The Navy Is Working on Its Most Powerful Laser Weapon Yet
Enter SONGBOW.
Despite fresh issues with its primary shipboard high-energy laser weapon, the US Navy is forging ahead with yet another new directed energy system.
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) awarded a $29.9 million contract to California-based defense firm Coherent Aerospace & Defense to “further the development” of a novel 400 kilowatt “directed energy subsystem” as part of its so-called SONGBOW project, according to a recent US Defense Department contract announcement.
Upon successful completion, delivery, and integration into a surface warship, Coherent’s solution would represent the Navy’s most powerful publicly known laser weapon system to date.
Few details are available about SONGBOW’s mission profile, integration plans, or operational concept, making it unclear how or where the Navy hopes to deploy the system. The contract was awarded under ONR’s Long Range Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for Navy and Marine Corps Science and Technology – an open-ended solicitation for early-stage projects that advance the organization’s research and technology areas, of which directed energy is one – and is expected to be completed by early 2027.
But based on the intended power output of the notional system, the Navy likely envisions it as an additional defensive layer against anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM) rather than the drones and watercraft targeted by lower-power systems like the 60 kw High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system currently installed aboard the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Preble.
The power levels also suggest that SONGBOW may be an outgrowth of the High Energy Laser Counter-ASCM Program (HELCAP) the Navy is currently pursuing to defeat incoming cruise missiles by tackling the “remaining technical challenges” facing high-energy laser weapons, namely “high atmospheric turbulence, target acquisition and identification, target tracking, aim point maintenance, automatic aim point placement, [and] jitter control,” according to the service’s fiscal year 2026 budget request released in late June.
The SONGBOW effort also appears to build on recent Navy experimentation with the Layered Laser Defense (LLD) system developed by Lockheed Martin in conjunction with ONR. The LLD successfully downed a target drone simulating a subsonic cruise missile in a 2022 demonstration at the US Army’s High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The status of that system remains unclear.
The SONGBOW contract comes amid a period of budgetary limbo for the service. While the Navy’s budget request does not include any discretionary funding for directed energy weapons, it does include $61 million in mandatory funding through the major reconciliation bill, also known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” that Republicans are advancing through the House and Senate, with $46 million for HELIOS (under the Surface Navy Laser Weapon System program) and $15 million for HELCAP, according to budget documents. (The reconciliation bill also allocates a total of $250 million for the “development and testing of new directed energy capabilities” by the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for Research and Engineering.)
The HELCAP funding in the reconciliation bill will be used for “lethality model validation and evaluation of High Energy Laser (HEL) technologies to assess HEL weapon lethality in Navy operational environments against the Counter Anti-ship Cruise Missile (C-ASCM) operational challenge while enabling the Navy to rapidly integrate a fleet-ready HEL weapon system capability,” the documents say.
Navy leaders have been clamoring for the Pentagon to accelerate the fielding of directed energy weapons like high-energy lasers to surface warships amid drone and missile attacks targeting vessels in the Red Sea from Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen in response to Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas in Gaza. In January, US Fleet Forces Command boss Adm. Daryl Caudle lamented that the service’s inability to scale laser weapons across the surface fleet was straight-up “embarrassing.”
But while building a high-energy laser weapon system that reaches 400 kw is one thing, integrating it into a warship is another thing entirely. Indeed, the acting Chief of Naval Operations, Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. James Kilby, recently revealed that the HELIOS system aboard the Preble was only operating at one-third of its advertised power output of 60 kw due to unspecified “problems” that cropped up during testing.
Whether those issues stem from the laser itself or the Preble’s power architecture remains unclear, but power generation has long been a top concern for Navy planners pursuing shipboard lasers. And since at least 2019, the service has been pursuing fresh innovations from the US defense industrial base that offer “potential for advancement and improvements in current and future shipboard electric power and energy systems” with directed energy weapons as a core design issue, according to a recently-updated BAA on the subject.
The Navy’s experience with HELIOS underscores a broader truth about high-energy lasers: power matters, but integration matters just as much. A 400 kilowatt laser would be a major leap – nearly seven times the output of HELIOS – and potentially the first naval laser capable of reliably burning through hardened missile casings in flight.
Time will tell if SONGBOW ends up yielding a laser weapon that’s actually powerful enough to burn through those fast-moving cruise missiles. And with the Pentagon depending on the Republican-backed reconciliation bill to fund its directed energy ambitions in the coming fiscal year, the future of American naval laser weapons is just as murky. But if SONGBOW succeeds where HELIOS stumbled, it could mark the moment the Navy’s laser dreams finally move from the lab to the fleet.
The Valley of Death however awaits, Ackshully the value of vested interests.