New Lockheed-Martin 'laser' disables truck from a mile away

You can bet the federal government will pay Lockheed-Martin a lot more than one . . . million . . . dollars for this:

Lasers have staggering range, can attack land or air-based targets and are dirt-cheap to fire, making them ideal for a military with one eye on the budget. Now, Lockheed Martin has worked out that the technology could also be used for stopping a car without resorting to lethal force. The company has been testing out a new fiber-optic laser, called ATHENA, which was able to burn through the engine manifold of a truck that was over a mile away. For the purposes of the test, the truck had its engine and drive train running, although the vehicle itself was up on props. Rather than causing the engine to explode, as per Hollywood, the truck was simply rendered unable to move. Reading between the lines, perhaps Lockheed believes that the gear will be a useful, potentially non-lethal precaution against explosive vehicles being driven, at speed, towards infrastructure points, guard towers or military bases.

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ATHENA is based on Lockheed's earlier ADAM system, which was designed to shoot down enemy rockets while in mid-air. This time out, the hardware used a technique called "spectral beam combining," which involves taking multiple laser modules and pointing them in the same place to create a single, powerful, high-quality laser beam. I do not know the cost of generating a laser with this kind of force, but it has to be a lot less than the cost of manufacturing and handling standard munitions, doesn't it? And what sort of capacity would a weapon like this have? If you can just keep firing those laser beams and never run out, what does that do to any enemy force that's thinking about moving on you? Check this out:

New Lockheed-Martin 'laser' disables truck from a mile away

Note that the truck is disabled and not destroyed. It's not a weapon with unlimited capacity to take out targets and render them piles of rubble. But having said that, isn't this type of technology a potential game-changer once we figure out how to fully optimize it?