In the midst of all North Korea's saber-rattling, the United States made a major military announcement yesterday which is going to change the future of warfare in significant ways. Not to put too fine a point on it, but America just unveiled the first working phaser weapon. The Pentagon doesn't call it that, they call it a "laser weapon system," but this is merely semantics from a bunch of guys who probably didn't spend a lot of time watching science-fiction as kids. Their loss. But no matter what the big brass wants to call it, the fact is that Captain Kirk's phasers are now a reality.

The video, which I am too lazy to search for at the moment, shows a ship-mounted laser cannon (again, they probably call it something else, but that's essentially what it is) shooting down an unmanned drone aircraft out of the sky.

Now, this is significant in a number of ways, but I'm going to focus on the silliest first, just because it vindicates a rather silly article I wrote a long time ago. In it, I laid out four of my major bugaboos with how Hollywood does science fiction. The other three were: you cannot make a U-turn in space; the problem of time lag and time dilation at interplanetary or interstellar distances; and in space, no one can hear (because it's vacuum, so there's no sound). But the fourth concerned light-based weapons. I even broke this subject down because Hollywood gets more than one thing wrong in their portrayal of laser weapons. One of these, however, concerned something which was visible (Warning: Irony ahead!) to all in the just-released video of the Pentagon's new weapon. What I said then (after talking about light weapons shooting "bolts" of light) was:

Beam, bolt, whatever, you wouldn't see anything in space at all. Try this sometime. Turn off all the lights in a room, and shine a flashlight at the wall. Unless your house is extremely dusty, you don't see any "beam" at all -- you just see a spot of light on the wall. The light has to have something (dust motes) to reflect off of, or you just don't see it. This is why at rock concerts, they pump out lots of dry ice fog behind and above the band -- so you can see the spotlights' beams. Otherwise you wouldn't see these beams at all.

Which, ironically (hey, you were warned), is just what we saw -- or didn't see -- in the Pentagon test. The beam is invisible. You can't see it. It's basic physics. The only way the beam would be visible is if it were foggy, smoggy, or if the weapon were so powerful (it isn't) that it turned the air to plasma. In one single test video, the Pentagon has schooled every science fiction moviemaker in Hollywood by showing "this is what it really looks like."

OK, I said all of that was going to be silly, but I had to toss it out there just because my own ego wanted to bask in being vindicated for a bit.

Silliness aside, however, I do believe that laser weapons are going to revolutionize warfare in very fundamental ways. The biggest selling point of the new weapon is that it "costs less than a dollar per shot." Think about that for a second. We can now take down an enemy warplane or sink a small enemy boat (more on that in a minute) for a buck's worth of energy. Without bothering to research it, I can state without fear of contradiction that this is a tiny, tiny (miniscule, really) fraction of the cost of, say, a Sidewinder missile. Which is what it used to take to down an enemy warplane, to say nothing of the cost (and risk involved) of sending up a fighter plane to shoot that Sidewinder missile. Instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars (millions?) per shot, we're now talking about a single dollar per shot. That is revolutionary, right there.

Cost-benefit analysis aside, though, having laser weapons will mean the entire face of warfare will change. While it is currently unknown (the Pentagon doesn't like bragging about weapons limitations), how will the new weapon fare in fog, through clouds, or in other rough weather? If it works just as well as on a clear day, that's one thing, but if there are limitations built in, you can bet the enemy will adjust to this new reality.

I don't say that in order to argue against laser weapons, I just mention it in passing as what Donald Rumsfeld used to call "an unknown." But even if laser weapons are limited in usefulness, they will still fundamentally change the battlefield. The test was made public for a specific reason: to announce that the ship with the new weapon will be deployed in the waters near Iran. Iran has played a game of "chicken" with U.S. warships for quite some time now. They have tiny speedboats in their navy which they send out to harass U.S. warships in places like the Strait of Hormuz. With the new weapon, these boats may be disabled at a distance, in non-lethal fashion. The phasers, to put it another way, can be set on the equivalent of "stun."

One more high-tech weapon in America's arsenal may not seem like all that big a deal. But to me, it represents another step along the path of roboticizing warfare. Which is another subject I've previously raised, in thinking about what drone warfare means and will mean:

All kidding aside, though, this is a moral development that hasn't really be adequately discussed. If warfare becomes a remote-controlled operation for America, what does that mean exactly for our future involvement in warfare? Can robot tanks and even robot infantry be all that far behind? I would be willing to bet that tax dollars are being spent right now on the development of both, especially considering how successful the drone aircraft have been. "Successful" is a relative concept, of course. What I mean by it is that no remote control operators have been injured, killed, or captured since we began flying Predators over hostile territory. Many on the ground have been killed or injured by Predator missile attacks, but these are our enemies (and the resulting civilian "collateral damage").

This is going to seriously unbalance the concept of warfare itself. If one side can launch lethal attacks with no risk whatsoever to its military personnel, and the other side does not have this technology, then it's not all that fantastical to see a few years into the future when we just send in the robots to do all our fighting for us, no matter where in the world it takes place.

Again, this is not science fiction. It's a reality that already exists in the skies over at least two countries right now (and possibly more). Robots are killing humans. These robots are not acting on their own, they are fully controlled by human operators -- but the next generation of drone aircraft will not need a human to operate them (again, this is fact, not supposition). Robot artillery, robot tanks, and robot infantry cannot be all that far behind. War as the ultimate video game, in other words.

I don't have any sweeping conclusions today, I'm just marking the milestone that we are indeed moving further down this path towards waging war in "video game" fashion. Although admittedly fantastical on my part, it's not going to be that long before a U.S. Navy captain of a warship gives the order: "Fire phaser one!" He may use different language, but the age of Star Trek weaponry is no longer in the realm of science fiction. It is now science fact, and it is being deployed as an active weapons system.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant