This article is republished with permission from  Laser Wars , a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology. The U.S. military is pushing to demonstrate high-energy laser weapons engineered for fielding at scale in the next two years, according to the U.S. Defense Department’s top science and technology official. Testifying  before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee on May 19, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, Emil Michael, told lawmakers that the science of laser weapons “is largely done.” He said the Pentagon is focused on addressing the engineering challenges that come with transforming exquisite prototypes into mass-producible capabilities—the “scaled” element of the department’s “ scaled directed energy ” critical technology area. “We now have a suite of directed energy products that go from low end to high end, and now we have to scale production of those,” Michael  said .…