The Pentagon's Laser Weapon Promise — and the Problem of Keeping It
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants the US defense industrial base to build “tens to hundreds” of directed energy weapons.
The US military has a message for America’s directed energy industry: it’s time to build.
In a written posture statement submitted to the House Armed Services Committee ahead of a hearing on the US Defense Department’s fiscal year 2027 budget request on April 29, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated that the Pentagon plans on buying “tens to hundreds” of directed energy weapons like high-energy laser systems in the coming years — the beginning of what Hegseth dubbed a “strong and consistent demand signal” to the US defense industrial base that, after years of producing just “a limited number of prototypes,” the US military is deadly serious about fielding such capabilities at scale.
Here’s the relevant section from Hegseth’s posture statement:
Directed Energy (DE) weapons represent a transformative capability, yet the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) is currently postured to produce only a limited number of prototypes. There are significant vulnerabilities and gaps in our DE defense manufacturing capabilities. To address this, the Department must create a strong and consistent demand signal for the production of greater quantities of these weapons, on the order of tens to hundreds of units.
This increased demand is essential to enable the DIB’s manufacturing capacity to mature and scale to meet the tactical innovation of the warfighter. Overcoming the “business as usual” acquisition mindset is paramount. The Department must reform its procurement processes, warfighting tactics, and policy limitations to “demystify” Directed Energy weapons and facilitate their integration into the force structure. This includes developing new concepts of operation, training programs, and support infrastructure to ensure that these advanced weapons can be effectively fielded to our warfighters and employed on the battlefield.
The successful integration of Directed Energy weapons will require a concerted effort to overcome institutional inertia and embrace a new way of thinking about warfare. The Department’s commitment to creating a demand signal is the first and most critical step in this process.
While senior military and defense officials have vocally endorsed fielding directed energy weapons at scale in 36 months or installing “a laser on every ship,” Hegseth’s statement offers a more grounded (and familiar) diagnosis for observers of the US military’s decades-long laser weapon ambitions: the technology has advanced, but the institutional mechanisms to transition mature systems to the field have not. The defense industrial base simply cannot invest in the manufacturing and supply chain capacity required for production at scale if it can’t predict how many systems it will actually be asked to build, especially if promising initiatives continually perish in the “valley of death” between research and development and procurement
The defense industry has been making this point for years. A January 2024 report from the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) trade group on directed energy weapon supply chains, which is on based in-depth research and interviews with dozens of key industry stakeholders and subject matter experts, found that the lack of a consistent demand signal “was raised many times by industry leaders as negatively impacting all levels of the supply chain.”
“Existing [directed energy weapon] supply chains can only produce small numbers of systems with long lead times,” the NDIA report says. “Once DoD’s strategic goals are articulated, appropriate DEW systems should be transitioned to programs of record and multi-year contracts used to send an extended demand signal. A clear, sustained demand signal, accompanied by the overarching strategic vision, will provide industry with the assurance that they can begin to make the internal investments necessary to secure DEW supply chains for the future.”
This assessment isn’t wrong. Despite ramping up laser weapon efforts following a deliberate shift from bulky chemical systems to more reliable, compact, and efficient solid-state and fiber laser technology in the 2000s, the last two decades have been marked by abandoned projects. Here are some recent examples:
US Army officials touted its 50 kilowatt Stryker-mounted Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) as a major breakthrough when it deployed to the Middle East for real-world operational testing in 2024, but the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded the system “was not mature enough” to transition to a program of record.
Army officials told Congressional Research Service as recently as this past January that they planned on transitioning the ambitious cruise missile-killing 300 kw Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) weapon to a program of record, but now say they only plan on taking delivery of a single system to use as a testbed to inform future laser weapon development efforts.
The US Navy’s 60 kw High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) weapon system, which only recently began testing at full power and frying drones aboard Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Preble after years of delays, has effectively disappeared from the service’s fiscal year 2027 budget request outside of a handful of sustainment dollars.
The US Marine Corps returned its five Compact Laser Weapon System (CLaWS) units to Boeing in pursuit of a “more deliberate programs of record,” years after touting the system as “the first ground-based laser approved by the Department of Defense for use by warfighters on the ground” (and without any explicit funding for laser weapon R&D in its fiscal year 2027 budget request).
The US Air Force spent years experimenting with Raytheon’s High-Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) for counter-drone missions but abandoned the effort without successfully transitioning the system to a program of record, although the service appears poised to once again pursue ground-based laser weapons for airbase defense.
These failures share a common pattern, according to a detailed 2023 GAO report on the Pentagon’s directed energy weapons efforts: projects advanced through prototyping without ever securing formal transition partners or drafting agreements that would bind developers and the acquisition community to shared requirements, timelines, and funding responsibilities. The Navy’s HELIOS effort, for example, identified a notional transition partner but never documented agreements detailing how to resolve various power and cooling integration challenges before the system headed to an actual warship for installation. The Air Force’s HELWS spent more than three years in development before the service even identified a transition partner, and when it did, the relevant program office had neither the funding nor the mandate to take it on. The Army’s comparatively more disciplined approach — embedding transition teams in prototyping efforts, drafting early capabilities documents, and regularly convening stakeholders to plan for future doctrine, training, and maintenance — shows what the other services didn’t do, and even that wasn’t enough to save DE M-SHORAD from demilitarization. There is simply too much “institutional inertia,” as Hegseth put it, to allow promising systems to drift toward obsolescence rather than fight the bureaucratic battles required to turn them into programs of record.
So what does a “clear, sustained demand signal” actually look like? The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2027 budget request contains a few elements that indicate the beginnings of a firm institutional commitment to fielding laser weapons (although, as one defense official recently reminded me, justification books rarely survive contact with the budget process).
First, the Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS): a containerized 150-300 kw laser weapon designed to defeat incoming cruise missile threats as part of the Trump administration’s new “Golden Dome for America” missile defense shield. As Laser Wars previously reported, the fiscal year 2027 budget documents lay out a planned R&D investment of $675.93 million through fiscal year 2031 to develop the joint Army-Navy system based on lessons from HELIOS and IFPC-HEL, among other higher-power laser weapon efforts. And while there are no explicit procurement plans yet, this investment will likely be augmented by additional funds from the $452 million the Pentagon has requested specifically for directed energy weapons as part of Golden Dome separate from the services.
Second, the Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL): the modular 30 kw laser weapon the Army envisions as its counter-drone system of choice and eventual program of record. Beyond ongoing directed energy R&D efforts, the service has stated that it plans to “produce and rapidly field” 24 E-HEL systems over a five-year period, with plans to purchase two at a time for roughly $17 million apiece for the first two years before subsequently ramping up to batches of five. This program appears to be moving faster than most laser efforts before it, with the first E-HEL prototype expected no later than the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 and initial procurement units slated for delivery by end of fiscal year 2027. Even the Navy is exploring the E-HEL’s potential naval applications, per the service’s fiscal year 2027 budget request.
It’s also worth noting that Hegseth’s posture statement invokes the 23 new Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAE) that the Pentagon has already established across the services, which are designed to transform the US military acquisition processes to “prioritize performance and accountability.” A dedicated directed energy PAE with real budget authority behind it could prove a concrete test of whether this new framework changes outcomes rather than just incentive structures (although the posture statement doesn’t explicitly commit to one).
Are bold declarations from military and defense leaders, a massive R&D budget, and renewed promises of programs of record a strong enough directed energy demand signal for the defense industrial base? Recent laser industry moves, both domestic and international, suggest as much. Huntington Ingalls Industries announced a new laser integration and test facility in support of the E-HEL effort in September 2025. The following November, IPG Photonics announced the grand opening of a new manufacturing facility in Huntsville, Alabama dedicated to developing and producing laser weapons for defense applications. In January, nLight announced a 50,000-square-foot laser weapon manufacturing addition in Colorado before unveiling an expansion of Italy operations to support European directed energy development in April. Australia’s Electro Optic Systems (EOS) opened a laser weapon production hub in Singapore in February amid ongoing discussions with the US and other potential customers. AV, the maker of the LOCUST Laser Weapon System that has become a fixture of US counter-drone operations, announced a $30 million manufacturing expansion in Albuquerque, New Mexico earlier in March. Finally, start-up Aurelius Systems announced a brand new division focused on building fiber laser source modules in the US in late April.
But manufacturing expansions alone aren’t enough for the US military to meet its near-term goal of rapidly fielding directed energy weapons at scale. Part of the problem is that laser weapons are arguably more complex and time-consuming to produce than, say, Raytheon’s Coyote interceptors; the new EOS Singapore hub, for example, can only produce five to 10 laser weapon systems annually, per company executives. But more importantly, a demand signal hundreds of laser weapons is only meaningful if the entire directed energy supply chain is ready to answer the call — and according to the NDIA report, it is far from ready.
First, many critical components in laser weapons currently face long lead times due to lack of capacity. As the NDIA report notes, the precision mirrors and lenses that shape and direct laser beams require highly specialized grinding and polishing to tolerances that can take 12 to 18 months to produce for a single large optic. Beam directors, the devices responsible for precisely aiming and controlling the laser beam, are built by just two or three companies in the US, with lead times that regularly stretch beyond two years. Adaptive optics, which compensate for atmospheric distortion in real time, have only two or three suppliers for non-medical applications, with lead times of 18 to 24 months. Specialized optical fibers essential for efficient energy transmission are so niche that one NDIA interviewee mentioned a Scandinavian company as among the few viable suppliers. Ceramic laser gain materials are sourced from a single company in Japan. Diffraction gratings critical to laser amplification come from a single industry supplier. Beam dumps used in testing — a component so routine it barely registers in program discussions — are manufactured exclusively by one company in Israel, with lead times that have stretched to a year.
Second, the raw materials required to make these components are subject to their own geopolitical bottlenecks, as Laser Wars has previously noted. The essential lasing medium in most high-energy laser weapons is a solid-state or fiber gain medium doped with rare earth elements — neodymium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium. Unfortunately, Chinese exports accounted for 74% of US rare earth element imports between 2018 and 2021, while Beijing controls more than 85% of global processing capacity. The laser diode pumps that drive most solid-state laser systems are typically built from gallium arsenide, but China controls 98% of global gallium production and announced fresh export controls in the summer of 2023. Germanium, a primary material in the infrared optics, is similarly exposed: 54% of US imports come from China and are subject to those 2023 export controls. Even the copper used in laser weapon thermal management systems runs through Chinese processing, with 41% of all refined copper originating in China as of 2022 despite the US’s substantial domestic ore production. A determined US effort to scale military laser weapon production to hundreds of units would face Beijing-controlled chokepoints at almost every major component layer.
There’s a third constraint lurking beneath the manufacturing and materials challenges: the US simply does not have enough people trained to build laser weapons at scale. The NDIA report identified three specific workforce categories facing acute shortages in the directed energy sector: optical coatings specialists, power electronics engineers, and opto-mechanical engineers. Optical coating construction and application is, in the words of industry participants, an “artform” that takes years to master, and there are only a handful of US companies devoted to defense-grade coatings. Optics graduates are also scarce: only a handful of schools in the US have dedicated optics programs, and they face intense competition from the medical device and consumer optics industries, which pay better and don’t require security clearances. Finally, power electronics engineers with the unique experience needed for the power conversion and charging systems in directed energy weapons are increasingly hard to find as broader demand for electrification across commercial industries drains the same talent pool.
Taken together, these challenges are the reason “tens to hundreds” of directed energy weapons has remained an aspirational goal rather than a reality for so long — and they won’t be solved by a demand signal alone. A long-term solution will require sustained, coordinated investment across manufacturing, materials, and workforce development. While the Pentagon is already pursuing potential solutions with $100 billion requested in fiscal year 2027 to “supercharge” the defense industrial base, those investments will take years to translate into consistent production capacity,
Still, Hegseth’s posture statement represents the clearest and most senior articulation yet that the Pentagon understands the systemic problems that have held back its directed energy programs and intends on addressing them. Whether it’s also a sufficient step will depend on whether E-HEL’s transition to a program of record actually happens on schedule, the $675 million JLWS investment survives the budget process, and the supply chain and workforce investments needed to back up a demand signal for hundreds of systems materialize alongside it.
The defense industrial base has heard this kind of rhetoric before. What it needs now is the multi-year contracts, programs of record, and upstream investments in materials and workforce that will empower it to actually respond. The next budget cycle will reveal whether this time is different.
