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Trolling the internets the other day I came across this article on WIRED.

Army Turns to Lasers for Copter Defense

Some jerk has fired a heat-seeking missile at your Black Hawk. You’ve got a few options. You can try to dodge the thing, but good luck with that. You can fire off a flare in order to fool the missile into no longer following you as you maneuver. Or you can shoot off a laser from on board your bird to do the same thing. Not really a choice, is it?

OK, so Black Hawks and other military copters don’t have lasers yet. But a University of Michigan professor with a million dollars in Darpa and Army money is building a highly portable laser to keep U.S. helicopters protected from insurgents wielding shoulder-fired missiles. “It’s a jamming laser, not a knock-it-out-of-the-sky laser,” explains its creator, Mohammed Islam, a little sheepishly.

Islam’s Mid-Infrared Supercontinuum Laser (MISL, get it?), pictured below, is still in the prototype stage, so its effectiveness isn’t yet proven. But it’s got some advantages over existing military laser tech. Namely: You can fit it onto a helicopter, it won’t break, and it’s cheap.

Gene Roddenberry promised us energy weapon firepower in the form of a sidearm. But it turns out lasers are tragically heavy. The Airborne Laser might be able to shoot a ballistic missile out of the sky, but it’s so corpulent that it barely fits into a Boeing 747. It’s just “too large and expensive to field in large numbers on many operational airborne platforms,” sighed the Missile Defense Agency. The Pentagon is still stumped for portable alternatives.

Enter Islam’s MISL. It’s about the size of a DVD player, meaning you can screw it onto an onboard console. We’re not talking about needing a separate laser-equipped jet to pop out from behind the Afghan mountains on-demand and zap Taliban. Not that that happens anyway.

Read More Army Turns to Lasers for Copter Defense | Danger Room | Wired.com What strikes me as ironic is the University of Michigan professor's name, Mohammed Islam. What do you want to bet that he's also a Muslim?

Let's hope his research is successful, and his lasers someday save countless American lives on the battlefield. And they will owe their lives to a University professor named Mohammed Islam.