The really important news often goes unnoticed. They happen, no one notices them, but the events mentioned in this news often have consequences, which then, developing to a large scale, make observers gasp - and it's good if just from surprise.
On August 4, 2019, one of these events took place, mentioned in such news, but not particularly noticed by anyone.
For the first time, a combat vehicle armed with a combat laser destroyed another combat vehicle on the battlefield. In a real war, on a real battlefield.
And nobody noticed it.
Unexpected leader
Turkey is not customary to be numbered among the ranks of innovator countries in military affairs. But it seems that they will be able to surprise the world's population a lot in this century. The Turks have taken a strong start as an industrial force, and any participant in military tenders in the Islamic world knows how much power they have already gained. The fact that it is the Turks who are building skyscrapers in Russia is also no secret to anyone.
Recently, there have been rumors about Turkish plans to build a springboard aircraft carrier similar in “ideology” to Vikramaditya or Kuznetsov. The Turks participated in the F-35 program precisely as a component manufacturer and are planning to create their own combat aircraft. But these are all plans.
But with combat lasers it turned out differently.
Turkey, concerned about achieving military superiority in the region, as well as gaining quality advantages in military power over Greece and Russia (and, apparently, also over Israel), has long and seriously invested in innovative weapons systems, including weapons on new technical principles. Back in the early 2010s, the Turkish company SAVTAG demonstrated experimental samples of installations of various capacities, starting from 1.25 kW, and further up to 50 kW. The systems were created in conjunction with TUBITAK, a government research institute. The Turks showed these systems as demonstrators of technology, and did not particularly hide the fact that they were planning to use these developments as weapons.
However, they managed to let all the observers on the wrong track - reports of both the press releases of the Turkish Defense Ministry and the specialized press hinted that Turkish laser weapons would be primarily produced for the Navy, and in general, they repeat the American work. No one was particularly interested in this then. Well, the Turks … Well, they want lasers … So what?
In 2015, TUBITAK announced that experimental lasers are successfully hitting targets. At the same time, the financing of the program became known - it turned out that the Turks are pouring huge amounts of money into laser weapons - in 2015 alone, 450 million US dollars were spent on the program. For a country that has access to all Western technologies and is already saving huge money on R&D on this, this was a very impressive amount. And, you need to understand that other years did not differ much from 2015. Nevertheless, the experts of most countries of the world, the Turkish progress, as they say, slammed.
In the same year, it became known that the Turkish laser weapons program was taken under the wing of the Aselsan holding, the largest Turkish military-industrial corporation.
On July 7, 2018, the company circulated a press release stating that it had successfully tested a combat laser capable of hitting small-sized UAVs from 500 meters, as well as destroying explosive devices from 200 meters. A compact laser cannon was installed on the Turkish Otokar Cobra armored car, and, most importantly, was equipped with a guidance system that allows the laser marker to be continuously held on the target.
Laser power cannot be compared to any kinetic ammunition. She is insignificant. A projectile from a 76-millimeter cannon gives the target such energy that the laser can communicate to the target, only for a very long time and continuously heating one of its points. And this is exactly what the specialists in optical-electronic systems from Aselsan have achieved. Their cannon could "cling" to a specific point on the target and "warm" it until it was completely destroyed. Even if the target was moving.
And that changed everything.
In its press release, Aselsan emphasized that it managed to achieve reliable target tracking, continuous laser operation and extremely low cost of fire. The latter is obvious. Where a conventional weapon consumes a projectile that does not necessarily hit the target, a low power laser cannon requires only diesel fuel for the generator.
The company showed a photo of a car armed with a laser and a video presentation showing the results of firing at metal plates.
The sensation, however, did not happen, and the news was greeted in the world quite calmly. No less calmly, the Turks continued to work on laser weapons. They knew that the most interesting press releases about their products were yet to come.
Erdogan's Libyan War
The ongoing war in Libya has not gone the way Recep Tayyip Erdogan would have liked: the Islamists he has bet on are losing. This problem did not arise yesterday, and the Turks have been opposing the Libyan National Army of Khalifa Haftar for quite some time now. The latter has the support of a wide variety of countries and forces - from Saudi Arabia and the United States to Russia and France. Russian mercenaries and mercenary pilots of Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater, work for Haftar, MiG-23s, specially repaired for his Air Force, are brought from Russia to Haftar, and Pantsir air defense systems from the UAE to protect against air strikes. And Haftar is slowly but surely winning.
And Erdogan again, as elsewhere, bet on the wrong horse. As in Syria, as in Egypt, in Libya, the forces that Turkey viewed as friendly and on which it had relied on failed. True, in Libya, the Turks are still counting on something. Turkey continues to support the so-called "government" and its friendly Misurat groups. Turkey has supplied and is supplying these groups with heavy weapons, sending advisers and instructors. Seeing that this was not enough, the Turks began to transfer to Libya militants previously employed in the Idlib province of Syria. We will not delve into the course of this war, which is far from us, something else is important for us.
The synthesis of the need for Turkey to stop Haftar, on the one hand, and advanced high-tech weapons, without discounts that have no analogues in the world, on the other, sooner or later had to happen. And it happened.
August 4, 2019
For the operators of the Chinese-made Wing Loong II UAE owned by the UAE, it was an ordinary reconnaissance and combat mission. Their drone, armed with an anti-tank missile, patrolled the outskirts of Misrata, conducting reconnaissance in the interests of Haftar's forces and looking for targets that could be destroyed by direct attack. The war in Libya has long taken the form of a bizarre mix of irregulars and state-of-the-art weapons, and UAVs have been one of the symbols of this mix. The flight, however, ended with the UAV being shot down.
And soon photos flew around the world.
Details became known immediately. The Turkish installation that shot down the UAV is mounted on the chassis of an off-road armored vehicle. Like the earlier Aselsan model, it is equipped with a Turkish-made optoelectronic guidance system. The system allows you to accurately inspect the target at which the fire is being fired, to select a vulnerable point, and then hold the laser marker at this point until the target is completely destroyed. Also, as with the previously demonstrated laser gun, a continuous radiation mode is provided, without long breaks for "pumping" the laser. The power of the gun is 50 kW. This is the most powerful combat laser on a Turkish ground combat vehicle so far.
The important point is this is not an experimental setup. It is a fully functional combat vehicle armed with a laser cannon. And it has just been tested in battle, and not at all against the "commercial" drone from E-bay. Such a gun could well have shot down an unarmored helicopter, and easily. And Turkey can build such weapons in large quantities without any problems - right now. Moreover, this is a tactical weapon, no special conditions for transportation are needed for it, a combat vehicle armed with a laser has the same level of mobility as any other armored vehicle of the same type. These weapons may well be used by ordinary soldiers, including conscripts. And the cost of a shot with this gun is literally equal to the price of diesel fuel spent during the shooting. Let's just say that an unarmored helicopter will take about twenty-five rubles.
Will this episode be the beginning of the "laser weapons race"? Let's make a prediction: no, it won't. The epochal news, as they say, did not thunder. Well, who are the Turks in the world of the military industry, right?
The Turks will continue to improve their weapons, and no one will pay attention to them. And so it will be until, in some other war, Turkish laser cannons on armored personnel carriers and tanks massively burn out optical-electronic sights of enemy equipment, burn engines to unarmored vehicles, shoot down helicopters and UAVs, disable airplanes standing on the ground with long distance, mow down the infantry without noise and external unmasking signs. And then everyone will shudder …
Interesting in this whole story is how, in fact, newcomers to the laser theme occupy the niche into which the "giants" of the laser business, such as Russia and the United States, do not even think to climb. They borrow successfully and very quickly, building almost serial military equipment faster than their competitors in the world read news about it - literally. This is all the more surprising because both Russia and the United States are superior to the Turks in laser technology and, in theory, should "attack when they threaten to lose their advantage" - to work ahead of the curve. There is some groundwork, and incomparable with the Turkish one, and there is some experience, we have from Afghanistan. And a much more complex complex for much more complex tasks, "Peresvet", is already in service in Russia. And the United States has a "working" ship installation. In a single copy, however.
But ground combat vehicles with tactical lasers are being built and used not in Russia or in the United States. This is done by the Turks, and the transition of the quantity of their work to the quality of technology as a whole to a new level is a matter of the very near future. They will grow the faster the more combat experience they have. As well as not far off the "acquaintance" of Turkey's enemies with what a combat laser is in its own skin - in the truest sense of this expression. In the future laser arms race, the Turks have already staked out a prize for themselves, and it is not a fact that this place will not be the first in the end.
