The American corporation Lockheed Martin demonstrated the possibility of using a prototype of its laser installation for the destruction of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

As the company reported, the tests took place at the US Army's White Sands landfill in New Mexico. The test used a portable 30-kilowatt ground-based ATHENA laser. With this advanced weapon, five UAV Outlaws with a wingspan of about 3.3 m were knocked down one by one in the air. The latter are manufactured by the American firm Griffon Aerospace.

Tests, as it turns out, took place in August, American ground forces also took part in them, along with which Lockheed Martin is developing the ATHENA laser, TASS reported September 21.

Chief technologist Lockheed Martin Keoki Jackson said that the same results were observed earlier when using this weapon against fixed targets. According to Jackson, as the development of this project the laser ATHENA becomes all "more efficient". Current work will allow in the future to have laser weapons capable of hitting "complex targets from long distances," said Lockheed Martin.

Similar weapons are being developed by other companies of the US military-industrial complex, including, for example, Raytheon, which in June hit a UAV with a laser installed on an Apache helicopter from a distance of 1.4 km. And in July, the US military conducted a test of a laser cannon in the waters of the Persian Gulf aboard a floating base of special forces - the Ponce ship. Then various targets were amazed, including UAVs. CNN claimed that it was "the world's first active laser weapon"