Look Out World! (or, Our Military Weapons Developers Are a Total Joke)

This news article, from The Guardian:

Laser Used to Shoot Down Planes

Wow, half a century after the invention of the laser, our military has FINALLY done what we all assumed they had done decades ago.  The real joke is this (emphasis added):

Raytheon developed the system after buying six off-the-shelf commercial lasers from the car industry and joining them to make a single, powerful beam guided by the Phalanx’s radars. Unlike other tests which have been conducted on aircraft it uses a solid state laser rather than a chemical generated beam.

So, from this, we are to understand that they have been spinning their wheels since around 1960 on “chemical generated” lasers, while industry has been using solid state lasers now for more than two decades?