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You spot an IED from a Predator or the guy on point spots it. An armored vehicle rolls up and zaps it with a laser, blowing the sucker up. No one has to don a suit or get out of a vehicle. Neat, huh? It’s not often that we’ll respond to a plain old company press release but Boeing has tested just such a laser system that looks as if it could really make a difference to troops in the field today. If it’s far enough along to actually rumble over broken terrain, fire and be maintained in the field...

Watch as this bad boy—the Humvee-mounted Laser Avenger that destroyed a drone in January 2009—obliterates bomb after bomb during a test at the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. It just takes a few seconds, and boom. Not exactly Star Wars material, but this will save a lot of lives in the future—and destroy others too, I'm sure. Click here to watch video.

Some defense thinkers believe directed energy weapons, lasers, hold out real battlefield promise, particularly against future enemies armed with large numbers of relatively cheap precision guided weapons. For example, the folks at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington say lasers provide a potential solution to the so called G-RAMM (guided rockets, artillery, mortars and missiles) problem. Using missiles to shoot down incoming rounds can get very costly and a counter G-RAMM arsenal can be rapidly depleted; lasers solve the finite counter-munition arsenal problem. Granted, directed energy weapons are not ready for prime time, although they are getting...