The Navy is probably going to end up putting a pair of these on every surface vessel except hospital ships and (possibly) tenders. I predict there’ll be a move away from carriers and manned aircraft towards distributed fleets of smaller corvettes armed with lasers for point defense and railguns for mass computer guided multiple launch simultaneous impact bombardment. Basically we’re going to have the function of battleships again in the form of a much harder to engage swarm of smaller stealthier ships.

CNN got exclusive access to a US Navy live-fire test of the world’s first laser weapon https://t.co/5OvZZReWkJ pic.twitter.com/u0wqyvjNZ7

— CNN (@CNN) July 19, 2017