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Navy Will Send Prototype Laser Weapon To Persian Gulf: Adm. Greenert

NATIONAL HARBOR: The Navy will send a prototype laser weapon to the troubled Persian Gulf for a roughly year-long test deployment starting "less than a year from now," the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, announced today at the Navy League's annual Sea-Air-Space conference.

The bad news is this isn't some superweapon out of science fiction. The Navy's Laser Weapon System (LaWS) is a fairly modest death ray that, for now, can only kill small boats and drones. Unlike the lasers of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars dreams, nuclear missiles aren't on the menu.

The good news is this isn't science fiction. "We're taking it out there to be an operational weapon," said Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of the Office of Naval Research, said in a briefing after Adm. Greenert's announcement.

Klunder claims the laser has scored 12 straight hits in 12 trials against flying targets, mostly firing from test sites on land but, in three cases, from the deck of an actual Navy warship, the destroyer USS Dewey. As early as this fall, the same prototype laser used in those tests will be installed on the USS Ponce, a former amphibious warfare ship converted to the Navy's first Afloat Forward Staging Base. (Ponce's large deck and copious cargo space, originally meant for transporting Marines, make it well-suited to host experiments in everything from firing lasers to clearing mines).