Welcome to Pulse, a weekly digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem. In this week’s edition: Israel’s spaceborne laser ambitions, the UK ramps up directed energy funding, the Netherlands takes a two-track approach to laser weapons, and more.

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The US military is closing in on its high-energy laser weapon of choice for counter-drone missions. Now it needs the vehicles to support it.

With the demise of its Stryker-based Directed Energy-Maneuver Short Range Air Defense (DE-MSHORAD) program, the US Army has focused its ground-based laser weapon efforts on light tactical vehicles. AV’s 20 kilowatt LOCUST Laser Weapon System has already been operationally tested aboard both the Infantry Squad Vehicle and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle through the Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) effort, establishing that the US military’s preferred mobile platforms can carry and employ directed energy weapons in the field. The Army has reinforced this preference with its Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) push, which is explicitly targeting light tactical vehicles like the JLTV for what might become the US military’s first directed energy program of record.

Both the ISV and JLTV are at the center of the US military’s emerging approach to future distributed operations. For the Army, the speedy and versatile ISV is seen as providing an essential maneuver capability for Mobile Brigade Combat Teams on a battlefield increasingly dominated by low-cost weaponized drones. And while the ultimate fate of the JLTV remains uncertain, the vehicle is currently the chosen platform for the Marine Corps air defense system that’s the backbone of the service’s new Marine Littoral Regiments.

But both platforms face the same big problem: power. And the two services’ potential solutions offer a look at what the US military’s future fleet of laser trucks might actually look like.

As the modern battlefield is increasingly defined by unmanned systems and the electronics needed to counter them, consistent and reliable power at the tactical edge has become as important as ammunition. During the height of the Global War on Terrorism, a 30-soldier infantry platoon carried 400 pounds of batteries during a 72-hour mission to power their equipment, a load that Army researchers have sought to lighten in the intervening years. The US military’s new crop of tactical vehicles don’t currently offer a robust solution: the JLTV can only generate up to 15 kw of exportable power, while the ISV’s output beyond baseline vehicle operations is not public (and likely negligible).1

The challenge for building a laser truck is bigger than just raw power. The core problem for directed energy weapons, as Chariot Defense founder and CEO Adam Warmoth told Laser Wars earlier this month, is that while they don’t consume enormous amounts of energy in absolute terms, each engagement demands a significant spike in power sustained for several seconds. Conventional generators are optimized for steady output but not for these spikes, and running one at the ready around the clock is not just inefficient and expensive, but actively dangerous on a battlefield where heat signatures and engine noise turn are prime targets for drone-based reconnaissance and precision strikes.

“That targetable signature is always on because you have to be ready to provide power to that laser system at any moment,” Warmoth said. “So you have efficiency challenges, signature management challenges, and then mobility problems, where you have to bring the generator sized to your peak demand, which is three to five times larger than the equivalent battery system.”

The proposed solution to this problem is a hybrid architecture: a generator sized for average load paired with a high-voltage battery system capable of delivering instantaneous surges on demand. The battery handles the spike, the generator recharges the battery between shots, and the overall system is smaller, quieter, and more tactically versatile than alternatives. A vehicle with the right hybrid architecture becomes more than just a maneuver capability, but a node in a distributed battlefield power grid capable of charging drone batteries, running C2 and sensor networks, and powering electronic warfare equipment — and, when the moment requires it, feeding a laser weapon the juice it needs to fry a target.

The Army and Marine Corps have understood the benefits of vehicle electrification for some time. In January 2024, GM Defense demonstrated its Next Generation Tactical Vehicle-Hybrid — built on a Chevrolet Silverado HD 3500 with the same Duramax engine used in the ISV paired with a battery producing roughly 300 kw hours — with soldiers from the 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division in Hohenfels, Germany. The following February, the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office demonstrated a Humvee-based Tactical Hybrid Electric Vehicle at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland highlighting silent watch, silent mobility, and increased power generation and export as the core operational advantages. And later that month, the Army’s JLTV program office released a market survey for a “projected new production effort of a light tactical wheeled hybrid-electric vehicle.”

The US military has validated this technology despite ongoing concerns that the Trump administration might put the kibosh on such efforts. Now the Pentagon has to actually field it in the right package.

The Army’s answer to the power gap is the ISV-Heavy. The name is slightly misleading: what makes the vehicle “heavy” is its chassis and, more importantly, its proposed power generation capabilities. According to a commercial solutions opening (CSO) document published in late March, the system must produce and export a minimum 60 kw of continuous high-voltage DC power to support modular mission-specific payloads, from C2 communication equipment and radar to, explicitly, future directed energy weapons. If the original ISV, based on GM Defense’s Chevrolet Colorado ZR2, was intended as a high-speed troop transport, the ISV-H is envisioned as a mobile power plant that happens to carry soldiers.2

The ISV-H is designed to fill a “niche requirement there between an ISV and then, say, a JLTV, and it’s really going to be focused on the power generation part,” as Jess Tolleson, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a June 16 hearing. “One of the things that we do have a critical capability gap on right now is power generation at that mobile brigade combat team level.”

The ISV-H is moving faster than the earlier CSO document might have indicated. According to the Army’s fiscal year 2027 budget request released in April, the service plans on procuring an initial tranche of 34 ISV-H vehicles at a unit cost of roughly $463,000 each, with a total procurement objective set at 606 vehicles. The service plans to release proposal requests by the end of this year, Tolleson said, describing the platform’s development as “a top priority” that the service wants to accelerate. The Army wants to award a contract by September 2027 and accept its first deliveries by January 2028, per the budget documents. GM Defense had previously announced it will offer the same Chevrolet Silverado model showcased as the Next Generation Tactical Vehicle-Hybrid for the effort.3

The ISV-H’s power specifications track with the hybrid architecture necessary for a mobile directed energy weapon employment, while the silent operations mode addresses the generator signature problem. The vehicle is purpose-built for the demands of the electronically-defined battlefield — a laser truck designed from the outset to fight, and win, the Laser Wars.

For the Marine Corps, there is no equivalent clean-sheet solution available. The JLTV is firmly entrenched in the Corps’ redesigned force structure: the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) counter-drone and air defense system, which carries a 30mm cannon and Stinger missiles, operates across a fighting pair of the vehicles, while the Navy-Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS), which mounts the Naval Strike Missile on a JLTV, forms the centerpiece of the service’s Indo-Pacific sea denial strategy.

The main problem is that Army’s relationship with the JLTV has deteriorated sharply over the past year. In May 2025, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll published a directive stating that the service would cancel procurement of “excess ground vehicles like the [Humvee] and JLTV” and redirect funds toward modernizing light formations around the ISV; according to the Congressional Research Service, the service planned to procure no additional JLTVs beyond the 250 delivered in January of that year. AM General’s JLTV A2 variant, the next-generation successor that was supposed to carry the program forward, is now running more than 20 months behind schedule with roughly 2,000 vehicles in arrears, and House appropriators have proposed cutting $133 million from the program’s $245 million budget.

The Army’s JLTV ongoing issues jeopardize the Corps’ plans for the platform. As Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith stated during a June 2025 posture hearing, the service would have to buy fewer JLTVs going forward due to the Army stoppage — the Corps has already fielded roughly half its 12,500-vehicle requirement, but with Army volume gone, per-unit costs will rise. This past February, the service reaffirmed its commitment to fielding the vehicle as part of its new force structure, as its Marine Littoral Regiments are built around JLTV-mounted capabilities in a way that makes a clean break from the platform effectively impossible. In May, the service released a request for information seeking “mature, production-ready, rapidly fieldable” alternatives from vendors capable of supplementing or replacing AM General’s supply, a tacit acknowledgment of the A2’s production troubles.

This is where original JLTV manufacturer Oshkosh Defense comes in. Displaced by AM General in 2023, Oshkosh arrived at Eurosatory 2026 in Paris with a potential answer to the power problem: an upgraded version of the hybrid-electric eJLTV demonstrator the company first unveiled in 2022, capable of generating 115 kw of exportable power and operating in silent drive and watch modes that allow for full electronic functionality without the tactical liability of a engine signature. With the purported ability to generate bursts of power up to 250 kw, the system was explicitly designed with future directed energy weapons in mind.

“[Working out where to] aim the power available for export is a consideration and the top end is kind of where we’re focused,” Logan Jones, chief growth officer of Oshkosh’s transport division, told Shephard Media. “One that we’ve been tracking is the Australian-based Electro Optic Systems Apollo high energy laser weapon. At the other end, another type of integration is the Cilas HELMA-P [counter-drone] system.”4

Oshkosh is already pushing to reclaim its role as primary JLTV supplier for the Marine Corps, but its broader institutional argument for eJLTV adoption is relatively straightforward: a service that already operates JLTVs can easily integrate the electric version into existing maintenance infrastructure, draw on established spare parts supply chains, and train crews already familiar with the base vehicle. With the Army walking away from the JLTV and the Marines actively shopping for alternatives, Oshkosh’s power-capable variant may prove the most realistic near-term path for the latter service to get directed energy into the fight.

Together, the ISV-H and eJLTV offer the US military a two-track approach to fielding laser weapons on light tactical vehicles at scale. The Army gets a purpose-built platform with the power architecture, silent operations capability, and modular payload bays to support directed energy weapons like the E-HEL from the ground up. Meanwhile, the Marine Corps gets an evolutionary upgrade to a platform it is already committed to.

Neither track is without risk. The Army has yet to select an ISV-H manufacturer, and 606 vehicles is a modest procurement objective for a capability the service describes as a critical gap. The eJLTV remains a demonstrator, and the Marine Corps’ JLTV procurement future depends heavily on whether AM General can close its production gap and Congress will continue to fund a program it has already threatened to cut

But if AV’s LOCUST proved the feasibility of a real-world laser truck, the ISV-H and the eJLTV are the US military’s first serious attempts to build enough of the right vehicles to make laser weapons a standard battlefield capability. The major challenge ahead, as senior defense officials have repeatedly emphasized, is whether directed energy weapons can be produced, procured, fielded, and sustained at the scale required to prove effective. Without the right platforms to support them, these weapons will remain niche capabilities — impressive in demonstrations, but absent when it matters most.

Welcome to Pulse, a weekly digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem. In this week’s edition: extra details from the Laser Wars exclusive on the US military’s latest directed energy demonstration, the UK wants to shrink DragonFire, China’s debuts a man-portable laser weapon, and more.

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The US Defense Department demonstrated several high-energy laser and high-power microwave weapons for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, Laser Wars has learned, the first publicly known instance of a sitting US defense secretary personally observing a live directed energy weapon firing.

The demonstration, which occurred at the US Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, was attended by Hegseth and Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael.

“We have dramatically increased investment in scaling directed energy technologies, signaling to our manufacturing partners that the War Department is focused on delivering rapid solutions to the warfighter,” Michael said in a statement when reached for comment by Laser Wars. “We are directly tackling manufacturability, reliability and integration — areas that have challenged transition under previous administrations.” (The Office of the Secretary of Defense declined to comment on the record.)

According to sources familiar with the demonstration, participating directed energy weapons included the Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) based on AV’s 20 kilowatt LOCUST Laser Weapon System; the “P5 version” of the Army’s 50 kw Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE-MSHORAD) laser weapon system1 from nLight; the 300 kw Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) from Lockheed Martin known as “Valkyrie”; an Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Power Microwave (IFPC-HPM) system based on the Leonidas from Epirus; and a “high-power microwave variant” of Raytheon’s Coyote interceptor, likely the Block 3 Non-Kinetic (BNK) system.2

While these existing programs are run out of the individual service branches, Michael’s office is “taking a more active role moving directed energy forward” through the new Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS) effort initiated last year under the auspices of the “Golden Dome for America” domestic missile defense system, a senior Pentagon official told Laser Wars.

The White Sands demonstration “affirmed the ability of directed energy systems, particularly high-energy lasers, to defeat high-density, highly proliferated threats from a variety of sources and power levels,” the official said. “Scaling directed energy enables our warfighters to fight beyond the limits of magazine capacity and no longer limited by how many bullets are in the chamber.”3

The demonstration comes as the US military aggressively pursues alternatives to costly missiles and interceptors to counter the rapid proliferation of cheap, weaponized drones — a threat urgent enough that the Pentagon has proposed a historic $2 billion in funding for directed energy weapons research and development in its fiscal year 2027 budget request. With their comparatively low cost-per-shot and “infinite” magazine, laser weapons in particular represent an increasingly alluring solution to the drone problem, and the technology appears to have finally matured to the point where military leaders firmly believe they can actually field them at scale as deployable, supportable capabilities rather than an endless parade of exquisite prototypes.

Hegseth appears to share this confidence. In a written posture statement submitted to the House Armed Services Committee in late April, the defense secretary declared that the Pentagon intends to buy “tens to hundreds” of directed energy weapons in the coming years in a “strong and consistent demand signal” to a defense industrial base currently postured to produce only “a limited number of prototypes.” Hegseth’s comments are the clearest and most senior acknowledgement yet that one of the core obstacles to fielding directed energy weapons at scale isn’t the technology itself, but overcoming the bureaucratic inertia that has consigned so many promising systems to the “valley of death” between R&D and procurement.

The Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) effort — the Army’s most serious attempt yet at translating decades of laser weapon R&D into a program of record — will be the Pentagon’s first real test whether this time is different. The successor to the DE-MSHORAD effort, the modular, 30 kw counter-drone system is moving on an unusually aggressive acquisition timeline: the first prototype was expected in the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, with production units slated for delivery by the end of fiscal year 2027. The service plans to “produce and rapidly field” up to 24 E-HEL systems over five years, an ambition that would have been unthinkable for a directed energy program just a few years ago. Even the US Navy has begun exploring the system’s potential shipboard applications.

Laser weapons from two known E-HEL contenders — AV’s LOCUST and nLight’s P5 DE-MSHORAD system — were in attendance at Tuesday’s demo at White Sands. The third known contender is Huntington Ingalls Industries, the nation’s largest military shipbuilder, which was awarded an $14.82 million contract for E-HEL system design, development, and integration in February 2025 and subsequently announced a dedicated laser weapon test facility to support the effort.

LOCUST is the most battle-tested laser in the American arsenal. First deployed overseas in 2022 and integrated onto Infantry Squad Vehicles and Joint Light Tactical Vehicles under the AMP-HEL initiative, the system was responsible for the US military’s first acknowledged laser kill at the southern border with Mexico in February (friendly fire, unfortunately). LOCUST also shot down multiple drones from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush last October, and Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll personally fired one at White Sands in May via Xbox controller. AV unveiled an upgraded version of the LOCUST specifically targeting the E-HEL competition last August, and with its palletized and vehicle integrations already proven, it already appears to be the frontrunner for E-HEL.

nLight’s P5 version of the DE-MSHORAD system is the predecessor to the 70 kw HADES laser weapon the company unveiled in May. Designed for mass production, HADES represents the company’s near-term bid for counter-drone contracts as it continues its ongoing work on the Navy’s 300 kw High Energy Laser Counter Anti-Ship Cruise Missile (HELCAP) effort and under the Pentagon’s High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative (HELSI) on megawatt-class lasers capable of engaging ballistic and hypersonic threats. nLight has been betting heavily on rising global demand for drone countermeasures more broadly, raising $175 million in new stock sales and announcing a 50,000-square-foot manufacturing expansion in Colorado earlier this year.

Beyond E-HEL, Tuesday’s demonstration is also the most visible expression yet of the US military’s directed energy ambitions around Golden Dome. The Pentagon’s 2027 budget request contains $452 million in dedicated directed energy R&D for Golden Dome, more than triple what was enacted just last year. Separately, the Army and Navy plan on spending $676 million over five years under JLWS to develop a containerized 150 kw laser weapon capable of defeating incoming cruise missiles as part of the initiative. In May, Michael told Congress that “the commitment was made to the President that we’re going to have a demonstration that includes directed energy in our Golden Dome architecture” by summer 2028.

Between E-HEL for drones and JLWS for missiles, no Defense Department since Ronald Reagan has invested so aggressively in America’s directed energy capabilities. But while Hegseth may have watched lasers burn targets out of the sky at White Sands, the Pentagon must now prove it can do so at scale — and on a deadline.

Edited by Justin Miller

In this week’s edition of Pulse: The Navy teaches an old laser weapon a new trick, EOS signs a laser weapon contract with the UAE, fresh details on Elbit’s airborne laser efforts, and more.

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The US military has spent billions of dollars over decades building high-energy laser weapons capable of burning drones out of the sky, but it has spent considerably less money and time exploring what happens when an adversary does the same thing. With China fielding a growing arsenal of laser weapons capable of killing drones at ranges up to 25 kilometers, Russia’s Peresvet reportedly in active service, and various laser systems now spreading across the world through indigenous development, proliferation, and a burgeoning export market, that oversight is becoming harder to ignore.

The US military’s answer to this problem has a name: counter-directed energy weapons (CDEW). It’s a nascent field — no dedicated CDEW system is publicly known to have been fielded, and most related research and development remains conceptual. But a 2023 study published in the Journal of Directed Energy by researchers at the US Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) offers the clearest public picture yet of what defending against a laser weapon looks like.

The NPS study — which draws on a comprehensive 2020 NPS systems engineering capstone report by the same team of researchers — is focused specifically on naval unmanned aerial vehicles, and with good reason. Drones are arguably the most exposed military asset in the world: increasingly designed for expendability, they operate in lethal proximity to adversaries and, unlike a destroyer or a tank, carry no meaningful armor. The same principles that makes drones attractive as delivery mechanisms for attritable mass also makes them highly susceptible to a weapon optimized for persistent energy delivery. And while the laser threat calculus the NPS researchers present also applies to manned aircraft, surface ships, missiles, satellites, and ground vehicles, naval drones just happen to sit at the acute end of the vulnerability spectrum.

To understand this vulnerability, the NPS researchers evaluated four representative drones of various sizes: a large Group 5 broad-area maritime surveillance (BAMS) drone (the MQ-4C Triton); a large Group 5 combat drone (Northrop Grumman’s X-47B demonstrator); a rotary-wing Group 4 ISR and fire support drone (the MQ-8C Fire Scout); and a small Group 2 ISR drone (a Small Tactical Unmanned Aerial System from ScanEagle). When faced with a 100 kilowatt laser with no countermeasures in place, three of the four drones were assessed as destroyed after just a few seconds of irradiation. Only the large BAMS drone, operating at extreme altitude and ranges exceeding 8,000 nautical miles from a potential threat, survived thanks to distance alone.

Since lasers bleed energy over distance and through atmospheric interference, altitude and range matter just as much as size. Fast-moving drones are harder to track and target with a sustained beam. Material composition is arguably the most significant factor: a thin composite airframe melts far faster than a thick aluminum one. And in terms of mission profile, a drone loitering at low altitude in a contested littoral is more exposed than one cruising at 60,000 feet over open ocean. To wit, the small Group 2 ISR drone ranked as the most vulnerable of the four drones evaluated in the NPS research, while the BAMS was the safest — but only until it came down to land.

No naval drone (or, for that matter, US military platform) is currently known to be equipped with systems to detect a high-energy laser attack as it occurs; in many cases, the first sign that a laser is being used against you might arrive only during battle damage assessment. That detection gap is the foundational CDEW problem, and everything else flows from it.

The NPS researchers identified five broad categories of CDEW solutions:

• Use the weather: This is the most immediately actionable laser countermeasure, and it costs nothing. Fog, rain, haze, dust, and smoke can all absorb and scatter laser beam photons, reducing the energy that reaches the target. At higher power levels (above 100 kw), even clear air can work against a laser through thermal blooming, where the laser heats the air it passes through and defocuses the beam. The operational takeaway is straightforward: plan missions to exploit bad weather and adverse atmospheric conditions wherever possible. The catch is that you need reasonably good intelligence on where a laser threat is located and what its capabilities are to accurately calculate how much protection the atmosphere actually buys you.

• Warning systems: Sensors like the AN/AVR-2B Laser Detection System (LDS) are already used on some military aircraft to detect laser rangefinders, target designators, and beam-riding missiles. Integrating those systems directly into drone payloads to detect and identify high-energy laser threats could produce something of an early warning system: a drone detects that it is being irradiated, alerts operators and nearby platforms, and triggers either active countermeasures or evasive maneuvers. The challenge is that warning systems have to be matched to the laser’s wavelength to work reliably — and they need to be designed into the platform from the start, not bolted on after the fact.

• Active countermeasures: This category covers four distinct approaches, according to the NPS research. Smoke and aerosol screens — essentially cloudbursts of fine particles dispensed around a drone — absorb and scatter the beam, buying time. Laser jammers analyze the incoming beam, identify the source location and intensity, and fire back a disrupting signal to break the adversary system’s targeting lock. Basic counterfire deploys weapons against the laser system itself if its position is confirmed. Finally, decoy drones acan ct as false targets, drawing the beam away from more mission-critical assets. These approaches range from immediately feasible to technically demanding, and all of them share one requirement: you have to know you’re being lased before you can respond.

• Armor up: Passive shielding is the most engineering-intensive solution, with three distinct materials yielding the most dramatic results in the NPS simulation. Bragg mirrors — dielectric mirrors constructed from alternating layers of two optical materials — can reflect up to 99.99% of laser energy for a specific wavelength, essentially making the beam bounce off. Reflective coatings work on a similar principle and can be applied directly to an airframe, even as a temporary pre-mission treatment matched to a known threat wavelength. Ablative coatings take a different approach: rather than deflecting energy, they absorb it and burn away in a controlled fashion to buy a drone time to escape. In the NPS analysis, Bragg mirror coatings were the single most effective CDEW method tested, protecting all four drone types under the simulated 100 kw threat. But there’s a critical caveat: the mirrors only work at the specific wavelength they’re built for. Use the wrong coating against the wrong laser and you’ve wasted weight.

• Evasive maneuvers: Maneuvering and swarm tactics round out the playbook. Continuous wave laser weapons require sustained contact with a target to inflict damage — break that contact by banking hard, diving, or flying erratically and the required dwell time resets. Swarm tactics extend this principle by flooding the adversary’s engagement capacity: a single laser system can only engage one target at a time, and a swarm forces it to choose and re-engage sequentially. In the NPS simulations, swarm tactics proved the second most reliable CDEW method, protecting drones in roughly three to four out of every five simulated engagements. Evasive maneuvering alone was less reliable, limited in part by the latency inherent in remote control. Onboard autonomous maneuvering, where a drone detects irradiation and evades without waiting for a human command, is a promising direction, and one that applies equally to any remotely operated platform facing a laser threat.

When the NPS team ran their CDEW analysis against the four drone archetypes, the results illustrated both the promise and the limits of each approach. Under cloudy atmospheric conditions, only the BAMS drone (already safe without countermeasures) gained enough protection from the weather alone to be considered survivable. Bragg mirrors theoretically protected everything, but only by assuming the laser’s wavelength was already known. Swarms worked most of the time, but evasive maneuvers alone failed more often than they succeeded for three of the four drone types.

The primary lesson of the NPS research will be familiar to anyone who has followed directed energy weapons development on the offensive side: there is no silver bullet. The most reliable CDEW strategy combines atmospheric awareness, passive shielding, warning systems, and active countermeasures into a layered defense.

The NPS research itself is not a solution. No CDEW payload has been fielded on a US military drone, the detection gap remains unsolved, and the shielding solutions that perform best in simulation are the ones most dependent on intelligence that the US military may not always have. There’s also an architectural challenge that mirrors offensive laser weapons: CDEW solutions can’t simply be bolted onto existing platforms. Laser warning receivers, countermeasure dispensers, and specialized shielding materials need to be integrated at the design stage as a platform requirement

Laser weapons are spreading around the world, and the adversarial laser weapon threat grows more urgent with each passing day. The question now is whether the US military will start building the CDEW playbook before it actually needs to use it.

Read the Naval Postgraduate School research below:

Counter Directed Energy Weapons And The Defense Of Naval Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Journal of Directed Energy, Winter 2023)

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The Naval Postgraduate School is conducting counter directed energy weapons research to characterize directed energy threat environments and develop solution concepts for protecting naval assets against this developing problem space.

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Counter Directed Energy Weapons Defense Of Air Assets (March 2020)

2.55MB ∙ PDF file

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This capstone project characterized the adversarial directed energy threat environment and developed and evaluated concepts for countering, evading, and neutralizing the potential threat effects against naval assets. In particular, the study focused on high-energy laser weapon systems and their effects on naval unmanned aerial vehicles.

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Editor’s note: There is officially more laser weapon news than I have time to devote individual newsletters to! To ensure Laser Wars readers remain up to date, I’m launching Pulse, a weekly digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem.

In this week’s edition: Israel’s laser-armed helicopter is closer than you think, Turkey’s chief laser weapon gets a starring role in the Steel Dome, new laser weapons break cover at the 2026 ILA Berlin Air Show, and more.

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Welcome to In Focus, an occasional interview series with subject matter experts in the directed energy space.

Adam Warmoth is the founder and CEO of Chariot Defense, a San Francisco-based start-up building battlefield power systems to bridge expeditionary forces’ energy gap at the tactical edge. The company’s Amphora battery system provides modular voltage and low-signature power for everything from radios and drones to sensors and directed energy systems.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

LASER WARS: How did you end up here? Was there an “aha!” moment for you where a light bulb went off over your head? What was the genesis of Chariot Defense?

ADAM WARMOTH: It was almost exactly two years ago, at SOF Week 2024, that I had this light bulb moment. I realized that the core commercial technology around high voltage batteries and silicon carbide power electronics that I had been working with and getting exposed to at Archer, Uber Elevate, and Kitty Hawk, and what was coming out of companies like Tesla and Rivian — there was this incredible breakthrough driven by the electric vehicle and electric aircraft industries, and the technology just wasn’t making its way into defense.

Half of my career was spent on electric aircraft, and the other half was spent at Anduril, where I was a program manager for counter-drone systems and air defense systems. We were deploying counter-drone systems into contested expeditionary environments, and one of the biggest problems we had was that these passive systems needed a high active draw when making an intercept. Our solution was these big diesel generators that we ran inefficiently 24/7, created a targetable signature, and had serious reliability issues. There was no product available that could solve these problems that could actually deploy in a military environment, had a secure non-Chinese supply chain, and was designed to be interoperable with all the US military’s existing equipment around power generation and mobility.

I had looked into something that I could buy and didn’t see it, and then I had this light bulb moment: all of this incredible Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) technology is now mature and ready for employment at a time when the battlefield was becoming much more decentralized, distributed, and reliant on electronic systems like drones and counter-drone systems. So that the light bulb moment: to bring this commercially validated breakthrough technology amid increasing demand.

What do people not understand about power and laser weapons?

People think about something you plug into the wall, and that’s how they think about power. That’s how they interact with power. What they don’t realize until they turn the microwave and the toaster on at the same time and pop a circuit breaker is there’s a maximum amount of power you can pull from the grid at any time. To go up to these higher power levels that laser weapons require, from 10 kilowatt to megawatt-class systems, you have to fundamentally rethink your power architecture, and that’s where you have to go to high voltage

This is where the EV and eVTOL breakthroughs make what we do possible: Tesla, Rivian, Archer, Joby — all of these platforms have 400V battery architectures. The simple math of power is that power equals current times voltage, so if you want to go to high power, you either have to have high current or high voltage. All military systems today are built around this low voltage architecture, but that means if you set a certain max current, you need a certain size cable — the higher the current, the more thermal loss that you have, and the more you have to deal with getting rid of that waste heat that’s generated. By going to high voltage, you can actually deliver a lot of power while keeping the current low. The problem is that, at these higher power levels and voltages, traditional solid state electronics transistors break down, and so there was no real way to do this kind of power conversion and management without massive transformers and substations.

The breakthrough that makes it possible now is silicon carbide, which allows you to apply the same digital control and solid state control of data to larger flows of power at higher voltages where traditional electronics would break down. Tesla, from the Model S in 2012 to the Model 3 in 2018, was able to cut the size and weight of their drive inverter — the component that takes a battery’s high voltage DC power and converts it into AC power that drives the motor — by a factor of 10. This is an order-of-magnitude, game-changing breakthrough in material science that allows you to get up to those higher power levels, those 10 kw, 50 kw levels, without needing massive transformers that make mobile employment of a laser weapon impossible. All of that innovation and commercialization of that technology was happening at EV and eVTOL companies, and all of our engineering talent comes from that world.

What are the unique power and battery requirements of laser weapons, and how does Chariot approach this problem?

Laser weapons are unique in power profile, but what we see is people often conflating the concepts of power and energy. Power is energy over time: just like how position and velocity have this relationship as a rate of flow, you have to think about power as how fast is energy delivered. And so laser systems and directed energy systems have a high demand for power and need a lot of energy in a very short amount of time, but the overall aggregate amount of energy is actually quite low because of the rate: it’s a lot of energy demanded for a couple seconds, and then the laser is done firing and power demand drops to zero. The aggregate energy used by a laser shot to take down a drone is actually very small, even though the demand for power is very high.

This dynamic creates challenges that traditional kinds of power generation are not well suited to. Engines are happy running at one happy speed: they’re designed and optimized for a specific RPM and run inefficiently when they’re operating outside of that. If you want to be able to employ these laser and directed energy systems at the edge, you really need to take a hybrid approach that takes the best of burning fuel with traditional generators and pairs that with batteries, which much better at delivering those surges of power

Our 30 kw power system is about a third of the size of a traditional 30 kw generator. If your peak power demand is that 30 kw, we can deliver you that peak power in a system that’s a third of the size of the equivalent generator. Pair that with a generator that’s sized for your average load, and you can use the energy density of fuel to deploy energy forward to the edge and generate the power at a time and place of your choosing. With an appropriately sized generator for your average demand, you can use that to charge up a battery and have that battery handle those big surges of power when you need to be able to take a laser shot. This is Chariot’s core reason for existence: to build hybrid architectures that harness the best of traditional power generation.

The other challenge of a pure generator-based solution is that you’re running your engine really inefficiently, because most of the time you’re not drawing much power. You’re also generating a targetable signature — the heat and noise of the system that’s detectable by enemy sensors. That targetable signature is always on because you have to be ready to provide power to that laser system at any moment. So you have efficiency challenges, signature management challenges, and then mobility problems, where you have to bring the generator sized to your peak demand, which is three to five times larger than the equivalent battery system. And there are a lot of reliability problems as well. Traditional generators fail a lot: they have a lot of moving parts and need constant maintenance and oil changes. Battery systems and solid state electronics do not.

What applications do you see beyond directed energy? Where do you see that system deployed in the long term?

Amphora can be a platform that can support all of the future electronic systems on the battlefield. We’re seeing a massive transition towards an electronically defined battlefield, with directed energy being the most power-intensive version of this and having the highest power demand. But lots of things that are being deployed on the battlefield today need distributed, reliable, low-signature, high-efficiency power. That includes charging drone batteries: when that drone lands, you need to charge that battery as fast as possible to get it back out into the air. That includes to power the sensors that are detecting the drones to be able to give your counter-drone capabilities something to shoot at, such as radars, camera systems, RF sensors, and electronic warfare systems.

Then you need to be able to charge other batteries for other drones and robots that rely on edge compute. There’s all this stuff in the news about how hard it is for us to provide power for all these data centers, and then now we’re trying to take all that same compute capability and push it to the off-grid, to the edge, where that compute is even more important because you don’t necessarily always have assured communications. So we’re throwing a bunch of edge compute on these platforms, at the point where the data is actually being generated and consumed, and seeing a lot of challenges keeping those systems powered. These systems all need high-quality power, but they’ve been designed on the assumption that they’re plugged into the grid, and the power sources that they’re plugging into in the field often have a lot of spikes, brownouts, or blackouts. Our systems provide a clean, consistent power for all of those sensitive electronic compute communications systems.

One common benefit military officials and defense contractors talk about with regards to directed energy is the “infinite magazine”: the assumption is that a laser weapon can keep shooting as long as it’s there’s power available. What is the real world architecture of this, and does Chariot allow for something like this?

This is where the math of the hybrid system really makes sense. The battery in our larger system is 15,000 watt hours, so it can power a 10 kw laser shot for an hour and a half. The math scales proportionally up and down based on how much power your laser needs, and that provides you that magazine depth. And what’s really important here is that it allows you to provide all of that completely silently, so you’re not running a generator on idle 24/7 just ready to take that shot. You can have the battery just sitting, waiting, ready 24/7 for whenever that shot is required. If you have a small drone flying at you, you’re going to have five seconds to respond, so you need to have that always ready with available power without creating all these challenges around poor fuel efficiency and detectable and targetable signature.

Now, eventually that magazine is going to be consumed, especially if your battery is not just powering your laser but also communications and compute systems and sensors and all the other loads that are required to run a node in the field. That’s where the hybrid configuration really matters. If you have to bring all of your energy forward in batteries, you have to bring 12 pounds of batteries to match one pound of fuel in terms of usable energy, but if you can bring some of that flexible power conversion, either by pulling power off of vehicles or small generators, you can bring your energy forward as fuel to backfill and recharge that battery. That’s how you achieve infinite magazine depth. You don’t want to be driving a dead battery back to the rear, charging it off the wall, and then driving it back forward, right? That’s not realistic in a contested environment. So you need that ability to recharge on the edge off of vehicles and generators. That’s really one of the unique aspects of our approach to this: yes, we have a battery in the system, and yes, we are big believers in the benefits of batteries, but you have to think about how you use fuel to recharge it, because deploying that energy forward as fuel is a much more efficient way than to deploy it as batteries.

This ties into our core thesis, which is focused on batteries as power, not batteries as energy. What the battery provides in this hybrid setup is the instant power delivery capability decoupled from your power generation. The energy of the battery is almost as small as we can make it while still being able to manage power demands, and then the fuel provides that energy reserve for magazine depth.

How has your outlook for the directed energy industry changed recently? In the last six months, we’ve had officials declaring we’re going to field laser weapons at scale in three years, and President Donald Trump posts memes of lasers all the time to Truth Social. The laser hype is real — do you see all this progress going in a direction where the next administration is going to come in and just kneecap it all?

We are certainly building a business that is robust to any timelines there. We have stuff to drop in and provide value today without directed energy, but we still see directed energy as that like platonic ideal, the most valuable use case of where this hybrid system is most impactful. We are very excited about the progress in directed energy, because it creates such a clear demand for our system as complementary product, and even though we’re not dependent on it for what we see as our growth over the next couple of years, the maturation of those technologies and their deployment is something that we’re very excited for our business and for the country.

There’s so much talk about the cost of these munitions and the asymmetric cost delta of shooting down a $20,000 drone with a $3 million missile, and that only increased with Operation Epic Fury — if that wasn’t already a topic at the front of everyone’s minds, it certainly is now. There’s a chart floating around about the falling cost of the watt, or of fiber laser components. There’s some big cost reductions happening in the core technologies and components behind laser weapons, from what I’ve been reading, and then you’re going to combine that with the growing operational demand for a low-cost down capability, so we very much see that trend accelerating.

Critically, these systems are going to need to be deployed on mobile platforms. Power is not really a problem when you’re fighting from a static position. You can bring massive diesel generators, you’re not worried about mobility or signature management or even logistics really. You may even have some kind of shore power or grid power you can tap into. But it’s really when you fight in a distributed, decentralized, contested environment where you really need advanced, miniaturized, edge-deployable, mobile systems. That’s where we see the battlefield going, and that’s where our products really shine as an enabler in that mobile, distributed, contested environment where efficiency matters, mobility matters, and signature management matters to bring maneuver back to the battlefield.

What we’ve seen in Ukraine over the last several years is a very static kind of trench warfare. That is not a fight we want to be in. If we want to be able to maneuver, we need systems on vehicle platforms, and that means we need modern power distribution and power management on those platforms as well.

Are you working closely with any laser companies?

So we’ve now done three demos with Aurelius Systems. We just got back from an exercise called Technology Readiness Experiment (T-REX) — I was in Indiana last week at Camp Atterbury, powering live shootdowns of drones with their systems, all powered completely silently off of our Amphora system. They’ve been our main partner in the directed energy space.

You had a significant raise in recent months — a $34 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. What does the company roadmap look like over the next few years?

A lot of that funding is going right into scaling our production. So, with our Amphora system, we have significant demand for that. We’ve sold systems to multiple US Army units, we’ve sold systems to B2B partners for counter-drone applications that are currently deployed downrange in theater. So we are powering air defense systems in contested environments today with that product, and we’re looking to scale up the production of Amphora 24 and take Amphora 400 from its early pilot stage right now into production as well.

We’re also exploring more integrations onto different platforms, taking the same core technology we’ve developed. Our current products are bolt-on and meant to be as adaptable as possible to the current platforms and power generation sources, so we’re really going to be building out more of our platform integrations, working with other OEMs, and building out our software and microgrid control software platform as well.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about supply chain challenges. Have there been many issues that you’ve faced in developing your products?

The great thing that we have about our position in this industry, in this ecosystem is, as I like to say, we are delivering the most valuable kw hour in the world. If you held an auction and you said, “I can magically deliver one kw hour of energy to anyone in the world, and it will be in a usable form, and it will just magically appear in this usable form that you can consume for whatever you need it for” … if you ran that auction today, I think the winning bid would probably be someone on the front lines in Ukraine who is actively being targeted by drones and needs to keep their electronic warfare jammer and counter-drone systems online. They would win that auction of the 8 billion people in the world — I think that person would find the most value in that kw hour.

This allows us to pay a little bit of a premium for a secure supply chain for high-performance components. And we actually see this as an exciting opportunity for us to help companies who are reshoring and doing domestic and allied production of some of these core battery and power technology components, to say, “We will actually help you get down your cost curve, because we have a customer who’s willing to pay for that performance, who’s willing to pay for that secure supply chain, so we can actually be a customer of you, because we have a customer that we can then sell that to.” We can help them get down their cost curve at the same time we’re getting down our cost curve, then they can actually start serving more industries at a commercially competitive price point.

One last thing: What’s your favorite fictional laser weapon and why?

I mean, the one that immediately comes to mind is definitely the Death Star from Star Wars, but you probably get that one a lot. I guess I’d have to say the flash memory-clearing thing from Men in Black. Think about it like a dazzler, right? It’s light that messes with your brain. That was my unconventional thing, but if you want the conventional answer, it’s the Death Star.

✉️ Are you a directed energy subject matter expert or enthusiast with a spicy take you’re desperate to share? Drop me a line:

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Editor’s note: There is officially more laser weapon news than I have time to devote individual newsletters to! To ensure Laser Wars readers remain up to date, I’m launching Pulse, a weekly digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem.

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