The Case for Ultrashort Pulse Laser Weapons
Applied Energetics CEO Chris Donaghey talks directed energy, drone warfare, and weaponizing the lightning bolt.
Welcome to In Focus, an occasional interview series with subject matter experts in the directed energy space.
Chris Donaghey is the CEO of Applied Energetics, an Arizona-based defense contractor specializing in ultrashort pulse laser weapons — systems that releases a high-intensity burst of energy that burns out camera lenses and electro-optical sensors to neutralize drone targets rather than relying on a continuous stream of thermal energy to destroy them outright.
On October 3, Applied Energetics released footage showing the company’s Pulsed Laser Air Defense (PLAID) system disabling the cameras on four drone targets in less than a second during a recent test:
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
LASER WARS: Can you briefly share some history of Applied Energetics and laser weapons research?
CHRIS DONAGHEY: Applied Energetics was founded in the early 2000s by our co-founder and current chief scientist, Dr. Stephen McCahon. He was the product lead for Raytheon’s high-energy laser programs and becoming disillusioned with continuous wave lasers as an effector, so he started doing some research on pulsed lasers. He wanted to do an IRAD, an internal research and development project, at Raytheon, but they wouldn’t approve it, so he said, “okay, well, I’m going to leave and start my own company and go pursue this independently.”
The primary focus of the company at launch in 2002 was an extremely high energy ultrashort pulse laser: a five terawatt system and a one terawatt system, so trillions of watts of peak power. That’s when Steve was building what we called a Laser Induced Plasma Channel (LIPC), which basically creates a virtual wire through the air with a laser and then a bolt of lightning to ride that channel. The complete system was called Laser Guided Energy.
The LIPC laser was very complex, very fragile, very brittle, and it was going to be very difficult to ruggedize. But this is at the time when roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan were one of the US military’s primary concerns. The goal was to use the laser to guide lightning at the sides of the road to cause the bombs to detonate — the laser was never going to make it in time, so we just focused on the high voltage static discharge system on the front of a US Marine Corps truck. You drive down the road, and it’s just dropping pulses of lightning into the ground, and the system would connect and ground to a command wire of an IED, causing it to detonate.
That prototype unit of the system, which we called Banshee, drove more than 10,000 miles in Afghanistan, and there was never an incident. The Marines were very excited by this thing, and the company was in negotiations for a contract to build 200 of them … and then President Obama announced the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, so roadside bombs weren’t really a concern anymore. The world is a safe place again, apparently.
So that order went away and left the company sitting there scratching their heads, and they ended up shutting the company down for a few years. Eventually, Steve went back to the drawing board and came up with this new concept to use fiber optics to produce the ultrashort pulse laser. We’ve spent the last six years building out that architecture.
What makes ultrashort pulse lasers tactically and technologically superior to continuous wave lasers like, say, the US Army’s Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) or US Navy’s High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) systems?
It depends on the mission profile that you’re trying to run and on the engagement scenario. For Class 3 drones and larger missiles, those systems are not flown by a pilot who is staring at a camera screen, and those are typically used to hit fixed infrastructure because they carry more explosives. So that’s where you would want a 100 kilowatt class or a 50 kilowatt class continuous wave laser, because those threats rely on sensors that we’re not yet able to affect.
But there’s a tradeoff to that. Continuous wave lasers tend to scale linearly, which means their size and their costs generally scale almost as a linear function of the power of the laser that you want — if you want to go from a 50 kilowatt laser to 100 kilowatt laser, it’s going to be twice the size and it’s going to cost twice as much. And when you get to 100 kilowatts, it’s a shipping container sized system, and it still requires a dwell time to cause the effect. With an ultrashort pulse laser, it’s much smaller and you can quickly target smaller drones. It’s all about size, weight and power: our laser is 60 times smaller than some of the 20 kilowatt lasers that exist today, and it has a near instantaneous effect.
If the mission profile is countering small drones or a swarm of small drones, the continuous wave lasers would run out of time before the adversary runs out of drones. With an ultrashort pulse laser, because you get a sub-second effect, you can rapidly fire the laser at individual drones and then retarget and move to the next one. And the goal is to blind these things well outside a one kilometer range; if you can do that, then that drone has a very, very low probability of hitting its intended target.
Tell me about the Pulsed Laser Air Defense (PLAID) system that Applied Energetics has designed and built for this purpose.
PLAID is a direct result of Ukraine’s Operation Spider Web, where they attacked air bases in Russia with hundreds of drones concealed on trucks. The day after that attack happened, I got calls from prime contractors and potential customers basically saying, “hey, if the Russians had had your thing, would that attack have been as successful?” That forced us to accelerate the development of not just the ultrashort pulse laser, but the gimbal that’s going to put the light on target and the software that’s going to do the targeting. So PLAID is a complete system: it’s not just the laser source itself, it’s also the beam director, as well as the software that we’ll have to do all the targeting.
Can you tell me more about that software? There are a couple of systems that rely on computer vision and AI for target acquisition and tracking at speeds faster than human operators can manage.
We’re in the early days of building that software. We will hire a full software development team late this year or early next year. Right now, we have a PhD in laser physics who is learning how to do this. But when we get to a production ready system, we’re going to want to have professionally developed software.
The software has to not just recognize the drone — once it has the drone in sights, it has to identify where the optic is and then tell the laser where to fire to hit that optic. But we don’t have to dwell, we really just have to flash the optic. There’s an approach here where you basically just paint the target by using a fast steering mirror that moves the beam, basically vibrating the beam down the center of the drone.
Where do you think laser weapon development is headed?
The original idea for lasers was always about Russian ICBMs, right? But on today’s battlefield, you have more devices, and the number of those devices that rely on sensitive electronic sensors to accomplish their mission is increasing dramatically. This rise of the robotic force means that sensors are going to continue to proliferate widely onto the battlefield, and an ultrashort pulse laser is the perfect effector for that because of size, weight and power, and short dwell times.
I think you’re going to start to see more spending in this area. The question is going to be, are the defense primes going to do it on their own, or are they going to wait until we get our technology matured to a certain level and then I get a call from a corporate development guy at one of those companies to say, “all right, we think you guys would fit perfectly in our portfolio”?
Industry is going to keep investing in continuous wave lasers. nLight has plans to build a megawatt laser, Lockheed Martin is working on a 500 kilowatt laser right now. And those lasers will work well for certain applications. However, we’ve already tested a two megawatt chemical laser called the Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL) and it didn’t work as expected. Laser technology has advanced a lot since MIRACL, but you still have to scratch your head: if two megawatts wasn’t enough, what do you expect from 500 kilowatts or a megawatt? This was about the time where Steve started thinking, “we might have to come at this from a different angle, we should start looking at what happens if you can concentrate all of that energy into a single pulse.”
There has to be balance placed in how the government is investing in this technology. There’s basically no dollars committed to pulse lasers right now, but I do think you’re going to see that change, particularly when we start showing these effects on target at range. We intend to do our first outdoor test of this system in Q4 of this year, and that is going to open a lot of eyes.
The US government seems to have trouble transitioning lasers out of the lab and onto the battlefield. How do you overcome the valley of death?
Our belief is that it comes down to size, weight and power. A 300 kilowatt laser can do some very cool things, but if it takes three shipping containers to field that system, it has limited use. You certainly couldn’t deploy them in a picket fence style approach, which is what you can do with our system. Again, it has to be the right kind of engagement that you’re trying to execute with that, but the main reason why they haven’t made that transition is because they’re exceedingly expensive, they’re very large, and they consume a huge amount of power. Our system solves the size, weight and power problem for Class 1 and Class 2 drone effectors.
Josef Stalin had a five year plan. What’s yours?
We’re at the pivot point right now. There are two key catalysts that are upcoming: the outdoor test is a big deal because that demonstrates that the system is a Technology Readiness Level 5 system. If you look at how the Pentagon arranges their R&D budget, 90% of that money is focused on products at TRL 5 and higher. So that is what will unlock our ability to go after these much deeper pools ofR&D capital that the government has.
We’re also accelerating our own commercialization efforts, so we’re going to be hiring a chief product officer soon, we’ll start hiring an engineering team, and we’ll bring in the software team. The goal is to get to fieldable prototype units before the middle of next year, with potentially commercial units in the second half of next year.
The combination of the outdoor test and commercialization effort will allow us to significantly accelerate the development of this system, because we will be more eligible for DoD development dollars and will be more interesting to investors. Now it’s just about turning it into a product, and we think that will happen in 2026.
One last thing: What’s your favorite fictional laser weapon and why?
There’s a book by Daniel Suarez called Daemon, and my favorite laser weapon is when the bad guy pulls out an LIPC. I was reading the book, and I got to that page and said, “Oh my gosh, this is our system!”
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