One of the most distinctive features of the U.S. military’s high-energy laser weapon of choice isn’t the system itself—it’s how operators control it.
The logic of embracing the handset simple: If the vast majority of Americans grow up playing video games and even continue playing into adulthood, why not adopt a control system that capitalizes on U.S. troops’ preservice experience and reduce the training timelines for advanced weapons systems?
“The gaming companies spent millions of dollars developing an optimal, intuitive, easy-to-learn user interface, and then they went and spent years training up the user base for the U.S. military on how to use that interface,” military technologist Peter Singer previously old me of the Pentagon’s Xbox fixation. “These designs aren’t happenstance, and the same pool they’re pulling from for their customer base, the military is pulling from . . . and the training is basically already done.”
Xbox controllers and high-energy laser weapons in particular appear to be a match made in heaven, and not just with LOCUST. More than a decade ago, the beam director on the U.S. Army’s truck-mounted 10-kilowatt High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) was operated using an Xbox handset. So is the 10-kilowatt High-Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) from Raytheon that both the U.S. and U.K. militaries have tested in recent years, according to a 2018 video published to the U.S. military’s Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS).
