That would not explain the accounts from the Navy pilots that made visual contact with some of these objects such as USS Nimitz and the 'Tic Tac' UAP. Also from the Forbes article you posted:

>It is unlikely the Pentagon would release videos of their own secret weapon in a bizarre double bluff. But other nations may have their own version. In the early 1990s the Russians claimed that they could produce glowing ‘plasmoids’ at high altitude using high-power microwave or laser beams; these were intended to disrupt the flight of ballistic missiles, an answer to the planned American ‘Star Wars’. Nothing came of the project, but the technology may have been refined for other applications in the subsequent decades.

And I would agree that the Navy wouldn't risk causing an indecent by surreptitiously testing secret technology on it's own ships, especially near areas with civilian air traffic.

Could it be a foreign nation deploying a similar technology? Also highly doubtful. This would require a foreign military to either regularly sail ships or fly into US waters or very close to it, emit these plasma lasers for extended periods of time and sail/fly out undetected. The laser induced plasma effects theory would have to account for this somehow to be viable.