The Laser Weapon Inflection Point
Are we entering a new phase of the global directed energy arms race?
The Laser Wars are heating up.
On September 3, China’s People’s Liberation Army trotted out a slew of new weapons during Beijing’s massive military parade marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat at the end of World War II, including what the state-run Global Times newspaper billed as an “LY-1” shipborne laser weapon alongside the PLA’s existing vehicle-mounted OW5-A laser systems. While no technical specifications for the system are publicly available, the LY-1 has been described as the country’s “most powerful” laser weapon yet.
China’s LY-1 isn’t just a fresh countermeasure against the rapidly proliferating drone threat to add to the PLA’s rapidly growing laser arsenal. As with most advanced defense tech showpieces in military parades, it’s also a technological challenge to adversaries like the United States, itself a long-time pioneer of military laser weapon research and development. With laser weapons slowly but surely making their way onto the battlefield, Beijing and Washington (and Moscow) are poised for a directed energy arms race ahead of a future conflict fought with swarms of low-cost weaponized drones.
But while China’s LY-1 reveal may have captured military observers’ attention this past week, it didn’t occur in isolation.
On the same day as the military parade in Beijing, US defense contractor AeroVironment announced that it had delivered two BlueHalo LOCUST Laser Weapons Systems integrated into M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicles to the US Army as part of the first increment of the service’s Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) prototyping effort. The actual delivery ostensibly took place weeks earlier, as Laser Wars had previously spotted a laser-armed ISV conducting training exercises near the US-Mexico border in mid-July. (The announcement also coincided with news that laser weapon startup Aurelius Systems had raised a $10 million seed round to continue development of its AI-enabled Archimedes Laser Sentinel for the US military.)
The next day, France’s Directorate General of Armament announced that it had ordered a “Sydreal” counter-drone laser weapon demonstrator “with tens of kilowatts of power” developed by defense contractors MBDA, Safran, Thales, and CILAS to potentially field to its armed forces by 2030. The French government has been pursuing laser weapons for years, even deploying a pair of CILAS systems to secure the airspace over the country’s Île-de-France region during the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics.
These developments all followed a late August announcement from India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation that it had conducted a successful test of its new Integrated Air Defence Weapon System, which included a “high-power laser-based Directed Energy Weapon.” That exercise followed of the debut of the Indian Armed Forces’ 30 kilowatt Mk-II(A) Laser-Directed Energy Weapon back in April and the earlier active deployment of a 2 kw laser weapon as part of its Integrated Drone Detection and Interdiction System to shoot down hostile Pakistani drones.
All told, the last few weeks might mark an inflection point in an already transformative year for military laser weapons. Israel scored the very first combat laser kill caught on camera and is developing an airborne ‘Iron Beam.’ The United Kingdom announced plans for a fleet of robot warships armed with 50 kw ‘DragonFire laser weapons. Turkey debuted a laser tank, the latest addition to its growing arsenal of indigenous laser weapons. Ukraine, Iran, South Korea, and Japan have all unveiled fresh laser weapons for air defense in the last year.
Laser weapons have become the new status symbol of military modernization, a signal of technological credibility. And these systems are no longer boutique prototypes, but parallel programs maturing across every major military power with a common denominator: defending against cheap drones with expensive missiles is unsustainable, and lasers promise to flip that cost curve.
Yet for all the fanfare, the real test for these systems won’t be a parade: it’s whether they can operate consistently in the field through haze, fog, and other atmospheric interference. Indeed, a former Saudi Arabian military officer told Defence Blog the day after the Beijing military parade that the Chinese-made ‘Silent Hunter’ laser weapon system that Riyadh procured and deployed back in 2022 performed poorly in real-world desert operations, so far that dust and sand aggressively interfered with optical tracking and beam focus: “In some cases, it took between 15 and 30 minutes of continuous targeting and laser illumination to guarantee a drone kill.”
Israel’s battlefield footage may have proven that lasers can kill under combat conditions, but operationalizing them across brigades and fleets is another matter entirely. The physics remain unforgiving: dust in deserts, fog and salt spray at sea, and even cheap reflective coatings can drastically reduce their effectiveness. At the same time, the real contest may be less about physics than politics, with defense budgets, procurement cycles, and strategic priorities ultimately deciding who actually fields these systems at scale. Look no further than the recent saga of the US Navy’s lone shipboard high-energy laser weapon, the High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS): firing at full power during recent tests, but effectively sidelined in the service’s 2026 budget request. While every million-dollar missile fired at a $500 drone makes the case for laser weapons stronger, nations must still struggle across the “valley of death” that may strand such systems in acquisition limbo.
The Laser Wars aren’t some mirage on the horizon — they’re officially here. And the victor won’t be a question of technological superiority, but who has the political will to make their directed energy dreams a reality.
