Gunning for laser weapons

The heart of any military is always its soldiers, sailors, aviators, and myriad support troops. But to get their jobs done, they need aircraft, ships, ground transport, radio systems, and weaponry -- and all of those things need to keep pace with advances in technology. Here are some of the things that the Pentagon has at the tip of its technology spear for 2014.

We're especially keen on seeing what the Defense Department can deliver in the category of directed-energy weapons -- a rather bland and bureaucratic term for that staple of sci-fi cinema, ray guns. For all the money that the military-industrial complex has thrown at the problem, we're still a long way off from phasers and photon torpedoes, but ever so slowly, we do see small gains -- or at least flashy demonstrations. One such moment in the coming year should materialize from the US Navy's Laser Weapon System, or LAWS, a solid-state system that will be installed on the USS Ponce, a former amphibious transport ship that the Navy has reclassified as its first Afloat Forward Staging Base (Interim), for deployment to the Persian Gulf "in fiscal year 2014" -- that is, by October 1.

The Laser Weapon System (LaWS), a technology demonstrator, in a temporary installation aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey (DDG 105), from July 2012.