The Air Force Is Giving Up on Airborne Laser Weapons (For Now)
The service's airborne laser ambitions have hit turbulence.
The US Air Force is halting its push to develop an airborne high-energy laser weapon to defend aircraft against incoming drones and missiles, according to newly released budget documents.
For the second year in a row, the Air Force’s budget request allocates zero dollars for research and development into its High Power Solid State Laser Technology project, once a cornerstone of the service’s airborne laser ambitions.
While last year’s budget request indicated that the Air Force was merely scaling back its efforts to develop an airborne laser weapon, this year’s budget documents explicitly state that the service is planning to “stop work” outright on the project.
These cuts extend beyond airborne lasers. The Air Force budget documents also show that the service is also backing away from its ground-based laser weapon prototyping program after evaluating a handful of unspecified systems — likely the Polaris MRZR-mounted High-Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) developed by defense prime Raytheon — for airbase defense over the last several years. Those efforts were transferred to the US Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO), which oversees the ground branch’s directed energy efforts, at the end of fiscal year 2024.
The termination of the Air Force’s airborne laser efforts comes on the heels of two major setbacks for the service’s directed energy ambitions. In 2024, the service concluded its Self-Protect High-Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) project which, funded through the aforementioned High Power Solid State Laser Technology project, aimed to mount laser weapon pods on fighter jets to counter incoming missiles. As I reported for Military.com, the program ended without ever actually installing a pod on a fighter jet test bed. Around the same time, Air Force Special Operations Command revealed it had scrapped plans to mount a similar laser weapon called the Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) on an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship due to "technical challenges.”
While an Air Force spokesman told me at the time that the service would “continue to mature airborne [laser] weapons technology for the operational needs of today and tomorrow” despite the disappointing outcomes of the SHiELD and AHEL efforts, the budget documents appear to suggest that when it comes to laser R&D, the service is going back to the drawing board.
The US Defense Department’s dream of laser-armed aircraft stretches back more than half a century, beginning with the Air Force’s Airborne Laser Laboratory (ALL) program in the early 1970s. That program yielded a modified Boeing NKC–135 tanker that successfully disabled several airborne targets during tests in 1983. In 2009, the service installed a 100 kilowatt Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) system on a NC-130H transport and reportedly “defeated” a ground target during testing. An in 2010, the service’s Boeing 747-based YAL-1 Airborne Laser Test Bed (ABL) took out a pair of ballistic missiles during testing before the program was cancelled due to what US military officials characterized as “significant affordability and technology problems.”
With decades of R&D and real-world testing under its belt, it seems as though the Air Force should be on the cusp of successfully developing and fielding operational airborne laser weapons. So why do they still feel just out of reach?
As I previously wrote for Laser Wars, there are two major factors that make airborne laser weapons so challenging: generating enough power on an aircraft and maintaining a stable, coherent laser beam mid-flight.
First, power. High-energy laser weapons need vast amounts of electricity and advanced thermal management, a tall order for aircraft already brimming with mission-critical systems. You can’t just bolt extra generators and heat sinks onto a C-130, let alone smaller aircraft like the F-22 Raptor of F-35 Lightning II, without running into major size, weight, power, and cooling (SWaP-C) constraints. While laser systems have grown smaller and more efficient over time, they’re still not at the point where integration onto an airframe is a breeze.
Second, beam coherence. Lasers may travel at the speed of light, but they’re still subject to the messy physics of the Earth’s atmosphere, where obscurants like fog, dust, and humidity can significantly degrade beam quality. So can turbulence at altitude — and when your laser platform is traveling hundreds of miles an hour while tracking fast-moving targets, those environmental variables can make or break a engagement, especially because laser weapons require substantial dwell time to effectively neutralize incoming threats.
To be clear, the Air Force’s current retreat from airborne laser R&D doesn’t preclude a future revival. The service restarted its airborne laser weapon efforts after both the ATL and YAL-1 programs were canceled and may very well do so again. US military planners have reportedly long envisioned laser weapons as critical elements of the Air Force’s sixth-generation F-47 fighter jet that’s currently in development through the service’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) effort. As of 2024, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) was taking yet another look at airborne lasers to blast threats out of the sky. And defense prime General Atomics recently claimed to Naval News that the Pentagon is looking to outfit the Air Force and US Marine Corps MQ-9 Reaper drone fleets with laser weapons, although this initiative isn’t reflected in either service’s budget documents.
Like jetpacks and powered armor, some futuristic technologies are simply too enticing to abandon entirely. But when it comes to airborne laser weapons, the challenge for the Pentagon is no longer one of imagination but integration. Airborne lasers are caught in a technological bottleneck, right on the cusp of feasibility but still limited by SWaP-C constraints and atmospheric factors. Without a radical leap in power generation or beam steering, these systems may remain perpetually stuck in the demo phase: dazzling in concept, but difficult to actually build and operationalize.
This bottleneck is exacerbated by the Air Force’s shifting strategic priorities. The service is currently investing heavily in next-generation capabilities like autonomous systems and long-range munitions, technologies that offer tangible gains today without the developmental uncertainty that comes with directed energy. And in a threat environment dominated by drone swarms and missiles attacks, the service may be leaning toward scalable, distributed defenses rather than high-risk, high-reward bets like airborne lasers.
Airborne lasers may one day reshape aerial warfare. But until power and physics catch up, they’ll remain a weapon of the future — just not the near one.
