On August 4, 2019,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 no one noticed.
As per the claims, a Turkish mobile BILGEM laser illuminator deployed to support Libyan government Army (GNA) has shot down a Chinese Wong-loong II attack UAV operated by the rebel LNA forces.
Background
In the early 2010s, the Turkish company Savtag demonstrated experimental samples of plants of different capacities, starting from 1.25 kW, and then up to 50 kW. The systems were created in conjunction with Tubitak and ASELSAN, a state research institute. The Turks showed these systems as technology demonstrators and did not particularly hide the fact that they plan to use these developments as weapons.
In 2015, Tubitak announced that experimental lasers successfully hit targets. Then it became known that the program was funded – it turned out that the Turks were pouring a lot 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 already saves a lot of money on R&D, this was a very impressive amount. And, one must understand that other years did not differ much from 2015 either.