This year, I reported on an innovative ad campaign in which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) explicitly urged gamers to apply for air traffic control jobs.
The campaign appears to have been very successful.
Earlier this month, I noted that the U.S. military publicly acknowledged deploying “space control weapons” in orbit.
Another announcement brought two themes together. The U.S. is now using infrared lasers to dismantle Iranian infrastructure.
The US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware, taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles,” the Department of War recently confirmed.
The US project to harness laser power has been 50 years in the making and outstrips the capabilities of any other military on Earth.
“We can very specifically track and target drones and put the spot exactly where we want it, [in order] to disable its sensors or kill [i.e. explode] the drone itself,” Mark Neice, president of Directed Energy Consultants, which works with the military, told The Post.
…“It’s weaponized light that spends several seconds of what we call ‘dwell time’ on the target to bring it down,” said Jared Keller who puts out the newsletter Laser Wars.
Soldiers operate these lasers using reconfigured Xbox game controllers.
According to the report, the US military is of the opinion that when the gaming industry has figured out the best controller, “why reinvent the wheel with a specialised control system where you can just use an Xbox controller or something really similar to do the job?”
According to Jared Keller, who is behind the newsletter Laser Wars, it “makes sense” now to take out the laser weapons in an outside environment rather than caging them in a laboratory.
Talking about the Xbox controllers used to control the weapons, Keller claimed, “If you’ve shot a Spartan laser in ‘Halo’, you can probably fire [one of the weapons] in real life.”
And, as the New York Post article noted, lasers are expected to play a role in the U.S. Space Force, tying both gaming and the space weapons program together.
Intriguingly, the success of the FAA program appears also to be inspiring the U.S. military to appeal to gamers. One U.S. Army unit is offering its troops a special bonus of four extra days off timed around the November release of the video game “Grand Theft Auto VI.”
Commanders of the 9th Brigade Engineer Battalion based at Fort Stewart, Georgia, believe free time to indulge in the latest entry in the “Grand Theft Auto” series — in which players commit carjackings, battle police in shootouts and attempt audacious heists — will sway some soldiers to extend their military commitments.
The Nov. 19 release of “Grand Theft Auto VI” is expected to be one of the year’s biggest entertainment events. Game publisher Take-Two Interactive hasn’t released sales figures for preorders, but CEO Strauss Zelnick recently called them “unprecedented and astonishing.”
A career counselor with the Army engineer battalion hatched the idea with commanders to tie a retention perk to the game’s release, in part to remind soldiers of their approaching reenlistment dates, said Lt. Col. Angel Tomko, a Fort Stewart spokesperson.
“The idea was to have a unique incentives program that connects to what soldiers are interested in,” Tomko said Thursday in a statement to The Associated Press.
From FAA control towers to Army laser batteries, America has discovered very intriguing cheat codes to recruit nerds and gamers.
As my colleague Ben Smith recently reported, U.S. forces downed 300 suspected cartel drones in the first eight months of 2026, while Army lasers helped cut suspected drone traffic along the border by 75 percent.
And the added incentives for extra time off to hone the skill set necessary to succeed in this new style of warfare may keep our border better protected and keep the new space weapons program on a successful trajectory.
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