Boeing, General Atomics team up for HEL

Boeing and General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems today announced a new partnership to offer the U.S. military speed-of-light-weapons for air and missile defense, specifically 100kW- to 250kW-class high-energy lasers.

The partnership combines Boeing's beam director precision acquisition, tracking and pointing software with General Atomics' scalable distributed gain laser technology, according to a joint statement from the companies.

"In addition to meeting the high-output power, range, adaptability and precision ATP requirements necessary to defeat an increasing array of emerging threats, the [high energy laser] weapon system's compact footprint will offer a reduced logistics footprint and greater configurability for both stand-alone use and integration with a variety of mobile ground, sea and air-based platforms," according to the statement.