I am not an expert, but...

A military contractor identified a threat - infrared seeking missiles directed against aircraft (which includes helicopters). Being good little money grubbers, and knowing that most acquisitions officers are rank morons (by longstanding custom and policy), said contractor created an expensive “solution” to this problem. What’s that? We already have a cheap and reasonably effective solution in the form of flares? Ah, but what if dozens of missiles are launched at the aircraft, one after another? (Nature’s way of letting you know you’re operating in the wrong airspace.)

The solution ? Lasers! (Cue Captain Laserbeam!) Not just one, but potentially whole arrays of them! Shining infrared lasers at an infrared seeker will undoubtedly confuse and distract it, and possibly even blind it!

Wait, what? You’re planning on making the missile’s target brighter and more visible to the missile’s seeker head? It’s an idea so ingenious, it’s never been tried before. Silly engineers keep trying to make targets look smaller and less visible to the systems trying to detect and track them.

I’m sure that identifying and tracking relatively small missiles flying in excess of Mach 2 head-on directly towards you will be super easy. Detecting and locking onto a rapidly moving passive seeker head that is less than three inches across at a distance of a mile in less than a second with a laser is a trivial task, I’m sure.

These laser pods (pdf), which must be fully automated and include passive and possibly active sensor systems, will obviously be so small (“only 91mm into the airstream”) and light (“38 kg”) as to not alter the flight characteristics of the aircraft. And I’m certain that the power requirements of this automated detection and engagement system (“1350 W”) will be trivial. Especially if, as the manufacturer suggests, you place at least three of them on each aircraft.

I am curious, though, how one constructs a “multi-band” infrared laser. Lasers are rather notorious for emitting light at a single wavelength, after all.

I’m sure the people making the passive infrared seeker heads would never think to shield them from glare (like the sun) or program them to ignore monospectral sources (like early flares).