So yeah, pulsed lasers can do it, and I'm certain the Air Force would rather be using them. They are finnicky though.
Not for petawatt lasers, those are around 1Hz or lower [1].
That said, I would be shocked if they can dissipate enough heat to fire a continuous beam for an hour. It’s very likely designed to be pulsed over longer time periods.
Do you really think they are so incompetent so as not to have thought of this?
I’m sure the labs developing these are aware of what you’re suggesting, have probably even tried them, and have their reasons for the design they’ve chosen.
They likely want to used pulsed lasers assuming average power output stayed the same, but physics is a bitch. So, they don’t get to arbitrarily chose.
We already have pulsed lasers with average power output in the kw range over several hours. Even better, this thing does not need to fire for hours at a time so you can skimp on heat dissipation. But, you can buy 2kw laser cutters off the shelf.
Really, scaling it up in a lab is one thing, but getting everything else to work like dealing with vibration, portability, and targeting is hard. So, while this design had slightly better tradeoffs, that does not say much about the design space they where working with or what they consider useful vs required. Ex: What frequency is this?
The 50kW laser that the air force wants is a sustained laser. This is not at all comparable to the petawatt lasers used by scientists, which produce pulses on the order of a femtosecond. Such a brief pulse would not be able to destroy a missile since the total amount of energy delivered is very low.