Germany has summoned the Chinese ambassador for a dressing down after it stated a Chinese warship, unprovoked and without warning, fired a laser weapon at an aircraft on a European Union military mission.
The militaries of several developed nations are developing and deploying experimental laser weapons, a non-kinetic and potentially cost-effective anti-air capability for blinding military aircraft and shooting down drones and missiles. Now Germany alleges China has used such a device in anger against one of its aircraft over the Red Sea in the text of a diplomatic protest issued against Beijing.
Per the German Foreign Ministry, “The Chinese military employed a laser”, endangering the aircraft and the crew aboard. Germany has made a formal diplomatic protest over the incident, summoning the Chinese ambassador to Berlin for a dressing down. The Foreign Ministry said: “Endangering German personnel & disrupting the operation is entirely unacceptable”.
The aircraft, which is a surveillance platform operated by a defence contractor, flown by civilian pilots, but carrying a German military team operating the intelligence suite aboard, was flying over the Red Sea as part of the European Union’s Aspides deployment. The purpose of the mission is the protection of civilian shipping by monitoring and intercepting Houthi missiles and does not, the European Union says, contribute to American-led strikes on the Iran-backed Houthis themselves.
After the laser incident, the aircraft returned to its base in the Middle East as a precaution. Per German news magazine Der Spiegel, any possible damage to the aircraft and its sensor suite — which are typically sensitive and possibly the most vulnerable thing aboard to a directed-energy weapon — is “currently unclear and is still being investigated”.
A spokesman for the German military said the laser attack took place during a routine mission by “a Chinese warship that had already been encountered in the area several times, without any reason or prior contact” and that with the course of action followed, “the warship accepted the risk of endangering people and equipment”.
The contact with the Chinese warship is not the first incident for the German armed forces over the course of their involvement in EUNAVFOR’s Aspides mission to protect civilian shipping in the Red Sea. Last year, German Frigate Hessen, due to a communication failure with the American forces liaison, mistakenly launched two missiles at a passing U.S. Reaper drone. Fortunately for the U.S. and unfortunately for Germany, both missiles failed to reach the target and splashed into the sea, which sparked a debate about German military capability.
Laser air defences are an important emerging area of military technology that has become more urgently attended to in recent years as the Ukraine war massively underlined the present asymmetric nature of air war. The economics of shooting down single use explosive drones that can cost as little as tens-of-thousands of dollars with multi-million-dollar interceptor missiles is horrendous, and excluding development and deployment costs lasers can be fired for as little as $10 a time, providing just enough energy to a target to defeat its onboard systems to cause a crash.
The U.S. military has been developing laser air defence systems for decades and recently published an image [top] of USS Preble test-firing the High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS). The 60kw weapon is intended to defeat fast attack craft and drones, and can also be used in a lower-power mode to dazzle enemy systems without actually destroying them, which may be similar to what the German aircraft experienced over the Red Sea.
Israel said this year it has used laser weapons to bring down enemy aerial threats and the British government has also said it has successfully used its experimental ‘Dragonfire’ laser and would even be deploying it to Ukraine to continue tests in a live environment. Images released by Britain’s weapons development department even showed, remarkably, a mortar round with a hole melted through it, suggesting a high potency weapon if faithfully represented.
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