The U.S. Army is testing a secret weapon that can destroy an entire swarm of small armed or unarmed aerial drones with a single electromagnetic burst. And this weapon is just the first iteration of an evolving weapons system that will be smaller, more compact and more accurate in the future.

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The army has named its weapon the "PHASER," and anyone remotely familiar with sci-fi knows where this name came from.

While details of PHASER are still classified, what is known is this huge weapon is classified by the army as a "High-Powered Microwave" (HPM) radiation transmitter.

Its "gun" is a huge radar dish atop a 20 foot-long shipping container that fires microwave energy at the target drones. The intense microwave energy burns-out the drone's control systems; destroys their motors and causes the drones in a swarm to crash to the ground like flies sprayed with insecticide.

PHASER destroys aerial drone swarms en masse with a single shot. It does the job much quicker and more efficiently than lasers, which can only shoot-down one drone at a time with their thin high-energy beams.

PHASER emits a huge burst of microwave radiation that literally fries the electronics of any drone caught in its beam. Its HMP radiation can also knock-out the computers, radios and electronic devices in military vehicles; the electronic triggers of improvised explosive devices or IEDs and any weapon or battlefield device reliant on integrated circuits. It can also shoot-down helicopters in flight.

The HMP radiation fired by PHASER is similar to that generated by the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) generated by a nuclear explosion.

PHASER has been tested since 2013 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home of the U.S. Army Air Defense Artillery branch. The scant information about this weapon was only recently declassified, however.

The Army said PHASER was used successfully against Flanker and Tempest drones, two commercially available, fixed-wing drones. PHASER is being developed by Raytheon.

A YouTube video of PHASER can be viewed here.

There's a PHASER in our future but it won't come from Star Trek but from the U.S. Army.

TagsPHASER, U.S. Army, "High-Powered Microwave" (HPM) radiation transmitter, High-Powered Microwave, aerial drones, microwave radiation, electromagnetic pulse, Star Trek