrips the capabilities of any other military on Earth.

A Navy man I spoke with at an early spring swap meet (we were figuring out whether a 3-D printed Phalanx turret was O Scale: it was) confirmed the existence of such systems.  They're cheaper to operate either than Phalanx, with its depleted uranium slugs, or the SM series surface-to-air interceptors.  But they use a lot of electricity and apparently have noisy capacitors to generate the laser pulses.  Ships, however, have turboelectric power plants for propulsion.

Laser technology works by drawing energy from generators or battery packs which is then converted into light particles called photons. The photons are then concentrated as a single beam, which is only visible under infrared light, not the naked eye. They heat the surface they are directed onto until it explodes or melts.

That might be, at a more modest scale, how laser-assisted secondary cataract removal works, only with quieter capacitors and carefully calibrated energy.

Today's seagoing air defense specialist probably requires no special training on the controls.

Somewhat surprisingly, the laser weapons are operated by soldiers using reconfigured Xbox game console controllers.

“The video games industry figured out what the best controller was and now the US military is saying, ‘Well, why reinvent the wheel with a specialized control system where you can just use an Xbox controller or something really similar to do the job?'”

“If you’ve shot a Spartan laser in ‘Halo’, you can probably fire [one of the cutting-edge weapons] in real life,” Keller claimed.

Well, why not?  Adapting civilian stuff to military use is the American Way.  Making the military stuff more effective is also the American Way.

While the lasers are powerful, there are drawbacks. They need clear skies to function effectively and have a tough time defending against drone swarms.

The next deployment may not even be on earth. Lasers are expected to play a role in the US Space Force, which recently confirmed it had deployed active weapons into Earth’s orbit.

At the moment, having a quick, cheap response to an Iranian flying gas main probably matters more.  A drone swarm requires coordinated action by numerous launch teams, which is the kind of thing a reconnaissance satellite or Hawkeye crew can observe and call doom down upon.

That "next deployment" well might be another win for the Gipper.