Welcome to Pulse, a regular digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem. In this week’s edition: an note on a recent New York Post article on US military laser weapons, NATO’s biggest directed energy challenge, a trio of new laser weapons break cover, and more.

No, American Laser Weapons Aren’t Downing Iranian Missiles in the Strait of Hormuz

I am quoted in a September 24 article in the New York Post discussing the development and deployment of US military laser weapons. In the course of my interview, I noted several facts:

• Several Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN) systems are present aboard warships deployed to the Middle East in support of the US military campaigns against Iran, although there is no confirmation that those systems have been fired in anger (the Navy declined to comment when reached by Laser Wars.)

• Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael had recently stated that US military laser weapons are “in the fight” in the Middle East, although he declined to provide details as to which systems he was referring to

• AV’s LOCUST Laser Weapon System, selected for the US Army’s historic $500 million Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) program and currently in action on the US southern border with Mexico as the service’s Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) system, can be operated with an Xbox controller

The resulting article, however, does not say this. Instead, it conflates these three facts, stating that the US military is currently using laser weapons to shoot down missiles in the Strait of Hormuz using Xbox controllers, which is nowhere near accurate.

The most egregious error stems from the assertion that the US Defense Department had confirmed lasers are taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles” in the Middle East. Not only has the Pentagon never explicitly confirmed this, but the supporting quote comes from an entirely unrelated Army release about AMP-HEL’s deployment to the southern border and laser weapons’ potential capabilities. (Spencer Ackerman has a great takedown of the entire article at Forever Wars.)

Unfortunately, as Jonathan Swift wrote, “falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” Given that so much of digital media is a game of aggregation telephone, where outlets rewrite and repackage original reporting into morsels of delicious content for their attention-addled audiences, it makes complete sense that the logical result of the New York Post’s slapdash reporting is headlines like these:

I have learned a lot in the last few years of writing Laser Wars, but my favorite bit of directed energy jargon is the term “laser liar” — a (usually) well-meaning journalist who, blinded by lasers’ enduring cultural status as symbol of our sci-fi future, does a terrible job articulating the real-world potential and challenges facing directed energy weapons. After watching my careful reporting get scrambled into hot garbage over the last week, I now have a visceral picture of what that means. (And after 15 years working in digital media, I should have expected as much.)

That said, the best antidote to a laser liar isn’t frustration or cynicism – it’s documentation. Every claim I made in that interview is backed up by real-world evidence: DVIDS photos of ODIN systems aboard Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, public comments from Emil Michael at a defense forum captured by a journalist, and open-source reporting on the US military’s long love affairs with video game controllers. Directed energy weapons are coming to the battlefield, and that story is remarkable enough without embellishment.

The reason Laser Wars exists is to tell it straight, one confirmed fact at a time. The truth may come limping, but it does arrive eventually — and when it does, you’ll read it here.

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On a modern battlefield defined by the ever-expanding “affordable mass” of cheap, disposable drones, Ben Levinson wants to build something that lasts.

Levinson is the founder and CEO of Heven AeroTech, the Virginia-based maker of hydrogen-powered drones for long-endurance operations. In a recent interview with Laser Wars, he described the company’s approach to drones as “a pickup truck mindset,” focused on reusable “mothership” platforms capable of stealthily hauling mission-specific payloads at extended ranges with minimal noise and thermal signature thanks to unique hydrogen fuel cells. And that, he claims, may prove an ideal platform for the airborne high-energy laser weapons that the US Defense Department has pursued for decades.

“We’re not in the laser space,” Levinson said. “But we actually are a platform for lasers.”

Levinson traces Heven’s roots to his service as an infantry combat commander in the Israel Defense Forces in 2018 during a period of airborne arson attacks involving hundreds of incendiary balloons and kites launched from Gaza into Israel. Levinson volunteered to build a drone outfitted with a thermal camera to track down nascent fires and alert Israeli firefighters with GPS coordinates; his second model was designed to extinguish blazes with a chemical solution. Recognizing that standard small camera drones offered limited utility, Levinson founded Heven in August 2019 to focus on heavy-lift capabilities.

“The skies are open,” Levinson said. “Compared to any ground, compared to our streets, our forests, our parks, and our battlefields, it’s just open. I had this deep conviction that drones would power the world. What I also realized is that as long as drones are small flying cameras, it would be very limiting — you can’t do much with that information. So drones have to be more like flying robots.”

While Heven initially pursued short-range heavy-lift drones, Levinson quickly discovered that long-endurance missions suffered from an “energy gap”: existing power solutions simply don’t offer the energy density for prolonged operations, Levinson says, and traditional solutions like noisy combustion or jet power systems are a non-starter for both defense and commercial applications. Levinson pointed to the depletion of the US military’s MQ-9 Reaper drone fleet in the war with Iran and regional proxies as a prime example of the need for low-signature capabilities.

The solution, Levinson found, lies in hydrogen fuel cells. “It’s basically an electric drone, but we’re creating electricity in the sky by having a small amount of hydrogen, less than one pound, in a highly pressurized tank that goes to a fuel cell,” he said. “There’s no combustion. There’s no noise. There’s no thermal signature. We’re getting 10, 13, 15 hours of flight time and 100, 300, 500 kilometers of distance.”

Heven’s flagship Z1 is the first (and currently only) Blue UAS Select-certified hydrogen-powered system of its kind in the Pentagon’s arsenal, and the company announced a $100 million Series B raise at a $1 billion valuation in December 2025 to invest in capabilities to meet “escalating demand from US Special Operations Command, combatant commands, and allied forces.”

“We want to make the best drones as platforms in the world in terms of capacity to fly stealth with significant payloads, net distance, etc.,” Levinson said.

Heven’s mothership approach may have arrived at the perfect time for the Pentagon’s next airborne last weapons push. As Laser Wars previously reported, the US Air Force plans on developing a new “laser system technology demonstrator” for airborne testing starting in fiscal year 2027 following the disappointing conclusion of the service’s Self-Protect High-Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) project, which sought to mount a laser weapon pod on a fighter jet to counter incoming missiles, and the Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL), which Air Force Special Operations Command sought to install aboard an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship. In April, US Missile Defense Agency director Air Force Lt. Gen. Heath Collins stated that the organization was “all in” on “bringing potentially game-changing directed energy capabilities to bear in an unmanned platform” for domestic air defense against hostile drones and missiles. And the most recent Pentagon directed energy roadmap shared by the department’s Scaled Directed Energy (SCADE) team during a Joint Directed Energy Consortium webinar in September envisions a major push for airborne laser platforms starting in 2030.

While most past airborne laser weapon efforts have focused on larger manned platforms, Pentagon has pursued drone-mounted systems in particular for more than two decades with minimal success. The High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) effort, initiated in 2003 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sought to develop a 150 kilowatt system to integrate into both manned and unmanned aircraft before grinding to a halt in 2015. The MDA pursued outfitting drones with laser weapons for ballistic missile defense for more than a decade through its Low Power Laser Demonstrator (LPLD) initiative before then-Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin threw cold water on the project in 2020, citing the unique technical and environmental challenges inherent to mounting lasers on aircraft.

“I think it can be done as an experiment, but as a weapon system to equip an airplane with the kinds of lasers we think necessary — in terms of their power level, and all their support requirements, getting the airplane to altitudes where atmospheric turbulence can be mitigated appropriately — that combination of things doesn’t go on one platform,” Griffin told reporters in May 2020, per Breaking Defense. “So, I’m just extremely skeptical of that.”

Levinson’s interest in laser weapons is, like many military planners and defense contractors, primarily focused on magazine depth. He described a scenario in which an adversary launches a mass drone attack (say, 10,000 drones against a US aircraft carrier) and argued that no existing kinetic air defense system can keep pace: shoot down 2,000 drones, and the remaining 8,000 “could be as stupid as possible, but they’ll just go through, because you have no more munitions.” A laser weapon, by contrast, only needs power to keep firing. “I think lasers are a big part of the solution,” he said.

When asked about the power requirements for airborne lasers weapons and associated challenges that Griffin described in 2020, Levinson responded that the company’s Z1’s 1.2 kw hydrogen fuel cell “provides for a lot of onboard power for payloads and devices not associated with simply keeping the aircraft flying.”

“That’s one of the other nice things about fuel cells: they can sustain higher power output for much longer than batteries,” he added. “For larger operational requirements, [Heven’s] Raider is expected to have 9 kw of onboard power output from its fuel cells. We’re continually developing fuel cell technologies to provide higher power output, more efficiency, and better power management across our platforms.”

But beyond power, weight is a major consideration: a 2016 Air Force Research Laboratory report on the service’s directed energy efforts stated that the target weight for a podded solution on a fighter jet was around 1,500 pounds, well below the 5,000 pounds the service considered “feasible” for a defensive airborne laser weapon at the time. The Air Force appears to be slowly addressing this challenge, issuing an Small Business Innovative Research solicitation in May 2025 for its Lightweight Optical Turret for Extended Capability HEL (LOTECH) effort to develop a “fully functional lightweight 10 centimeter class high energy laser beam director for tactical airborne applications.”

“Smaller. Lighter. More efficient. Size, weight, and power decide what flies,” as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies Michael Dodd put it in a series of social media posts on the Pentagon’s directed energy efforts in August. “We want tech on aircraft and high-altitude platforms for counter-drone, expeditionary and special operations missions, and disrupting adversary C2.”

Heven’s Atlas drone, currently the company’s most capable heavy-lift platform, maxes out at 70 pounds in payload capacity. According to Levinson, future developments will offer a heavy-lift capability in the 100-pound range.

“The problem with lasers is [that] they’re heavy,” he said. “But with our 50-to-100 pound payloads now in some of our systems, you can start taking some of these relatively lightweight portable lasers and actually do really cool stuff with it.”

Levinson was candid about how immature the laser technology remains for airborne applications, stating that Heven is in early discussions with “a couple” of laser manufacturers. (”Everyone has good presentations,” he said. “We’re waiting to see data.”) He also stated that Heven has not yet approached the end users most likely to buy an airborne laser platform, like the Air Force or MDA, because the company wants a validated system in hand first. “You want to have the solution first,” he said.

For now, Heven’s laser ambitions remain a notional future capability. But the case Levinson is making — long-endurance, stealthy, hydrogen-powered airframes designed as reusable motherships — is a bet that whoever solves lightweight directed energy first will need a power-rich platform to mount it on for airborne missions. Time will tell if any drone in Heven’s line will be able to actually clear the weight bar Griffin described five years ago, but with the Pentagon increasingly focused on airborne laser weapons, we may find out sooner rather than later.

Editor’s note: This post has been updated.

After decades of research and development, high-energy laser weapons have finally become an operational reality.

The US…

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Welcome to Pulse, a regular digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem. In this week’s edition: the Space Force eyes laser weapons to counter drone threats at launch sites, the Pentagon considers directed energy’s power bottleneck, the Netherlands and Australia’s EOS team up, and more.

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

US Navy Adm. Daryl Caudle is the 34th Chief of Naval Operations and a longtime student of directed energy who’s currently on something of a media blitz in support of the service’s vision of a “laser on every ship.”

Laser Wars originally submitted a list of 18 detailed questions, including many proposed by readers, to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations for Caudle to answer. Public affairs officials subsequently requested a pared-down list to ensure timely responses, which are printed in full below.1

LASER WARS: What does the US Navy’s five-year roadmap for the development and fielding of high-energy laser weapons look like?

NAVY ADM. DARYL CAUDLE: Our approach is to move on two tracks simultaneously. First, we need to get useful directed-energy capability into the hands of sailors now. Containerized systems give us a way to accelerate that effort on existing ships, shorten integration timelines, experiment operationally, and build the tactics, training, maintenance practices, and human expertise we will need as these weapons mature.

At the same time, we have to design future ships with directed energy in mind from the beginning — with the electrical generation, energy storage, cooling, combat-system integration, and optical architecture required to support much higher-power systems. I have been clear that the Navy needs to be moving from the hundreds-of-kilowatts range toward megawatt-class capability as the technology and engineering support it. The objective is not another demonstration. It is reliable, maintainable weapons in the fleet that sailors know how to fight.

Some of the defining Navy capabilities of the 20th century took big bets and long-term commitment from senior leaders (Rickover with nuclear propulsion, Meyer with Aegis and MK 41 VLS). How does the service think about making another bet on transformational capability like laser weapon systems for every combatant platform? How can today’s acquisition leaders own and lead that commitment like leaders of the past?

I don’t view directed energy as a replacement for kinetic weapons. I view it as an essential part of a layered defense that can fundamentally change our magazine-depth problem. Today, every VLS cell allocated to a defensive interceptor is a cell that cannot carry an offensive weapon. Directed energy gives us the opportunity to shift an increasing portion of the defensive fight from a finite magazine to the ship’s ability to generate and manage electrical power. That changes both the economics and endurance of naval combat and allows us to preserve our most capable kinetic weapons for the threats that demand them.

That’s why I continue to push this so hard. We need the Foundry solving the engineering and industrial challenges, the Fleet developing the operators, tactics and CONOPS, and ultimately a capability that gives our sailors greater endurance and lethality in the Fight.2

You’ve been advocating for megawatt-class laser weapons since your 1992 Naval Postgraduate School master’s thesis. Given the trajectory of current laser technology, what’s the best way to achieve the power levels necessary for shipboard missile defense: coherent beam combining or spectral beam combining?

I don’t want the Navy prematurely choosing an engineering architecture when industry and our technical community are still advancing multiple approaches. Both coherent and spectral beam combining offer potential pathways to higher power, and both present engineering challenges as we scale. What matters to me is the operational result: sufficient power on target, excellent beam quality, efficiency, reliability, maintainability, and the ability to operate in a demanding maritime environment. Encouraging industry to pursue diverse technological avenues fosters open and fair competition. Ultimately, this approach delivers superior operational performance to our sailors standing watch—ensuring they can focus entirely on fighting their ship rather than worrying about the underlying technology.

I want us setting demanding operational requirements and creating a strong business case for industry to solve those problems. I am much less interested in prescribing the technical solution than I am in getting a scalable, reliable weapon into the hands of sailors.

In 2019, then-surface warfare boss Rear Adm. Ron Boxall declared the Navy’s fleet “out of Schlitz with regard to power” because the new Flight III Arleigh Burke destroyers were strapped for juice powering the new AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar: “We used a lot of power for that and we don’t have as much extra for additional functions.” How do you plan to address the power issue with regards to proliferating laser weapons across the existing fleet?

We have to distinguish between the fleet we have and the fleet we are designing. For existing ships, containerization and modularity can allow us to introduce directed-energy capability without waiting for major ship alterations. Where practical, that can include modular power, energy storage, and thermal-management solutions that reduce demands on legacy ship systems.

For future combatants, we need to stop treating electrical power as simply a ship-service requirement. Power is increasingly a warfighting resource. Future ships need sufficient generation, distribution, storage, and cooling margins to dynamically support sensors, electronic warfare, directed energy, propulsion, and other high-demand mission systems. If we want megawatt-class weapons tomorrow, we have to design the electrical and thermal architecture for them today.

For laser weapons to effectively counter small drones, warships must be able to detect, classify, and track them with very high reliability – something that AN/SPY family of radars does exceptionally well with larger targets, but will likely struggle with against smaller and slower ones. How does the Navy plan to address this problem with the current Aegis sensor stack?

The laser is only one element of the kill chain. Detecting, classifying, tracking, assigning and maintaining a precise track on increasingly small and maneuverable targets is every bit as important as generating the beam.

Our objective is not to bolt a laser onto a ship as an independent weapon, but to fully integrate it into the ship’s combat system. Directed energy, integrated with Aegis and our broader sensor and fire-control architecture, gives the tactical watchstander another critical option.

That is particularly important against unmanned systems, where the economics favor the attacker if we are forced to use an expensive kinetic interceptor against every inexpensive threat. By shifting a portion of the defensive fight from a finite missile magazine to the ship’s electrical power, we break that unfavorable cost curve and preserve our most capable kinetic weapons for more demanding threats. A commanding officer should never be in a position where they are worried about choosing the most cost effective interceptor. Directed energy allows for future kinetic preservation at a fraction of the cost.

The Directed Energy Systems Integration Laboratory reportedly brought the Navy’s “one-of-a-kind” 150 kilowatt Solid State Laser Technology Maturation (SSL-TM) demonstrator back to life starting in early March 2025, with the system eventually shooting down four drone targets during the Crimson Dragon exercise in September. Can you share any details regarding the restoration of that system and its role in the service’s directed energy efforts?

The SSL-TM demonstrator has been an important part of the Navy’s directed-energy learning. As has been publicly reported, the Navy restored critical functions of the system to support additional experimentation and learning. What matters to me is that we capture everything these demonstrators can teach us — about the weapon itself, maritime propagation, power and thermal management, combat-system integration, maintenance, and ultimately how sailors employ directed energy operationally.

We aren’t trying to preserve a particular demonstrator indefinitely. We are using what we learn from systems like SSL-TM, HELIOS, and our other efforts to accelerate the next generation of operational capability.

In September 2025, the CEO of Lockheed Martin stated during an earnings call that the company was testing a previously undisclosed shipboard laser weapon capability in the Red Sea with the Navy. Can you provide any additional detail or context regarding that system or test?

I can’t provide additional details at this classification level. What I can say is that operationally relevant testing and experimentation are essential to moving directed energy from a promising technology to a dependable fleet weapon. We will continue to test these systems under realistic maritime conditions, learn rapidly from the results, and feed those lessons directly back into our engineering, training, and tactics to deliver real capability to our sailors in the fleet. Consequently, a top priority is to continue conducting rigorous afloat testing and operational demonstrations. This means moving beyond scripted, proof-of-concept events to deploy systems in realistic, real-world threat environments. Ultimately, we must prove that laser weapon systems are a viable, combat-ready option for our warships in harm’s way.

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

It’s a toss-up between the phaser on the Starship Enterprise and the Death Star’s superlaser. The phaser gets points for precision, versatility, and a little more restraint — but I have to give the nod to the Death Star. It’s completely over the top, wildly impractical, and about as subtle as a sledgehammer. But when you absolutely, positively need to make a statement to the entire galaxy, nothing else comes close.

Welcome to Pulse, a regular digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem. In this edition: the Army releases footage of laser weapons operating at the US-Mexico border, a video supercut of Trump praising laser weapons, a Pentagon fix for a looming laser weapon supply chain problem, and more.

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The US Navy has awarded a modest contract to America’s largest shipbuilder for a new high-energy laser weapon for maritime operations.

Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) and defense contractor EO Solutions — not to be confused with Australian laser weapon provider Electro Optic Systems — received a $3.8 million Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) for a ‘Counter-Group 3 Marinized MOSA Laser for Navy’ (Gr3MMLN) in June through the Naval Surface Technology & Innovation Consortium (NSTIC), a public-private partnership that develops advanced surface warfare capabilities in collaboration with academia and non-traditional defense contractors.

The Gr3MMLN OTA emerged from a 2024 Navy solicitation for a prototype counter-drone laser weapon dubbed the Adaptable Transportable Laser Weapon System (ATLAS), a US defense official familiar with the project told Laser Wars. The ATLAS solicitation called for a containerized laser weapon with a baseline output between 30 and 100 kilowatts that can operate from the flight deck of a surface combatant “in a stressing naval environment for an extended period without degradation or damage,” according to a statement of need obtained by Laser Wars.

While the statement of need detailed anticipated funding of $50 million for ATLAS, the defense official said that the $3.8 million Gr3MMLN OTA was likely just to support experimentation and testing with an existing system. Funding for that contract came from a $5 million congressional addition to the Navy’s fiscal year 2026 budget for an ‘enduring high energy laser,’ according to budget documents. (Not to be confused with the US Army program by the same name.)

Gr3MMLN is the newest laser weapon initiative to break cover as part of the Navy’s renewed pursuit of “a laser on every ship.” The fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that the House passed in late July contained $5 million in funding for a containerized version of the service’s 60 kw High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system, as well as an additional $2.5 million for a separate ‘Containerized Maritime High Energy Laser Weapon System.’ Meanwhile, the Office of Naval Research recently awarded defense contractor Attalon a $17.1 million contract modification to continue work on a 400 kw laser weapon under the SONGBOW program the service initiated in 2025. (The status of the unnamed laser system that Lockheed Martin’s CEO claimed the company was testing with the Navy in the Red Sea remains unclear.)

The Gr3MMLN OTA marks HII’s first known contract for a naval laser weapon. The company’s only previous publicly known laser work was with the Army under a $14.82 million contract awarded in February 2025 for design, development, integration, and systems engineering work on the service’s Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) effort. The following September, the company announced a significant capital investment in a new integration, production, and test facility to support E-HEL development. While E-HEL isn’t exclusively a land-based program — the Navy has experimented with palletized laser weapons on aircraft carriers and is eyeing a marinized version of the system for potential shipboard applications — a full focus on naval laser integration is arguably a more intuitive lane for a defense contractor like HII whose business is building warships.

HII’s Gr3MMLN calculus appears straightforward: with defense contractor AV’s operationally proven LOCUST Laser Weapon System having clinched the Army’s much-awaited E-HEL production contract, the company seems to be pursuing a separate naval laser effort as a more natural extension of its core shipbuilding business. With Gr3MMLN, HII appears focused on the marinization and integration of an existing EO Solutions-derived capability rather than a directed energy system built in-house for the E-HEL effort. Whether Gr3MMLN turns into something more than a technology experiment will depend on whether HII and EO Solutions can capitalize on previous marinization efforts enough to successfully slot a system onto the bow of a surface combatant.

At just a few million dollars, the Gr3MMLN OTA isn’t as big a deal as, say, the Navy’s original $150 million HELIOS contract, or even the initial $29.9 million SONGBOW award. But with the US Defense Department firmly committed to finally transitioning laser weapons out of the laboratory and into combat formations, the new initiative might yield insights into the marinization and containerization that could potentially lay the foundation for future shipboard directed energy capabilities. Just don’t let it get wet.

Welcome to Pulse, a regular digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem. In this edition: US military laser weapons are apparently watching over American troops in the Middle East, the Pentagon’s Joint Laser Weapon System gets a target fielding date, a mystery international customer for AV’s LOCUST, and more.

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Welcome to Pulse, a regular digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem. In this week’s edition: a peek at the Pentagon’s new directed energy roadmap, the coming season of Navy laser content, a new Russian laser weapon breaks cover, and more.

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The US Army has awarded defense contractor AV a $464.8 million contract for the production of high-energy laser weapons under the Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) program, the service announced — the US military’s first formal directed energy program of record and a major milestone for laser weapons after decade…

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On July 7, 1960, American physicist Theodore Maiman introduced the “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” or “laser,” to the American public for the first time at a press conference in New York …

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The soldier of the future doesn’t carry his weapon into battle — he simply wears it.

In Robert Heinlein’s beloved 1959 novel Starship Troopers, Johnny Rico’s powered battlesuit is a second skin of servos and armor that makes him faster, stronger, and more lethal than any warrior in the history of warfare.…

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Welcome to Pulse, a regular digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem. In this week’s edition: Australia and Japan form a laser alliance, the Pentagon lays out a fast lane for directed energy weapons, a peek at Germany’s ‘laserdome,’ and more.

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The US Navy has a unusual proposition for the US defense industry: take your high-energy laser weapons and break them into pieces.

In a draft request for solut…

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Welcome to Pulse, a regular digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem. In this week’s edition: the US military’s secretive laser weapon test, the remaining challenges to fielding directed energy weapon at scale, American space lasers, and more.

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Every science fiction hero gets the laser weapon they deserve.

In Star Wars, Han Solo’s blaster is as janky and well-worn as the Millennium Falcon. The phasers in Star Trek are sleek instruments of focused destruction — a perfect match for the …

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Welcome to Pulse, a regular digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem. In this week’s edition: Israel’s Iron Beam still isn’t operational, directed energy weapons will watch over US nuclear convoys, a laser weapon supply chain warning, and more.

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As of July 2026, 18 countries1 are publicly known to possess high-energy laser weapons.

The United States and China are currently the most advanced in terms of both the quality and quantity of systems under development and operationally deployed. Russia, Israel, and the United Kingdom are not far behind, with Israel in particular standing out as the first…

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Welcome to Pulse, a regular digest of updates from around the directed energy ecosystem. Apologies for the gap in editions — I have been traveling for the last few weeks. Feel free to send feedback using the button below:

In this week’s edition: the US Air Force sends laser weapons abroad to counter drone threats, Ukraine’s laser weapons inch toward combat, two small steps forward for the global laser weapon industrial base, and more.

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The most critical componant to actually fielding high-energy laser weapons at scale isn’t the diode pump, or the gain medium, or the beam director. It isn’t even the power source. In reality, it may actually be this tiny fiber optic converter.

On July 23, defense technology company Att…

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