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The U.S. Military Is Freaked: Lasers are No Secret Weapon Against Hypersonic Missiles
(nationalinterest.org)
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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My non-expert opinion is there's no way you could keep a laser painted on a target manuevering at mach 13 long enough to actually melt it. How long do they even have between detection and impact? DEWs are appealing because they travel at light speed and don't need to carry ammo. ___ but you have to hold your flash light on the target until it heats up enough to fail. That's fine if you've got a cruise missile puttering along at a stately pace, but not a terminally manueverable hypersonic vehicle.
Depends!
Carrier groups usually have an AWACS plane on standby, and wikipedia suggests modern systems have a 400km detection range. Assuming the missile has a steady speed of Mach 13, that's about 90 seconds of warning.
It's more complicated than this, though, because (afaik) these missiles cruise at a much lower speed and only reach maximum velocity when accelerating in their terminal guidance phase.
There's also the issue of laser range, which would probably be not very far, closer to the hypersonic missile last phase of attack range.
Yep! Line of sight alone would limit laser countermeasures to the horizon, to say nothing of the air scattering the beam's energy for the whole distance.
But interceptors (anti-missile missiles) have no such limitation and would remain the only effective countermeasure for hypersonics.