Pentagon Loses War to Zap Airborne Laser From Budget

The Airborne Laser is the pursuit of a military Holy Grail—a workable ray gun. But there may be only one thing harder than trying to perfect it: Trying to kill it.

The futuristic weapon, conceived to shoot down enemy ballistic missiles not long after they blast off, stayed on the drawing board in the early 1990s.

Then, it survived an effort to slash its funding at the end of the Clinton administration. And in 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gutted the program, telling Congress, "There's nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept."

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