Raytheon Sets Phasers to Drone Destruction with Directed Energy Weapon Test

There are all kinds of creative ways of dealing with rogue drones: Radio jamming. None of these are really designed to handle military drones, however, and large, fast-moving UAVs are still a potential threat, especially if more than one is coming at you at once. It's no surprise that the U.S. Army has been developing solutions for this potential threat-- we're not sure what they're working on now, but as of late 2013, Raytheon was successfully testing a long range, high power directed microwave weapon capable of taking out swarms of drones in milliseconds. The Phaser is essentially a high powered microwave (HPM) cannon that runs on a diesel engine. Exactly how powerful this thing is (and what its range is) is still classified, but we do know that it can be tuned to either "disrupt" or "damage," where for most drones, "damage" seems to be synonymous with "destroy."