Laser War - War paradigm of the future

Let me be the first to say this; laser weapons are going to be the next paradigm of war strategies. Maybe people will remember me after say 15 years, that I had claimed this. He He!

Today, nuclear weapons and their delivery systems like fighter aircrafts, submarines and ballistic missiles are the mainstay of all the nuclear weapon states in the world. The nuclear command in these countries is predominantly involved in modernizing these delivery systems.

Simultaneously, a few countries including India have started investing heavily in R&D of laser weapons and their delivery systems. These are called Directed Energy Weapons (DEW). For example, the US is developing an air borne laser delivery system called the YAL-1A (shown in pic - courtesy Wikipedia)

This delivery platform is a Boeing airliner modified to fit a laser device which can generate a laser beam having 1MWatt of power. If it is focused on an enemy aircraft, it can fry it in mid-air at the speed of light. India has also started a lot of projects in this area, both civilian and military oriented. The civilian projects involve 'laser dazzlers' which have applications in health care, transport etc. The military applications involve diffusing Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), causing temporary blindness to neutralize a person, etc. The strategic application is to create a blanket cover over India to protect it from hostile projectiles and enemy aircrafts using high power lasers. Currently India has developed a gas dynamic laser systems which can generate a laser having a power of 100 KWatt. The gas dynamic technology is old and is not portable. The next step is to create solid state lasers which are very portable and can be fitted on various platforms. This is projected to be achieved by 2020.

My claim is that when such technology matures, then it will render all current nuclear weapons and the delivery systems worthless. Because the lasers can just burn it off in a second! A very important requirement is to have very accurate and effective radars which can locate and track the enemy projectiles at runtime and activate offensive laser weapon systems which can neutralize it. Ground based, ship based and air borne radar systems have a limited capability to locate and track such projectiles because of limited range and accuracy.

The most ideal way is to have radars and laser weapon systems deployed in space, mounted on satellites. This opens a completely new and scary ideology called 'space weaponisation'. The name is quite intuitive. Currently, space is only used for civilian and reconnaissance purposes and fortunately the world has followed this policy. Any weaponisation of space is disastrous but i feel it is inevitable in the future. Just imagine, the Chinese can burn me off when I step out of the house, by firing a laser from space!!

If this is what is going to happen by the year 2020 itself, then why are we buying all these aircrafts, ships, submarines which are not immune to laser attacks? We should start preparing for laser defenses as well as offenses simultaneously.