You wake up, 20 years into the future, as President of the United States, improbably. The dictator of a country with a lot of coastline is killing his people. You have a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing you to stop him. You also have a Navy filled with weapons out of Starship Troopers.

Thanks to research conducted long ago — that is, in the 2010s, before your Rip Van Winkle nap — you can shoot bullets at hypersonic speeds through your adversaries’ artillery, missile sites or infrastructure, from hundreds of miles away. From a similar safe distance, you can sink his ships with a crazy-powerful missile. And your ships, Marine vehicles, helicopters and planes should have the ultimate in geeky weaponry: laser guns. Fire at will.

These are all projects underway by the Office of Naval Research, the Navy’s in-house weapons geeks. ONR expects they’ll reach maturity within roughly the next 20 years. If Moammar Gadhafi manages to hold to power for that long, he’ll find himself facing weapons that are even more sophisticated than a missile that thinks it’s a drone.

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Start with the super-fast bullet. By the 2020s, the Navy should have an electromagnetic rail gun ready — that is, a gun that uses a burst of energy to fire a 23-pound projectile (okay, maybe it’s more of a lightweight artillery shell than a bullet). And not just a little energy: a test this past December used 32 megajoules to send a 23 pounds of hurt 5,500 feet in a second, a speed of about Mach 8. By the time it’s ready to tear through enemy targets, it’s going to use twice that much energy to send a bullet hurtling to a target 200 miles away in six seconds. If this Stratfor map of the Libya fight is accurate, that’s about as far away as the Italian aircraft carrier Garibaldi is from the besieged Libyan city of Misurata.

One challenge: outfitting the projectile with a GPS system that won’t melt from the intense heat generated by firing the rail gun. Dumb hypersonic bullets are not the greatest military idea.

But if the rail guns aren’t enough, that’s where the lasers come in. ONR tells Danger Room that perhaps the most applicable and realistic (!) weapons in its labs for a fight against the Gadhafi of 2030 are solid-state laser guns. They use crystals or glass to help generate their beams.

That laser tech comes in two varieties, explains ONR’s Peter Morrison, a veteran research program officer. The “bulk” or “slab” lasers operated by ONR use crystals — about half an inch thick and a foot long — to generate a beam of coherent light. Fiber lasers, the slab’s less-mature cousins, “pull” light through fiber optic cables for their beams. Bulk lasers are much closer to weaponization: the Navy’s tested them at “hundreds of kilowatts” — weapons-grade, in other words. The fiber lasers, which use less energy to operate, are barely in the kilowatt class.

And that’s a big deal for laser guns. Their purpose is to slice through steel. Right now, the auto industry uses fiber laser technology for welding and cutting. But since they can’t handle much incoming energy right now, their beams lose potency — what laser geeks call “fluence” — the further they travel. “The hope is that fibers, if they show what they currently show in trends, will actually perform better than slabs, if you get the beam quality and power level up,” Morrison says.

If so, they’ll have a ton of applications. By the 2020s, ONR will offer their laser guns to the Navy to put them on ships, helicopters, planes and ground vehicles. In the hundreds of kilowatt ranges, they’ll shoot “from long distances, potentially thousands of yards,” Morrison says, making them potent “offensive weapons on planes.” Lasers shooting beams in the tens of kilowatts are good for “close-range missions.” (By contrast, the Air Force’s Airborne Laser, with its poor track record, uses chemicals to generate its light beams.) As defensive tools, they’ll burn missiles, rockets, artillery and mortars out of the sky before an adversary reaches U.S. ships, planes or tanks. And they improve sensors and weapons guidance.

Downsides: Morrison says the packages housing the guns are likely to weigh “a couple hundred pounds.” That’s fine for a ship, and maybe a plane, but they’ll have to lighten that load if the guns are to fit aboard a helicopter or ground vehicle.  Also, “you’ve got to be considerate about how much power it might draw, cooling it, and targeting,” Morrison explains. “How to direct a light beam onto moving target from a moving platform?”

But the solid-state lasers aren’t the Navy’s only laser tool. Sometime in the 2020s — after the solid-states are ready, ONR believes — it expects to have the mother of all lasers aboard a ship: a Free Electron Laser cannon. Unlike solid-state or chemical lasers, it doesn’t use any solid medium at all to generate its photons. Instead, a beam of electrons, passing over a series of magnets, do that work. It allows the laser to blast across multiple wavelengths, compensating for debris in the air that could diminish the beam’s potency.

Right now, the football-field sized Free Electron Laser at Jefferson Labs in Virginia produces a 14-kilowatt beam. It needs to shrink substantially and power up to a threshold of 100 kilowatts to protect a ship from a missile; and its program managers see it ultimately firing a megawatt-sized blast. That kind of power, which solid-state lasers are unlikely to produce, can cut through 2,000 feet of steel per second. Any adversary seeking to sink the Navy’s launching pad for all these other kinds of lasers will have to survive that high-energy piledriver.

That’s not all. Along with Darpa, ONR is working on a Long Range Anti-Ship Missile to sink enemy navies from long, long distances. The Navy won’t tell Danger Room the ranges of these missiles, launched from surface ships and subs, but Defense Industry Daily speculates that one variant of the so-called LRASM project will travel for 500 miles. That’s nearly the distance between Tripoli and the Navy base at Sigonella in Sicily.

Finally, Navy aircraft carriers — which, admittedly, aren’t being used in the Libya war — will one day be outfitted with an electromagnetic launch system to get its planes airborne. The system, known as EMALS, is way more efficient than the steam-powered catapults currently in use. By controlling the amount of energy pumped into the system, EMALS can launch anything from a fighter jet to a small drone. It’ll get easier, in other words, to get the airframes carrying the laser guns into the skies.

Even assuming that all these lasers, missiles, rail guns and launch systems can really be completed before 2030, the 2020s are still shaping up to be a trying decade for the Navy. “If you look at the ’20s, what is happening then is the growth that occurred in the ’80s in the fleet, where we were building multiple submarines and multiple combatants a year, all those ships age out in the ’20s,” warned Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations, at a breakfast with reporters on Wednesday. It’s one thing to have Judge Dredd-style weapons, but unless there’s a shipbuilding surge in the next decade, there may be about 70 fewer vessels to put them on.

And to state the obvious, the best weapons in the world are no substitute for a strategy. But maybe future dictators will think twice about massacring their people if they knew they’d only be incinerated by giant frickin’ lasers. That is, if we’re not still fighting Gadhafi by then.

??Photo: U.S. Marine Corps