Why Laser Beams Are the Hottest New Tech in Defense

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:03)
Hello, Odd Lots listeners, I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:06)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:07)
We're the hosts of the Odd Lots podcast, and we've got something exciting for you.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:11)
That's right. So one of the best parts of hosting our podcast is we get to actually meet and interact with our listeners. And we know we have some listeners over in Los Angeles.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:21)
That's right. So if you're in LA., we're going to be recording a live show, some live recordings at the Vermont Theatre in Hollywood on September 17th.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:30)
We have some really exciting guests lined up, have some really great conversations planned. So go ahead and get your tickets. You can find those over at bloomberg.com/oddlots or click the link below in the show notes and come and say hi when you're there.

**Wayne Sanders** (0:49)
Bloomberg audio studios, podcasts, radio news.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:05)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:09)
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:10)
Joe, I got to get something out of the way immediately up top this episode. Normally, you and I talk for a couple of minutes, and then I introduce the guest. I'm just gonna introduce the guest right away and say today we are speaking with Colonel Sanders.
I actually, I have some sympathy for this issue of people with famous military names because my dad was in the Air Force and his first name is Tom. Can you guess what the highest rank was that he actually achieved in the Air Force?

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:39)
Oh, Major.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:40)
Yep, and he always claimed he was under promoted because people found it funny to have Major Tom in the Air Force. Of course, you have to ask the question of whether he was over promoted to Major Tom.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:51)
I bet he never thought that story, but it's just as plausible.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:55)
That's right. Okay, so we'll have to ask our guest whether he was over promoted to Colonel or under promoted to Brigadier General, but we're going to be speaking with Wayne Sanders. He's the Senior Defense Research Analyst over at Bloomberg Intelligence, and we're going to be talking about laser beams and microwave weapons.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:12)
I don't know anything about laser beams or microwave weapons. This is all going to be new to me. I have seen in sci-fi movies that in theory, you could shoot a laser.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:22)
Pew, pew, pew.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:23)
But I don't know if that's a real thing or if that's just a sort of cinematized version of what a visual weapon could be like. I have no idea. Evidently, it is real-ish because there is research on laser weapons and energy weapons and so on, but I don't know anything about how this works.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:40)
So two things I learned in the course of preparing for this conversation. So number one, both these things fall under the umbrella of directed energy weapons, which sounds... Directed energy sounds like something my yoga instructor would say if I had a yoga instructor, which I don't. But at the same time, people have been talking about these forever. They've been in development for literally decades now. And I think the big question is whether or not we're hitting a moment when they might actually become reality. So we know, for instance, that Israel is getting ready to deploy its iron beam project. I think there's some discussion of whether it should be called laser dome instead of iron beam, which is kind of funny. But at the same time, we know that the US ballistic missile supply has been dwindling because, you know, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to use like weapons that cost millions of dollars to shoot down thousands of drones that are made out of Styrofoam and plywood in some cases.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:35)
It's clearly a lot of anxiety about just the sheer number of munitions in any context, etc. We've been obviously, the world is exhausting a lot. You read a lot of stories. If we could replace a bunch of it with lasers, maybe that could be a solution. It's interesting to think, you know, I sort of put this in a category of certainly core science technologies that have been the next big thing for a long time. You probably remember, what was it called? Like nanotech. Remember when like nanotech was going to be, I don't know what's going on with nanotech robots. Another one is quantum computing. There does seem to be a lot of progress, but also when I talk to someone in quantum computer, it still seems like we got a ways to go, et cetera. And so the way you describe this sort of high energy weaponry, I'm curious whether it's one of these things that definitely works in theory and ambiguously works in practice.