This was one of the ideas pursued in the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Star Wars. They weren't able to develop a system that would work against ICBMs. Powering an aircraft is both easier and harder; the aircraft presumably isn't making evasive maneuvers and trying to stop you from powering it, but the economic and safety constraints are harder.
IIRC, one of the problems with SDI was that at the time the only way to make lasers powerful enough to destroy an ICBM was to pump the lasing medium with a nuke, making them one-shot devices.
Sensing may still be a problem today, especially as stealth is also improving, but detection in general is much easier than it was in the Regan era.
