The trend is generally upwards. The mounting number of smaller fragmentation injuries cannot be denied, and is reflected in the rise in the incidence of ocular injuries. The increasing rise in eye injuries in battle areas is a great concern to military and civilian medical authorities because treatment of ocular trauma, if it is to be successful, is on a very different level to treatment of most other injuries such as wounds to the limbs or abdomen. Ocular surgery requires very clean operating rooms and sophisticated facilities such as operating microscopes. Fully equiped ophthalmic theatres are expensive in peaceful cities where there is no war-panic and services exist, but on or near by a battlefield providing such facilities is very difficult or impossible.
Eye injuries are bad news.
The intense laser beam is focused by the power of the eye, usually with the help of some external optics, on to the retina where the light energy destroys tissues. Hand in hand with the development of ophthalmic laser surgery, national and international safety codes of practice were developed to protect anybody who came near a laser or its beam of energy. The whole process of regulation and control has been very successful because the number of eye injuries caused to civilians by laser beams, even to those who work with high power lasers, has been very small. Laser energy has many useful properties and of especial interest to the military is its ease of collimation, i.e. it is readily formed into beams that diverge only very little with distance so that even at many kilometers the beam diameter may be only a few centimetres across. Laser beams are thus useful for picking out targets and very early on were used in range finders, target designators and similar devices.