'Sunray’: What We Know (And Don’t Know) About Ukraine’s New Laser Weapon
A new dispatch from The Atlantic offers a vivid look at the system in action, though key technical details remain unclear.
First came ‘Tryzub.’ Then ‘Slim Beam.’ Now, Ukraine reportedly has a new high-energy laser weapon in its arsenal.
In a February 10 dispatch, The Atlantic’s Simon Shuster revealed the existence of ‘Sunray,’ the third publicly known laser weapon the Ukrainian military has developed since Russia’s full-blown invasion in 2022 to counter the ever-expanding threat of low-cost weaponized drones. The Ukrainian soldiers who developed built Sunray spent just “a few million dollars” over two years to build a prototype, which “resembles a hobbyist’s telescope with some cameras affixed to the sides” and “fits comfortably into the trunk of a car,” as Shuster describes it.1
“For target practice, one of the engineers launched a small drone, and it flew a few hundred yards away from us, hovering in the gauzy winter sky,” Shuster reports. “The laser swiveled as its cameras followed the target. The operator shouted, ‘Fire!’ Within seconds, the drone began to burn as if struck by invisible lightning, then fell to the ground in a fiery arc.”
The scene Shuster paints is a compelling example of Ukraine’s rapid wartime innovation. But beyond the spectacle of Sunray burning a drone out of the sky, the report offers little in the way of technical detail about the system’s capabilities. Indeed, Shuster does not mention a maximum power output or effective range2 — details the Ukrainian military shared freely when previously showcasing the Tryzub and Slim Beam systems over the last year.3
This isn’t a huge deal: Shuster’s report is mostly focused on the Ukrainian military’s efforts to build, as he writes, “a bootstrapped version of [Israel’s] Iron Dome” without the comparatively pricey interceptors. But if Sunray is being framed as part of Ukraine’s nascent air defense shield, those missing details matter. Without basic information about power class, engagement range, tracking system, and performance under adverse weather conditions, it is difficult to assess whether Sunray actually represents a battlefield-ready capability or simply an impressive field demonstration optimized for ideal conditions.
To outside observers, the answer is most likely the latter. Based on the current state of the global directed energy ecosystem, high-energy laser weapons (and their high-powered microwave cousins) remain “relatively immature and [do] not currently present a viable option for C-UAS in Ukraine,” as a RAND Corporation report published in December concluded. “There is a range of technical limitations (including significant power and infrastructure requirements, inability to engage beyond line-of-sight, and reliance on clear atmospheric conditions), and [directed energy weapon] systems are prohibitively expensive to develop and deploy.”
The Ukrainian military would appear to disagree with this assessment. In a January interview with Ukrainian tech outlet dev.ua, Andriy Hrytsenyuk – head of Ukraine’s Brave1 defense tech incubator – stated that the country would likely start using laser weapons “this year” to disable “small enemy UAVs and at short distances” during combat operations – with limits.
“If we talk specifically about the “Shaheeds” [sic], I believe that this year the progress and readiness of developments will not yet reach a state where they can be shot down with the help of lasers,” Hrytsenyuk said. “There are longer distances, and the longer the distance, the more power is needed. But many countries are experimenting with this. We are also doing this, we have several projects.”
The distinction Hrytsenyuk draws is important. Shooting down small quadcopters at short range is a different technical challenge than intercepting Iranian-made Shahed drones, the latter of which require higher power classes with greater engineering demands. Nothing in Shuster’s reporting indciates that Sunray, demonstrated on a small drone hovering “a few hundred yards away,” has crossed that threshold just yet.
That does not diminish the achievement. A mobile, trunk-sized laser capable of reliably burning through small drones at close range still represents a meaningful defensive tool in a conflict defined by mass-produced drones. It just places Sunray firmly in the category of short-range counter-drone system rather than a laser-based analog to Iron Dome.
None of this invalidates the broader point of Shuster’s story: Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to field workable battlefield technologies at astonishing speed and cost, and Sunray may well prove to be another example of that improvisational advantage. Until its power output and engagement range are made public as they were with Tryzub and Slim Beam (or demonstrated under combat conditions), the system remains an intriguing experiment more than a transformational air-defense breakthrough.
⚡️Pulse
There’s officially more laser news than I have time to devote individual editions to! To ensure Laser Wars remains up to date, I’m experimenting with a new section, ‘Pulse,’ to capture other updates from around the directed energy ecosystem:
Trump’s battleship dream may be a ‘forcing function’ to drive broader fielding of shipboard laser weapons: US Chief of Naval Operations (and vocal laser zealot) Adm. Daryl Caudle told reporters at the WEST 2026 conference in San Diego that the inclusion of high-energy lasers in the designs for the Trump-class battleship the president proposed in December as a potential avenue to spur their proliferation across US Navy warships. “I can see that being a place where I really want to use that as the forcing function to solve this for other Navy ships,” Caudle said on February 10, according to Breaking Defense. His remarks came nearly a month after senior Navy leaders outlined their vision for, as one admiral put it, “a laser on every ship” in the service’s surface fleet.
Germany’s naval laser weapon is in trouble: The German Bundestag’s Budget Committee has “raised concerns regarding the planned awarding of a contract” for the ongoing development of a shipboard high-energy laser weapon by defense contractors Rheinmetall and MBDA, the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) news agency reported on February 9. In the works for more than a decade, the companies had announced in October that their current demonstrator had been transferred the German Navy for ongoing testing following “the successful completion of a one-year trial phase at sea,” with its most recent round of testing invovling “100 live-firing trials and significantly more tracking trials.” The main complaint from budget watchdogs, according to dpa, is cost: Germany’s demonstrator is expected to cost €462 million (nearly $548 million) in the coming years.
Electro Optic Systems and Roketsan team up to develop laser weapons: The Australian defense contractor and Turkish state-owned defense manufacturer announced a strategic partnership at the World Defense Show in Riyadh on February 10 to enable “collaboration in selected markets jointly identified by both companies,” as EOS put it in a statement. EOS makes the 100 kw ‘Apollo’ laser weapon and secured the first known export contract for such a system, with the Netherlands, last August. Roketsan is known for its ‘ALKA’ laser weapon system, most recently seen riding atop an FNSS KAPLAN Armored Tracked Carrier back in July.
Full disclosure: I worked as an associate editor at The Atlantic from 2010 to 2012 — what feels like a lifetime ago in digital media, but still worth mentioning.
Shuster’s article is headlined ‘The New Laser That Can Take Down Aircraft,’ which, while accurate, reads to me like he’s talking about fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft and not small drones. Then again, reporters rarely get final say on the headlines for their stories so I’ll let it slide.
Please don’t yell “OPSEC” at me!