Operation Epic Fury may have strengthened the case for directed energy weapons, but the US Navy’s dream of putting “a laser on every ship” may take significantly longer than expected to realize.

In a posture statement delivered to the House Armed Services Committee on May 14, Chief of Naval Operations (and noted directed energy champion) Adm. Daryl Caudle delivered a forceful argument for why high-energy laser weapons are a necessity for the sea service — namely, to take over missile defense from kinetic interceptors and free up space for offensive weapons across the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, which he proclaimed “the workhorse of the surface Fleet, as illustrated clearly by Operation Epic Fury.”

“Directed energy is a critical component of future naval warfare, particularly for ballistic missile and terminal defense,” Caudle stated. “The current paradigm, which forces a trade-off between defensive interceptors and offensive strike weapons within the limited space of the Vertical Launching System (VLS), is unsustainable. Every VLS cell used for a defensive missile is a lost opportunity for a long-range offensive strike.”

But Caudle’s testimony also contained an admission that the dream of a laser fleet remains a dream deferred — at least, until the Navy can actually build it.

The vision of a laser fleet Caudle laid out in his posture statement is anchored in the Navy’s proposed nuclear-powered battleship and future surface combatants, platforms that must be “designed with the power and cooling capacity necessary to scale these systems to very high energy levels, thereby providing lethality against exquisite threats.” To translate those designs into real-world capabilities, the service “must prioritize and fund R&D for compact, high-density energy storage and thermal management systems capable of handling the demands of [directed energy weapons],” he said, as well invest in “digital engineering and land-based test facilities to de-risk the complex integration of DEW systems with legacy combat and ship control systems.”

The structural reason for Caudle’s emphasis on future warships is one Laser Wars readers will recognize immediately: the Navy’s current surface fleet — including its most modern warships, the Flight III Burke-class destroyers — simply cannot support the power demands of laser weapons at scale. As the service’s then-surface warfare boss Rear Adm. Ron Boxall bluntly put it back in 2019, the Flight III Burkes are already “out of Schlitz with regard to power,” their generators fully committed to feeding the new AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar system. Caudle isn’t pretending a viable laser weapon for missile defense can be engineered around existing hulls; they must be built into the next generation of warships from the keel up.

The implication is stark: the first vessel in America’s true laser fleet won’t set sail until the first battleship or next-generation frigate steams out of a shipyard. Battleship procurement isn’t planned until 2028, with delivery to the fleet projected for the 2030s, if at all. The Navy may see directed energy as a critical capability, but don’t expect it to show up on any active warships outside of its existing Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN)-equipped fleet anytime soon.

None of this makes Caudle’s urgency any less real. Indeed, Epic Fury offers the most vivid illustration yet of exactly why he feels it so acutely.

Consider the Presidential Unit Citation recently awarded to the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group. According to the citation, nine surface combatants – eight as part of Destroyer Squadron 2, plus the USS Winston S. Churchill – fired 207 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles at Iranian targets between February 28 and May 1. Assuming all of these combatants were Arleigh Burke destroyers with 96 VLS cells apiece, that’s a potential combined ceiling of roughly 864 cells, with those 207 Tomahawks representing roughly one offensive strike weapon for every four cells. The citation makes clear where the rest of the magazine went: the strike group “protected vital sea lines of communication while under persistent threat from enemy missiles and one-way attack drones,” meaning the remaining cells were loaded with (and presumably expending) the defensive interceptors required to keep the formation in the fight.

This is Caudle’s unsustainable paradigm in action: the destroyers that prosecuted one of the most significant US naval combat operations since World War II potentially went into the fight with roughly three-quarters of their magazine committed to self-defense. And once those interceptors are spent, they are not easily replaced. Unlike fuel or food, vertical launch weapons cannot be reliably transferred at sea under operational conditions (the Navy has been pursuing an underway VLS reloading capability through its Transferrable Reload At-Sea Method (TRAM) program, but the system is not yet operationally fielded).

The directed energy solution to this problem is, in theory, elegant: a laser weapon defending a warship at $10 per shot leaves every VLS cell free for Tomahawks for offensive strikes and SM-6s for remaining high-end threats, converting the destroyer from a platform split between offense and defense into one optimized for offensive power projection. “Every VLS cell used for a defensive missile is a lost opportunity,” as Caudle told lawmakers — and directed energy, as he envisions, eliminates the choice. The problem is that the ships capable of hosting those laser weapons at the power levels required haven’t been built yet.

Caudle’s posture statement does offer something of a bridge between the Navy’s current surface combatants and the laser fleet of the future: the Containerized Capability Campaign (C³), an initiative he describes as enabling “missiles, unmanned systems, sensors, electronic warfare packages, and directed energy” to be deployed across “a wide range of platforms and shore sites” without major structural redesigns.

Caudle explicitly frames containerization as a workaround for the power and integration constraints that make bolting high-energy laser weapons onto existing warships so difficult. It “decouples payloads from platforms,” as he puts it, allowing the Navy to “adapt capability faster than traditional acquisition timelines” and deliver combat power “at the speed of relevance — not the speed of platform-centric acquisition.” (Caudle had previously made the vision concrete at the McAleese Defense Programs conference in Arlington, Virginia in March: “From towed array sensors to drone swarms to electronic attack systems to high-powered lasers, I want to containerize everything.”)

There is evidence to support this approach. In October 2025, the Navy conducted a successful live-fire test of the palletized 30 kilowatt LOCUST Laser Weapon System from the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, demonstrating that a containerized laser could draw cleanly from a carrier’s nuclear reactors without the issue that plagues the Burke fleet. Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, is developing a containerized version of the service’s lone 60 kw High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system currently installed aboard the destroyer USS Preble specifically so the system can be seamlessly transferred across vessels in maintenance rather than sitting idle pierside. The Navy’s fiscal year 2027 budget request also supports the “development, integration and marinization” of the US Army’s Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) systems for potential shipboard applications.

The most significant containerized effort reaches considerably higher up the power curve. The Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS) — the collaboration between the Army and Navy whose existence Laser Wars first reported in June 2025 — is designed from the outset as a containerized system, initially aiming for 150 kw with potential to scale to at least 300 kws specifically for cruise missile defense, according to the Navy’s fiscal year 2027 budget request. The system will also include a Joint Beam Control System capable of supporting a 300-500 kw weapon. Together, the Army and Navy have outlined a vision of $675.93 million in combined R&D spending through fiscal year 2031, with the Navy planning to award the first JBCS development contracts as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026. If JLWS delivers on its promise, it would represent a containerized laser weapon powerful enough to engage the missile threats that sit at the heart of Caudle’s VLS argument without requiring a keel-up redesign,

What Caudle’s testimony describes, then, are two directed energy tracks running in parallel — with a third, more tentative one emerging between them. One narrative is near-term and modest: containerized, lower-power systems like LOCUST and even HELIOS, deployable across the surface fleet now and effective against the ever-expanding drone threat. The second is transformational and distant: megawatt-class systems embedded in the hull of a battleship that won’t reach the fleet for close to a decade. JLWS represents an attempt to thread the needle between them with a containerized missile defense capability that could arrive before the battleship does.

For Caudle and his fellow Navy leaders, Epic Fury may have crystallized a need for a laser fleet that matches their ambition for one. Time will tell if they can actually build it.

On April 30, the Financial Times reported Israel had sent a version of its 100 kilowatt Iron Beam high-energy laser weapon to the United Arab Emirates to help Abu Dhabi fend off hundreds of missiles and drones fired by Iran since the beginning of the US military’s Operation Epic Fury. The FT notes the deployment is one of the first examples of major defense cooperation between the two countries since the 2020 Abraham Accords — a display of “the value of being Israel’s friend,” according to a regional official.

There is little information publicly available on Iron Beam’s performance in the UAE. But on May 7, Defence Blog reported a Chinese-made vehicle-mounted laser weapon had been spotted at Dubai International Airport. Tentatively identified as consistent with the Guangjian-21A system first displayed at the Zhuhai Airshow in 2022, there was no announcement of the systems’ export from Beijing or an acknowledgement of its arrival in the country from Abu Dhabi.1

The sudden appearance of laser weapons in the UAE isn’t a total surprise: the government has previously expressed interest in procuring foreign directed energy systems through both direct sales and strategic partnerships and even pushed to develop its own indigenous research and development ecosystem. But neither story mentioned that the Abu Dhabi was already in the process of acquiring an American laser weapon system as well. A notification to Congress published on April 15 revealed that the UAE had asked to buy 10 counter-drone Fixed Site-Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat Systems (FS-LIDS) from the US Defense Department for $2.1 billion — and, notably, the system’s command and control (C2) architecture was being specifically scoped to integrate an unnamed laser weapon “being purchased” by Abu Dhabi through direct commercial sales.2

Three laser weapons. Two geopolitical blocs. One customer. This is the state of the global laser weapons race: a competitive, proliferating market where systems from rival powers increasingly coexist in the same inventory and even the same operational theaters.

In September 2025, Laser Wars wrote that the world was approaching a laser weapon inflection point. This analysis followed a week in which China unveiled its LY-1 shipborne laser weapon at a Beijing military parade, the United States delivered its first laser-armed Infantry Squad Vehicles to the US Army, France ordered a new counter-drone laser demonstrator, and India tested its Integrated Air Defence Weapon System with a directed energy component. I concluded with a hedge: the winner of the global laser weapon arms race “won’t be a question of technological superiority, but who has the political will to make their directed energy dreams a reality.”

If that week in September marked an inflection point, then the UAE’s expanding laser weapon arsenal is part of a larger global wave — one that doesn’t just answer the political will question, but raises another one that will define how directed energy weapons reshape the battlefield for years to come.

In roughly four weeks across April and May, the pace of global laser weapon development reached a tempo that I haven’t seen since (and has arguably exceeded) since that inflection point analysis.

• On April 10, Germany’s Bundeswehr published a account of laser weapon testing at its WTD 91 range in Meppen detailung four distinct systems at staggered readiness levels, including a JUPITER German-Dutch joint system integrated into a Boxer fighting vehicle and the naval demonstrator tested aboard the frigate Sachsen that’s headed for an operational deployment by 2029.

• On April 21, the Australian government announced plans to double its investment in counter-drone capabilities to $7 billion over the next decade, with an initial $21.3 million contract to AIM Defence to further develop its Fractl portable high-energy laser system. A week later, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy stated that Australian Army plans on mounting laser weapons on its next tranche of 300 Bushmaster vehicles.

• On April 22, Army Recognition reported that China’s Novasky Technology was pitching its 3 kw truck-mounted NI-L3K laser weapon at the Defence Services Asia 2026 weapons expo in Malaysia. Designed as a last line of defense against drones, the company stated that the weapon was explicitly designed for export, the second such systems to surface in as many weeks amid Beijing’s increasing involvement in the global directed energy arms trade.

• On April 24, the Seoul Economic Daily reported, citing sources, that South Korea planned on deploying a second 20 kilowatt Cheongwang laser weapon near Seoul to shoot down North Korea drones, with an accelerating timeline toward broader coverage of critical infrastructure like nuclear power plants, airports, and seaports by 2027.

• On May 1, state-run TASS reported that Russia’s government had issued a formal decree listing counterdrone laser weapons among the systems on active duty protecting the country’s airspace borders. While Russia’s laser weapons have long existed in the murky overlap between confirmed capability and propaganda, the decree is a solid indication that Moscow’s systems may have tipped into the former category.

• On May 5, Turkey showed off multiple new laser weapons — namely ASELSAN’s 10 kw Gokberk 10 and TÜBİTAK’s 20 kw YGLS (purportedly scalable to 80 kilowatts) — at the SAHA 2026 in Istanbul. Both systems feed into the country’s “Steel Dome” concept, which envisions a unified command-and-control architecture integrating missiles, radar, electronic warfare, and directed energy into a single national air defense network.

• On May 6, the United States announced that the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 had selected five military installations to participate in a directed-energy counter-drone pilot program, a major step towards the formulation of a domestic ‘laser dome’ to defend strategic assets and critical infrastructure. Operations are expected to begin later this year, following a 180-day period to finalize deployment plans with installation commanders.

• On May 7, Ukraine’s Celebra Tech announced that its Tryzub laser complex — first mentioned publicly by the head of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces in December 2024 and demonstrated in April 2025 — had been integrated into a trailer-mounted mobile platform and was preparing for a public presentation following final tests. The system now claims an effective range of 1,500 meters against reconnaissance drones, 800 to 900 meters against FPV drones, and, according to the company, practical capability against Shahed-type UAVs at distances up to 5 kilometers, with AI-assisted targeting and radar integration added during the most recent development sprint.

The question September’s analysis left open has been answered: multiple militaries, in different ways and at different speeds, have demonstrated that the political and institutional will exists to translate laser weapon technology into operational reality. The UAE is slowly becoming the world’s busiest laser weapon market. Germany is testing parallel programs toward market readiness. Australia is rewriting its defense budget. China is showcasing more and more export-ready systems at defense expos. South Korea is expanding deployments. Russia is enshrining lasers in national air defense doctrine. Turkey is building an indigenous industrial ecosystem. Ukraine is compressing a decade of development into 16 months of wartime necessity. Even the US, characteristically deliberate in its development and deployment of next-generation defense technologies, appears to be playing for keeps when it comes to directed energy.

Political will, it turns out, is the easy part — and the Iran war revealed the harder problem hiding inside the very deployment that seemed to prove laser weapons had finally arrived.

In March, the IDF acknowledged it was not using Iron Beam regularly during the US-led war with Iran despite the Israel Defense Ministry’s December 2025 disclosure that the system had been formally rolled out in the field. The gap between that announcement and that admission was three months, during which Iron Beam was simultaneously celebrated as a historic milestone and quietly sidelined from the conflict it was built to fight.

In May, the Israel Air Force explained why: Iron Beam requires 14 batteries to have significant enough impact — batteries Israel simply didn’t have.

This doesn’t just complicate the subsequent UAE deployment, but Israel’s ostensible laser supremacy as well. Israel developed the Iron Beam, funded it for a decade, used it in active combat operations, formally declared it operational, and deployed it to a foreign ally’s soil, but 14 batteries were still more than it had when it needed them most. Effective ranges, kilowatt counts, engagement times — none of it matters if you don’t have enough critical systems in the field.

Those 14 batteries are the most important data point in the laser weapon story of 2026, underscoring the core challenge looming over the extraordinary global wave of laser weapon activity that has unfolded over the last month: laser weapon technology appears proven, combat-tested, operationally deployed, but its critical components are not yet produced at the scale that modern drone warfare demands.

As a result, the next phase of the global laser weapon arms race will be purely industrial. Who has the supply chain depth, production capacity, and procurement urgency to field not one laser weapon or four or ten, but enough of them to matter against the coordinated, multi-vector saturation attacks that the Iran war proved are now the baseline threat environment?

The solution to the scale problem is far from evenly distributed:

• China appears to be in the strongest industrial position. With a defense industrial base that has demonstrated the ability to scale hardware from concept to export catalog at speeds Western procurement systems cannot match, Beijing’s two-track export strategy — budget systems like the NI-L3K for price-sensitive customers, higher-capability systems like the Guangjian-21A for more sophisticated ones — appears designed to dominate the global laser weapon market the same way Chinese drones dominate the commercial market: by being cheaper, faster to market, and available to customers that Western export controls exclude.

• So far, Israel has the deepest operational knowledge, with dozens of Hezbollah drone kills beginning in 2024. Part of this is a product of the country’s unique organizational culture of defense tech innovation, where the IDF deploys systems that are “good enough,” learns in combat, and iterates. Still, 14 batteries is a supply chain problem, not a culture problem, and solving it requires industrial capacity that Israel does not have in unlimited supply even when operating at wartime levels.

• Turkey is building the most integrated indigenous approach among mid-tier military powers with the Steel Dome architecture that combines laser weapons like the Gokberk, YGLS, and ALKA-Kaplan “laser tank” into a unified national system designed for both strategic autonomy and export competitiveness. If this architecture succeeds, Turkey becomes the template for a dozen other countries looking to build sovereign laser weapon capability without dependence on US or Israeli suppliers or exposure to Chinese technology concerns.

• Ukraine is running the world’s most compressed and most instructive directed energy development program, driven by the most unforgiving possible testing environment. What Celebra Tech has learned about real-world laser weapon performance against real Russian drones is operational data that no test range can replicate, and Tryzub’s development sprint from December 2024 to approved combat sample by May 2026 is a preview of how laser weapon development works when the consequences of failure are immediate and concrete.

• The US, meanwhile, occupies a paradoxical position in the global laser weapon race. It remains the world’s most significant investor in directed energy R&D and its alliance relationships and export controls continue to shape who gets access to what defense technology and when, but the “valley of death” between American laser weapon R&D and deployments remains persistent and costly compared to, say, Israel and Ukraine’s accelerated efforts. That said, the most consequential role in the global laser weapon market may not be the systems it builds but the architecture it sells: the FS-LIDS counter-drone package the UAE requested is defined by backbone C2 infrastructure that will determine what UAE acquires plug into a coherent network. Washington’s ability to set the integration standards for allied capabilities is a different and underappreciated kind of directed energy power.

The laser weapon inflection point has passed. The Iran war has revealed that political will may be necessary to transform laser weapons into real-world military capabilities, but it is far from sufficient; indeed, 14 batteries is a political will problem only in the sense that manufacturing more Iron Beam systems requires budget decisions and industrial investment. Every government incorporating laser weapons into their national security strategy, every defense company pitching laser systems at export shows, every military planner now integrating directed energy into layered air defense architecture — all are signing up to face this challenge sooner rather than later.

Amid this new global laser weapon wave, the UAE’s expanding laser weapon arsenal offers a clear picture of where the directed energy arms race actually stands. The world has accepted that laser weapons work. The question that defines what comes next is purely industrial — who can build enough of them, fast, to matter when the next barrage begins. And right now, even the country with the best laser weapon in the world doesn’t have the batteries to answer it.

The US Air Force is assessing a high-energy laser weapon originally intended to blow up bombs as a potential countermeasure against a new kind of explosive hazard on the battlefield: downed drones.

US Defense Department photos published to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) in March show airmen assigned to the 8th Civil Engineer Squadron at Kunsan Air Base in South Korea engaging a drone target with the 3 kilowatt Zeus III laser weapon of a Recovery of Airbase Denied by Ordnance (RADBO) system “to determine its ability to destroy downed small unmanned aerial systems,” according to the photo captions.

Developed by defense contractor Parsons and mounted on an Cougar 4x4 Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle, the RADBO system was designed to clear unexploded bombs, mines, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) from far-flung airfields, primarily in the US Central Command area of operations. By engaging munitions with precision from up to 300 meters away, operators can neutralize threats faster and safer than traditional explosive ordnance disposal methods1 — threats that increasingly include low-cost weaponized drones grounded by guns, electronic warfare, and other countermeasures.

“We have an air superiority mission. If we are in a high threat environment, and there are unexploded ordnance on the airfield, maintainers can’t take care of the aircraft and the aircraft can’t get off of the runway,” Tony Miranda, the Air Force’s RADBO program manager, said of the system in 2022. “These RADBO vehicles will be utilized by Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technicians to detonate the unexploded ordnance from a standoff range, so we can get back to the business of flying planes.”

Initiated in 2012 and first delivered to the Air Force in 2023, the RADBO system is described by both the Air Force and Parsons as the first US military directed energy system to move beyond research and development and into sustained production. The service had been experimenting with a range of other ground-based laser weapons for airbase defense since at least 2019, including Raytheon’s High-Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS), but none have advanced further than operational testing.

Parsons was awarded a $50.6 million contract to produce 13 RADBO systems in October 2020 and received a $62.9 million contract modification in April 2024 to bring that total number to 29. The Air Force’s fiscal year 2027 budget request does not include funding for any additional units beyond $6 million for ongoing maintenance and sustainment.

The Zeus III at the heart of the RADBO system isn’t totally new. The fiber laser weapon is the successor2 to the 0.5 kw Zeus-High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle (Zeus-HLONS) system the US Army sent to Afghanistan and Iraq during the early years of the Global War on Terrorism to counter the unexpected (and defining) threat of IEDs — the cause of more than half of American combat casualties at the time. It was the first known deployment of a US military laser weapon to a combat zone in history.

Zeus-HLONS apparently proved highly effective in Afghanistan, neutralizing more than 200 munitions during a six-month period in 2003 and an additional 1,400 during a second deployment in 2025, with an overall success rate of 98 percent. Between deployments, the system underwent significant upgrades, with the laser power quadrupling from to 2 kw and the platform shedding thousands of pounds in a transition to a lighter fiber. Despite this, development stalled after a subsequent deployment to Iraq in 2006 revealed that the system “often could not burn through materials hiding” IEDs, according to the Army.

The Army would continue to pursue directed energy weapons for ordnance disposal in the intervening years, most notably through a Boeing-funded demonstrator consisting of a 1 kw laser weapon mounted on an AN/TWQ-1 Avenger Air Defense System. The system, known as the “Laser Avenger,” saw successful testing for both IED clearance and air defense against drones between 2007 and 2009 but never received funding from the Pentagon for additional development efforts.3

The current iteration of the RADBO system integrates an upgraded Zeus laser into an armored platform with a robotic arm and sensor suite, allowing operators to identify, approach, and neutralize threats without leaving the vehicle using an Xbox-style controller known as a Freedom of Movement Control Unit (FMCU). The system underwent operational testing for the first time during Exercise Cope North 24 in Guam in January 2024.

The next-generation version of the RADBO system, unveiled in March 2025, comes mounted on a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) and offers improved mobility, reduced size and weight, and AI-enabled rapid targeting capabilities, according to Parsons.

The March experiment in South Korea occurred as the US military continues to grapple with the proliferation of low-cost weaponized drones, which have rapidly displaced IEDs as the most significant threat to US troops in the Middle East. In this context, downed drones present an emerging variant of the same airfield denial challenge RADBO was built to solve: an armed drone that crashes on a runway is, functionally, an unexploded ordnance problem. The Air Force appears to be testing whether a system already in production might be capable of handling it.

The Air Force is simultaneously pursuing ground-based laser options for air defense through its new Point Defense Battle Lab at Grand Forks Air Force Base, which issued a request for information in March seeking 2–20 kilowatt systems specifically for counter-drone base defense — a power requirement the Zeus III's output would just barely meet at the low end. Whether RADBO has a role in the service’s broader directed energy architecture or the South Korea testing is simply an expedient experiment with a system already available remains to be seen.

For now, the most successful laser weapon the US military has ever fielded may find a second life — not as the air defense breakthrough the Pentagon has spent decades chasing, but as a more efficient answer to a familiar problem with a new face.

The US military has a message for America’s directed energy industry: it’s time to build.

In a written posture statement submitted to the House Armed Services Committee ahead of a hearing on the US Defense Department’s fiscal year 2027 budget request on April 29, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated that the Pentagon plans on buying “tens to hundreds” of directed energy weapons like high-energy laser systems in the coming years — the beginning of what Hegseth dubbed a “strong and consistent demand signal” to the US defense industrial base that, after years of producing just “a limited number of prototypes,” the US military is deadly serious about fielding such capabilities at scale.

Here’s the relevant section from Hegseth’s posture statement:

Directed Energy (DE) weapons represent a transformative capability, yet the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) is currently postured to produce only a limited number of prototypes. There are significant vulnerabilities and gaps in our DE defense manufacturing capabilities. To address this, the Department must create a strong and consistent demand signal for the production of greater quantities of these weapons, on the order of tens to hundreds of units.

This increased demand is essential to enable the DIB’s manufacturing capacity to mature and scale to meet the tactical innovation of the warfighter. Overcoming the “business as usual” acquisition mindset is paramount. The Department must reform its procurement processes, warfighting tactics, and policy limitations to “demystify” Directed Energy weapons and facilitate their integration into the force structure. This includes developing new concepts of operation, training programs, and support infrastructure to ensure that these advanced weapons can be effectively fielded to our warfighters and employed on the battlefield.

The successful integration of Directed Energy weapons will require a concerted effort to overcome institutional inertia and embrace a new way of thinking about warfare. The Department’s commitment to creating a demand signal is the first and most critical step in this process.

While senior military and defense officials have vocally endorsed fielding directed energy weapons at scale in 36 months or installing “a laser on every ship,” Hegseth’s statement offers a more grounded (and familiar) diagnosis for observers of the US military’s decades-long laser weapon ambitions: the technology has advanced, but the institutional mechanisms to transition mature systems to the field have not. The defense industrial base simply cannot invest in the manufacturing and supply chain capacity required for production at scale if it can’t predict how many systems it will actually be asked to build, especially if promising initiatives continually perish in the “valley of death” between research and development and procurement

The defense industry has been making this point for years. A January 2024 report from the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) trade group on directed energy weapon supply chains, which is on based in-depth research and interviews with dozens of key industry stakeholders and subject matter experts, found that the lack of a consistent demand signal “was raised many times by industry leaders as negatively impacting all levels of the supply chain.”

“Existing [directed energy weapon] supply chains can only produce small numbers of systems with long lead times,” the NDIA report says. “Once DoD’s strategic goals are articulated, appropriate DEW systems should be transitioned to programs of record and multi-year contracts used to send an extended demand signal. A clear, sustained demand signal, accompanied by the overarching strategic vision, will provide industry with the assurance that they can begin to make the internal investments necessary to secure DEW supply chains for the future.”

This assessment isn’t wrong. Despite ramping up laser weapon efforts following a deliberate shift from bulky chemical systems to more reliable, compact, and efficient solid-state and fiber laser technology in the 2000s, the last two decades have been marked by abandoned projects. Here are some recent examples:

• US Army officials touted its 50 kilowatt Stryker-mounted Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) as a major breakthrough when it deployed to the Middle East for real-world operational testing in 2024, but the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded the system “was not mature enough” to transition to a program of record.

• Army officials told Congressional Research Service as recently as this past January that they planned on transitioning the ambitious cruise missile-killing 300 kw Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) weapon to a program of record, but now say they only plan on taking delivery of a single system to use as a testbed to inform future laser weapon development efforts.

• The US Navy’s 60 kw High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) weapon system, which only recently began testing at full power and frying drones aboard Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Preble after years of delays, has effectively disappeared from the service’s fiscal year 2027 budget request outside of a handful of sustainment dollars.

• The US Marine Corps returned its five Compact Laser Weapon System (CLaWS) units to Boeing in pursuit of a “more deliberate programs of record,” years after touting the system as “the first ground-based laser approved by the Department of Defense for use by warfighters on the ground” (and without any explicit funding for laser weapon R&D in its fiscal year 2027 budget request).

• The US Air Force spent years experimenting with Raytheon’s High-Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) for counter-drone missions but abandoned the effort without successfully transitioning the system to a program of record, although the service appears poised to once again pursue ground-based laser weapons for airbase defense.

These failures share a common pattern, according to a detailed 2023 GAO report on the Pentagon’s directed energy weapons efforts: projects advanced through prototyping without ever securing formal transition partners or drafting agreements that would bind developers and the acquisition community to shared requirements, timelines, and funding responsibilities. The Navy’s HELIOS effort, for example, identified a notional transition partner but never documented agreements detailing how to resolve various power and cooling integration challenges before the system headed to an actual warship for installation. The Air Force’s HELWS spent more than three years in development before the service even identified a transition partner, and when it did, the relevant program office had neither the funding nor the mandate to take it on. The Army’s comparatively more disciplined approach — embedding transition teams in prototyping efforts, drafting early capabilities documents, and regularly convening stakeholders to plan for future doctrine, training, and maintenance — shows what the other services didn’t do, and even that wasn’t enough to save DE M-SHORAD from demilitarization. There is simply too much “institutional inertia,” as Hegseth put it, to allow promising systems to drift toward obsolescence rather than fight the bureaucratic battles required to turn them into programs of record.

So what does a “clear, sustained demand signal” actually look like? The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2027 budget request contains a few elements that indicate the beginnings of a firm institutional commitment to fielding laser weapons (although, as one defense official recently reminded me, justification books rarely survive contact with the budget process).

First, the Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS): a containerized 150-300 kw laser weapon designed to defeat incoming cruise missile threats as part of the Trump administration’s new “Golden Dome for America” missile defense shield. As Laser Wars previously reported, the fiscal year 2027 budget documents lay out a planned R&D investment of $675.93 million through fiscal year 2031 to develop the joint Army-Navy system based on lessons from HELIOS and IFPC-HEL, among other higher-power laser weapon efforts. And while there are no explicit procurement plans yet, this investment will likely be augmented by additional funds from the $452 million the Pentagon has requested specifically for directed energy weapons as part of Golden Dome separate from the services.

Second, the Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL): the modular 30 kw laser weapon the Army envisions as its counter-drone system of choice and eventual program of record. Beyond ongoing directed energy R&D efforts, the service has stated that it plans to “produce and rapidly field” 24 E-HEL systems over a five-year period, with plans to purchase two at a time for roughly $17 million apiece for the first two years before subsequently ramping up to batches of five. This program appears to be moving faster than most laser efforts before it, with the first E-HEL prototype expected no later than the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 and initial procurement units slated for delivery by end of fiscal year 2027. Even the Navy is exploring the E-HEL’s potential naval applications, per the service’s fiscal year 2027 budget request.

It’s also worth noting that Hegseth’s posture statement invokes the 23 new Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAE) that the Pentagon has already established across the services, which are designed to transform the US military acquisition processes to “prioritize performance and accountability.” A dedicated directed energy PAE with real budget authority behind it could prove a concrete test of whether this new framework changes outcomes rather than just incentive structures (although the posture statement doesn’t explicitly commit to one).

Are bold declarations from military and defense leaders, a massive R&D budget, and renewed promises of programs of record a strong enough directed energy demand signal for the defense industrial base? Recent laser industry moves, both domestic and international, suggest as much. Huntington Ingalls Industries announced a new laser integration and test facility in support of the E-HEL effort in September 2025. The following November, IPG Photonics announced the grand opening of a new manufacturing facility in Huntsville, Alabama dedicated to developing and producing laser weapons for defense applications. In January, nLight announced a 50,000-square-foot laser weapon manufacturing addition in Colorado before unveiling an expansion of Italy operations to support European directed energy development in April. Australia’s Electro Optic Systems (EOS) opened a laser weapon production hub in Singapore in February amid ongoing discussions with the US and other potential customers. AV, the maker of the LOCUST Laser Weapon System that has become a fixture of US counter-drone operations, announced a $30 million manufacturing expansion in Albuquerque, New Mexico earlier in March. Finally, start-up Aurelius Systems announced a brand new division focused on building fiber laser source modules in the US in late April.

But manufacturing expansions alone aren’t enough for the US military to meet its near-term goal of rapidly fielding directed energy weapons at scale. Part of the problem is that laser weapons are arguably more complex and time-consuming to produce than, say, Raytheon’s Coyote interceptors; the new EOS Singapore hub, for example, can only produce five to 10 laser weapon systems annually, per company executives. But more importantly, a demand signal hundreds of laser weapons is only meaningful if the entire directed energy supply chain is ready to answer the call — and according to the NDIA report, it is far from ready.

First, many critical components in laser weapons currently face long lead times due to lack of capacity. As the NDIA report notes, the precision mirrors and lenses that shape and direct laser beams require highly specialized grinding and polishing to tolerances that can take 12 to 18 months to produce for a single large optic. Beam directors, the devices responsible for precisely aiming and controlling the laser beam, are built by just two or three companies in the US, with lead times that regularly stretch beyond two years. Adaptive optics, which compensate for atmospheric distortion in real time, have only two or three suppliers for non-medical applications, with lead times of 18 to 24 months. Specialized optical fibers essential for efficient energy transmission are so niche that one NDIA interviewee mentioned a Scandinavian company as among the few viable suppliers. Ceramic laser gain materials are sourced from a single company in Japan. Diffraction gratings critical to laser amplification come from a single industry supplier. Beam dumps used in testing — a component so routine it barely registers in program discussions — are manufactured exclusively by one company in Israel, with lead times that have stretched to a year.

Second, the raw materials required to make these components are subject to their own geopolitical bottlenecks, as Laser Wars has previously noted. The essential lasing medium in most high-energy laser weapons is a solid-state or fiber gain medium doped with rare earth elements — neodymium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium. Unfortunately, Chinese exports accounted for 74% of US rare earth element imports between 2018 and 2021, while Beijing controls more than 85% of global processing capacity. The laser diode pumps that drive most solid-state laser systems are typically built from gallium arsenide, but China controls 98% of global gallium production and announced fresh export controls in the summer of 2023. Germanium, a primary material in the infrared optics, is similarly exposed: 54% of US imports come from China and are subject to those 2023 export controls. Even the copper used in laser weapon thermal management systems runs through Chinese processing, with 41% of all refined copper originating in China as of 2022 despite the US’s substantial domestic ore production. A determined US effort to scale military laser weapon production to hundreds of units would face Beijing-controlled chokepoints at almost every major component layer.

There’s a third constraint lurking beneath the manufacturing and materials challenges: the US simply does not have enough people trained to build laser weapons at scale. The NDIA report identified three specific workforce categories facing acute shortages in the directed energy sector: optical coatings specialists, power electronics engineers, and opto-mechanical engineers. Optical coating construction and application is, in the words of industry participants, an “artform” that takes years to master, and there are only a handful of US companies devoted to defense-grade coatings. Optics graduates are also scarce: only a handful of schools in the US have dedicated optics programs, and they face intense competition from the medical device and consumer optics industries, which pay better and don’t require security clearances. Finally, power electronics engineers with the unique experience needed for the power conversion and charging systems in directed energy weapons are increasingly hard to find as broader demand for electrification across commercial industries drains the same talent pool.

Taken together, these challenges are the reason “tens to hundreds” of directed energy weapons has remained an aspirational goal rather than a reality for so long — and they won’t be solved by a demand signal alone. A long-term solution will require sustained, coordinated investment across manufacturing, materials, and workforce development. While the Pentagon is already pursuing potential solutions with $100 billion requested in fiscal year 2027 to “supercharge” the defense industrial base, those investments will take years to translate into consistent production capacity,

Still, Hegseth’s posture statement represents the clearest and most senior articulation yet that the Pentagon understands the systemic problems that have held back its directed energy programs and intends on addressing them. Whether it’s also a sufficient step will depend on whether E-HEL’s transition to a program of record actually happens on schedule, the $675 million JLWS investment survives the budget process, and the supply chain and workforce investments needed to back up a demand signal for hundreds of systems materialize alongside it.

The defense industrial base has heard this kind of rhetoric before. What it needs now is the multi-year contracts, programs of record, and upstream investments in materials and workforce that will empower it to actually respond. The next budget cycle will reveal whether this time is different.

The cruise missile-killing high-energy laser weapon the US Defense Department envisions as part of its ‘Golden Dome for America’ domestic missile defense shield is beginning to take shape.

The new Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS) — a collaboration between the US Army and US Navy whose existence Laser Wars first reported in June 2025 — will initially consist of a containerized 150 kilowatt system with potential to scale to at least 300 kw to defeat incoming cruise missile threats, according to the Navy’s fiscal year 2027 budget request. The system will also include Joint Beam Control System (JBCS) “capable of supporting” a 300-500 kw laser weapon, the documents say.

The JLWS effort will leverage research and development lessons from the Navy’s 60 kw High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system, which is currently installed on the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Preble, and the Army’s 300 kw Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) system, the first prototype of which the service plans on taking delivery of of later this year. The Navy will also “conduct upgrades” to its High Energy Laser Counter Anti-Ship Cruise Missile Project (HELCAP) testbed “as appropriate” in support of future JLWS testing.

While last year’s Army budget request detailed $51 million in mandatory funding for JLWS through the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” reconciliation bill under its ‘Expanded Mission Area Missile’ program element, this year’s request does not contain any R&D funding for fiscal year 2027 but details plans for $337.8 million in spending starting in fiscal year 2028 and running through fiscal year 2031. Based on the budget documents, it looks as though the service plans on closing out its IFPC-HEL activities first before kicking off its part of the JLWS effort.

The Navy, however, isn’t waiting around. The service requested $94.825 million under its ‘Directed Energy and Electric Weapon Systems’ program element in fiscal year 2027 (up from just $14.5 million in fiscal year 2026, as Laser Wars previously reported) that includes $79.84 million under its Surface Navy Laser Weapon System (SNLWS) effort to jumpstart JLWS R&D, sustain the service’s lone HELIOS system for future testing activities, and upgrade the HELCAP testbed (which is also receiving a separate $14.978 injection), according to the service’s budget request. The service plans on investing an additional $243.3 million into JLWS R&D under that program element through fiscal year 2031.

Together, the Army and Navy requests total a vision of $675.93 million in R&D spending for the JLWS through fiscal year 2031. The Navy plans on awarding $31.7 million in contracts for JBCS development as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026 and the $30 million in contracts for the procurement and testing of containerized JLWS by March 2027, according to budget documents. It seems likely that Lockheed Martin will receive those contract: not only is the defense prime the technical lead on both the HELIOS and IFPC-HEL efforts that will inform the JLWS, but it’s also already developing a containerized version of the former, a company executive revealed in August 2025.

It’s worth noting that while the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2027 budget request also contains $452 million in R&D spending for the “development, integration, and assessment” of directed energy weapons in support of Golden Dome, the exact relationship with the Army and Navy’s JLWS efforts is unclear. The Navy budget documents state that the $79.84 million allocated under SNLWS also includes funds to “begin development of a consolidated implementation plan” for all Golden Dome-related directed energy projects, “leveraging synergy and common weapon architectures between these efforts where possible” in coordination with the US Missile Defense Agency.

The dream of a laser weapon capable of shooting down cruise missiles is nearly as old as the laser itself. The Pentagon first demonstrated the concept in the 1970s with the Navy ARPA Chemical Laser (NACL), a deuterium fluoride system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that successfully engaged small missile targets but proved far too large and complex for practical deployments. Those same challenges would befall its successor, the megawatt-class Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL), despite the system successfully neutralizing a supersonic MQM-8 Vandal missile during testing in 1989. The Gulf War briefly revived this dream in the US Air Force’s ill-fated Airborne Laser (ABL) program, which consumed more than $5 billion over nearly two decades before its cancellation in 2012. More recently, the Navy’s Layered Laser Defense (LLD) system, developed by Lockheed Martin in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research, successfully downed a target drone simulating a subsonic cruise missile in a 2022 demonstration at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the military’s latest attempt to validate the concept under realistic conditions.

The Pentagon clearly hopes that the JLWS will finally push its laser-based cruise missile defense efforts over the finish line. But as Laser Wars previously reported when the JLWS first became public in June 2025, such threats pose a far more complex challenge for directed energy weapons than the low-cost weaponized drones that are reshaping warfare on battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East. Cruise missiles fly low and fast, hug terrain, and execute evasive maneuvers that compress reaction time, while their hardened casings require far more sustained energy to defeat than the soft-bodied drones that current tactical lasers are optimized for. Compounding the challenge, atmospheric interference can scatter or absorb beam energy before it reaches the target; even at 300 kw power levels, laser weapons demand a degree of beam control and aim-point precision that no known system has yet demonstrated against a realistic cruise missile threat.

After years attempting to scale laser weapons to power levels suitable for cruise missile defense, the Pentagon’s push for a containerized solution also represents a departure from past vehicle-mounted or warship-integrated systems. For the Navy in particular, Chief of Naval Operations (and noted laser weapon champion) Adm. Daryl Caudle has explicitly emphasized the pursuit of modular capabilities that the service can rapidly swap across its surface fleet for particular missions without lengthy and expensive stays in shipyards. Look no further than the service’s October 2025 live-fire test of the Army’s 20 kw Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) system, based on the LOCUST Laser Weapon System from defense contractor AV, from the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush.

Indeed, the JLWS isn’t the only modular laser weapon the Navy is exploring. The aforementioned Directed Energy and Electric Weapon Systems program element also includes $4.82 million in funding to support the “development, integration and marinization” of the Army’s Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) systems — the modular, 30 kw laser weapon based on lessons from P-HEL and the aborted Stryker-mounted 50 kw Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) system that the service envisions as its first directed energy program of record. The Army planned on procuring two E-HEL units in fiscal year 2026 and another pair the following year, according to the service’s budget request, with plans to “produce and rapidly field” up to 24 systems total in the coming years. With its LOCUST system proven as a counter-drone capability both abroad and at home, AV appears the leading contender to clinch that contract in the coming years.

With institutional support for developing and fielding directed energy weapons at scale at a historic high, JLWS may prove a significant opportunity for the Pentagon to finally make its dream of missile-killing laser weapons a reality. But the history of counter-cruise missile laser development is littered with programs that cleared every bureaucratic hurdle only to stumble on the physics and operational realities. A containerized 150 kw system may be a more modest and achievable goal than the behemoths that came before it, but whether JLWS can survive contact with both the budget process and real-world complexities of blasting cruise missiles out of the sky remains the open question.

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