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 solutions (RFS) published on August 12 through the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL), the Office of Naval Research (ONR) detailed plans to explore the development of “distributed” laser weapons, where a system’s laser source and the beam director that actually delivers effects on target are not bolted together in the same apparatus, but instead connected through a specialized optical fiber spooled across a ship, base, or battlefield. For this particular project, dubbed the ‘Universal Optical Transport for Distributed Laser Weapons’ and valued at $10.25 million, ONR is seeking prototype connectors and fiber capable of transmitting 10 kilowatts over 10 kilometers with minimal power loss and high beam quality.

“The shift to distributed laser weapons allows for significantly expanded geographic coverage and multi-sector force protection” in support of expeditionary airbase defense and counter-drone missions ashore, the draft document says, a departure from the service’s past focus on shipboard directed energy systems operating on the high seas.

Distributed laser weapons have obvious appeal. Such systems could allow US and allied forces to keep a power-hungry, heat-generating laser source in a fortified position while deploying a comparatively lightweight and agile beam director around the perimeter of a base or formation. With the right fiber connection, a single source could plausibly feed multiple directors that simultaneously engage incoming targets. Indeed, the ONR document describes US Marines exposed to drone attacks and rocket, artillery, and mortar fire while seizing forward airfields under the service’s Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) concept as a potential real-world application.

But ONR’s vision of chopping up laser weapons into distributed components also appears to stand in contrast with the Navy’s current approach to laser weapons, which essentially involves bundling critical laser components up into a single container that can be rolled on and off a warship with relative ease.

As Laser Wars previously reported, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle spent the better part of 2026 pushing the service toward what he calls the Containerized Capability Campaign (C³), a doctrine built around cramming novel capabilities into standardized containers that can be swapped across platforms and fielded “at the speed of relevance — not the speed of platform-centric acquisition.” It’s the same logic that led the Navy to conduct live-fire testing of the US Army’s Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) system off the flight deck of the USS George H.W. Bush in October 2025. Congress is now trying to extend that logic to the Navy’s lone 60 kilowatt High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) with a $5 million funding addition for a containerized version of the long-suffering shipboard laser system.

ONR’s distributed architecture and Caudle’s containerization campaign both appear to be responses to the same recurring problem: trying to bolt exquisite laser weapons onto platforms that were never designed to carry them in the first place, whether a Stryker infantry carrier vehicle or Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, has consistently yielded significant power, cooling, and integration challenges. Distribution is primarily a physics and technical standards challenge that, if solved, could allow the Navy to mix and match laser sources and beam directors from different vendors through an open photonic interface. By comparison, containerization is as much an acquisition strategy as an engineering one, enabling the service to circumvent bespoke integrations for every new capability it needs to rapidly field on a warship. And these two approaches are not mutually exclusive: a containerized laser source could potentially feed fiber out to multiple modular beam directors that are themselves swappable across various sites, ship or shore.

The two approaches are unlikely to converge anytime soon. ONR’s current performance targets for distributed laser prototypes (transmit 10 kw over 10 km) suggest the initiative is still an early-stage engineering bet on enabling technologies that are years away from producing anything a surface combatant or Marine detachment can actually deploy in the field. Besides, there isn’t an extraordinary amount of cash available for the effort at the moment: $10.25 million is a relatively meager amount of funding compared to the roughly $350 million the Navy has sunk into HELIOS since awarding Lockheed Martin a contract for the system in early 2018.

Whether the ONR’s experiment ends up validating the promise of distributed laser weapons or simply yielding the same integration headaches remains to be seen. But the fact that the Navy is pursuing the technology alongside containerization suggests the service is still unsure whether the best fix for its laser woes is a better box or no box at all.

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 franchise’s utopian vision of the future. Even the Peacekeeper pulse pistol carried by astronaut John Crichton in Farscape, one of my personal favorites, reflects the militaristic corner of the galaxy a wormhole dropped him into. Lasers weapons aren’t just science fiction’s sidearm of choice — they’re a Rorschach test for visions of the future.

I recently asked Laser Wars readers in an email survey to weigh in on their favorite fictional laser weapons. The initial results are in, and they’re just as interesting as I expected.

Below are the top picks. You can nominate your favorite by taking the survey here:

Start Survey

Sidearms and Personal Weapons

These are the directed energy weapons mercenaries and starship crews carry into battle. Somehow, nobody nominated Buck Rogers’ XZ-38 Disintegrator Pistol, the most iconic ray gun in history of science fiction

Blasters, Star Wars

The most iconic sidearm in a galaxy far, far away is a fixture of pop culture for a good reason: it looks like it was built for a fight. Part of this was a deliberate choice: Han Solo's iconic DL-44 blaster, for example, was built on the real-world Mauser C96 "Broomhandle" pistol, while the standard issue Imperial E-11 blaster rifle carried by Imperial Stormtroopers is based on the British Sterling Mk 4 submachine gun. In a universe where laser weapons are as common as swords once were, the blaster remains the working man's weapon of choice — more reliable than “hokey religions and ancient weapons,” as Solo tells Luke Skywalker.

Starfleet Phasers, Star Trek

Where Star Wars blasters are crude and kinetic, Starfleet phasers are sleek and precise instruments of a civilization that has moved beyond war as a default. Gene Roddenberry clearly understood that even post-scarcity utopias need a trigger to pull. The only cooler man-portable directed energy weapon in the United Federation of Planets’ arsenal is the isomagnetic disintegrator that Worf trots out during Star Trek: Insurrection, which is best characterized as a “space bazooka.”

Ma'Tok Staff Weapon, Stargate

The Goa'uld staff weapon is the AK-47 of fictional laser weapons: ungainly, overpowered, and everywhere. It was designed less for precision than for intimidation — which, according to the show's own characters, actually makes it lousy compared to Stargate Command’s standard-issue FN P90 personal defense weapon. Still, it’s an excellent tool for maintaining a fear and superstition-based galactic empire.

Repulsors, Iron Man

Originally designed as a flight stabilizer, billionaire genius playboy philanthropist Tony Stark's palm-mounted repulsor beams occupy an interesting middle ground between directed energy weapon and propulsion system. It’s worth noting that repulsor rays aren’t really lasers in the sense of generating thermal effects, but are instead portrayed as beams of concussive force.

Laser Wristwatch, GoldenEye

Q Branch's laser wristwatch represents the logical endpoint of miniaturized directed energy: a weapon capable of cutting through steel so that’s compact it fits on your wrist. It is also proof that the real bottleneck for laser weapons has always been the power source. And while the laser wristwatch isn’t portrayed as an offensive capability in the GoldenEye movie, it is hilariously effective in close-quarters in the iconic GoldenEye video game for Nintendo 64.

Qualta Blade, Farscape

My personal pick. Luxan warrior Ka D'Argo's combination broadsword-pulse rifle is the rare fictional laser weapon with genuine personality, a hand-me-down melee weapon from an alien warrior culture that doubles as a ranged weapon for stand-off engagement. Like most fictional directed energy weapons, the Qualta blade makes no sense — and that’s what makes it awesome.

Infinity Ray, Invincible

Space Racer’s Infinity Ray is the kind of weapon that shows up when a story needs something more final than a gun but less on-the-nose than, say, a nuclear bomb. An unstoppable beam of pure destructive energy, the Amazon series earns credit for treating the weapon’s fictional physics with more seriousness than most superhero properties bother to.

Strategic Systems and Superweapons

Not every fictional laser weapon fits in a holster. These are the planet-killers and orbital platforms that make the beloved laser pistol look quaint.

The Death Star, Star Wars

The Death Star is the fictional directed energy weapon against which all others are measured: a moon-sized battle station capable of destroying an entire planet with a single focused superlaser shot.1 It is also the favorite choice of Laser Wars survey respondents, which probably says something about the ambitions of the directed energy industry.

Diamond Satellite, Diamonds Are Forever

Ernst Stavro Blofeld's orbital laser in the 1971 James Bond film predated Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative by more than a decade, which either makes it prescient science fiction or evidence that the villain community had better intelligence than the Pentagon. The concept of a space-based laser weapon remains very much alive today, if somewhat less glamorous in practice.

Death Blossom, The Last Starfighter

The Death Blossom is the fictional equivalent of a 360-degree area suppression weapon: a last-resort omnidirectional energy burst capable of wiping out an entire enemy fleet in one shot. It also has the best name of any fictional laser weapon ever conceived, and I will not be taking questions.

Meteor Defense System, Ringworld

Larry Niven’s Ringworld is beloved by hard sci-fi readers for its technical rigor, and the Meteor Defense System is a prime example: a planetary-scale laser array designed to vaporize incoming debris. Only a Laser Wars reader would nominate a weapon whose primary target is asteroids.

Molecular Slicer Beam, Babylon 5

Babylon 5 takes its fictional technology seriously, and the Shadow vessels’ molecular slicer beam is no exception. The weapon that doesn’t just destroy targets but cuts through them at the molecular level, a rare fictional directed energy weapon that gestures at something physically plausible even if the execution remains firmly in the realm of science fiction.

Graser, Honorverse

David Weber’s Honor Harrington series is a military sci-fi mainstay, and the graser (short for gamma-ray laser) is its signature weapon. Weber postulates a physically plausible mechanism for focusing gamma radiation into a coherent beam, which is exactly the kind of technically grounded speculation that makes Honorverse required reading for a certain type of defense professional.

Absurdist Picks

Some laser weapons earn their place in the cultural imagination through pure farce. These picks exist at the intersection of directed energy and the absurd — which, depending on your view of the Pentagon's acquisition process, may not be so different from the real thing.

Sharks With Frickin’ Laser Beams Attached to Their Heads, Austin Powers: Goldmember

Dr. Evil’s preferred weapons platform is a masterclass in military acquisition gone wrong: biologically unstable, impossible to aim, and dependent on a delivery vehicle with a notoriously poor command-and-control architecture. The Pentagon has wasted money on worse.

Marvin the Martian’s Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, Looney Tunes

The Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator deserves a place in the directed energy hall of fame for one reason: it remains the only fictional laser weapon whose primary mission objective was to improve the view. Marvin the Martian wanted to destroy Earth because it was obstructing his sight line to Venus, which may be the most relatable motivation in the history of WMDs.

Disintegrator Ray, The Pink Panther Strikes Again

In the 1976 film, the deranged Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus constructs a doomsday device capable of completely disintegrating matter and demonstrates it on United Nations headquarters in New York City. That threat of a global holocaust is deployed in service of assassinating the bumbling Inspector Clouseau makes it the most disproportionate use of directed energy in cinematic history.

Airborne Laser Weapons

Several readers, with what I can only describe as hard-earned earned cynicism, nominated the US military’s airborne laser weapons program as their favorite fictional laser weapon. The US has been attempting to mount functional (and operationally suitable) laser weapons on aircraft since the early 1970s — the Airborne Laser Laboratory, the Boeing 747-based YAL-1, the Advanced Tactical Laser, the HELLADS, the AHEL, the SHiELD program — and the history is a nearly unbroken chronicle of ambition followed by cancellation.

The Air Force appears to be gearing up to try again — I’ll keep you posted if this effort finally takes off.

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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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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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 weekly 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 Attalon — formed earlier this year from the spin-off of American laser company Coherent’s defense business — announced the first shipment of its Kilowatt Interconnect (kWIC) Disconnect subsystem, which it claims will allow operators to rapidly replace faulty or damaged laser amplifiers in order to reduce system downtime and maximize operational readiness

Previously, fixing a laser amplifier required splicing fiber optic cable, which is a delicate and tedious job requiring specialized training and equipment – and, in turn, a slow and impractical process for the average US service member on the battlefield looking over their shoulder for hostile drones. kWIC Disconnect is ostensibly a plug that replaces that splice: instead of fusing fiber back together, an operator can simply unplug the broken amplifier and swap in a new one.

The clearest potential impact of this system is a significant reduction in repair time from potentially days down to just a few minutes so laser weapons can get back in action faster. But the other implication is that it effectively converts an exquisite and highly sophisticated laser amplifier into a line-replaceable unit (LRU), a major step towards building laser systems that the US military can actually field at scale.

The LRU has been a fixture of the American defense industrial base since the 1950s, when the US Air Force adopted modular, self-contained electronics components on the flight line to minimize downtime and enable ground crews to maintain high operational tempos despite the increasing complexity of fighter aircraft. The US Army’s M1 Abrams main battle tank was expressly designed for easy repairs, with only four major maintenance actions requiring more than a day to complete, while the US Navy’s AN/SPY-6 radar system, for example, are built on self-contained Radar Modular Assemblies that can purportedly be repaired with just two tools.

Defense contractors have been chasing the idea of a truly field-serviceable laser weapon for nearly two decades. Northrop Grumman’s “Firestrike” system, developed under the Pentagon’s Joint High Power Solid State Laser and presented as the world’s first weaponized solid-state laser, was marketed as a LRU upon its debut in 2008, and the 60 kilowatt fiber laser Lockheed Martin built for the US Army’s High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL-MD) in was designed to scale power through replaceable modules. As early as 2014, defense officials were explicitly looking for “components necessary for field-swappable fiber connections and disconnections, so you don’t need a clean room to join two fibers together,” as one Air Force Research Laboratory official told Laser Focus World at the time.

But due to their technical and engineering complexity, laser weapons have proven a stubborn exception to the US military’s embrace of LRUs. “The internal mechanisms for DE weapons are sensitive, and typically require a specialized clean room for repairs,” according to a 2023 Government Accountability Office report on US Defense Department directed energy weapon programs.. “For example, DOD officials said that one DE weapon fielded to an operational environment encountered challenges with battery charge and cooling, and had to be returned to the manufacturer in the United States for repairs. Ultimately, this challenge reduced system availability, which is key to a successful weapon.”

Indeed, the GAO report indicates that those challenges could doom even the most technologically mature laser weapons to the dreaded valley of death. “Developing maintenance and sustainment processes for weapon systems is a key role for an acquisition program office,” the report says. “The ease of maintaining a weapon may factor into an acquisition program office’s decision to pursue that technology compared with another.”

The Pentagon is clearly hoping that LRUs may help laser weapons finally transition from the lab to the battlefield. The US Army’s Enduring High Energy Laser effort, expected to become the US military’s first official program of record, expressly requires LRUs that can be quickly replaced through soldier-performable sustainment in the field without requiring depot-level maintenance.

“We are stressing in this effort to industry the need for reliability and sustainability, going with a modular approach for components so that we can allow the soldiers to do line replaceable units for certain aspects of these very, very complex technical systems without the need for the clean rooms,” as then-Army Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch said at the 2025 Space and Missile Defense Symposium, in Huntsville, Alabama in August 2025. “We’ve asked industry to help them where we can help improve the manufacturability of critical components for [directed energy], which will, as we continue to press on this technology, allow us to scale quickly and allow us to continue to reduce costs.”

kWIC Disconnect offers a promising answer to this call. If a fiber laser amplifiers can really be swapped on the battlefield the way a radio card or a radar module can, then the system (and others like it) could prove essential to tipping laser weapons from exquisite prototypes to field-ready capabilities ready for productions and deployment at scale in the way that the Pentagon envisions. In the end, the fight over the future of laser weapons may end up decided less by who has the most kilowatts and more by who solves the boring problem of keeping a system in the fight without a fusion splicer, a clean room, and a PhD.

The threat of low-cost weaponized drones may grow more urgent by the day, but the United States’ nascent laser dome is slowly but surely expanding to meet it.

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The US Defense Department has awarded a combined $86 million to Lockheed Martin and nLight under the Joint Laser Weapons System (JLWS) program to develop high-energy laser weapons capable of defeating cruise m…

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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 focu…

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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 dem…

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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,…

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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…

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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: The US Defense Department’s dream of ‘Star Wars’-style space lasers lives on, South Korea announces a major laser weapon breakthrough, the Pentagon assesses a 'laser shield,’ and more.

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The footage is 40 seconds long and, depending on your expectations, either mundane or extraordinary.

Shot from the deck of a vessel in the harbor of the Russian port city of Novorossiysk on the night of M…

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