Welcome to the Laser Wars

The age of the laser weapon is finally upon us.

The United States Army has officially sent a pair of high-energy laser weapons overseas to defend American troops and US allies against enemy drones, the service recently revealed, marking the first publicly known deployment of a directed-energy system for air defense in military history. And, according to a top official, those weapons are actively blasting threats out of the sky.

The weapon, known as the Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) and developed by the American defense contractor BlueHalo based on the company’s 20-kilowatt Locust Laser Weapon System, first arrived in an unspecified location overseas and “commenced operational employment” in November 2022, according to an April press release from the company. A second system arrived overseas “earlier this year.”

While the Army initially declined to indicate where the P-HEL systems were sent and whether they had achieved a “kill” against an adversary drone, citing operational security concerns, the service’s top acquisition official recently confirmed that the new laser weapons had in fact succeeded in neutralizing incoming threats in the Middle East.

“They’ve worked in some cases,” Doug Bush, the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics, and technology, told Forbes this month. “In the right conditions, they’re highly effective against certain threats.”

News of the P-HEL’s deployment comes as the US military seeks to aggressively bolster its air defense capabilities amid a dramatic increase in drone and missile attacks against US troops by Iran-backed militias in the Middle East, as well as against US Navy warships operating in the Red Sea by Houthi rebels in Yemen following the October 7 attack in Israel by Hamas.

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, the US Defense Department has been slowly but surely hinting at the use of laser weapons downrange. But the arrival of the P-HEL in the Middle East for operational use is a technological victory for the US military, which has actively pursued research related to directed-energy weapons since the 1970s. Even more significantly, it may also represent a tipping point for the development and use of laser weapons more broadly by militaries around the world.

BlueHalo’s LOCUST Laser Weapon System (LWS) combines precision optical and laser hardware with advanced software, artificial intelligence (AI), and processing to enable and enhance the directed energy “kill chain”.Photograph: BlueHalo

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Following its creation in 1960 by American engineer and physicist Theodore Maiman, the laser—technically an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”—almost immediately became a futuristic weapon of choice among both science fiction writers and military planners. This wasn’t surprising: While Maiman touted the potential scientific applications of his discovery when he first unveiled it to the country later that year, the laser immediately conjured up visions in the public consciousness of the Martian “heat ray” from H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, so much so that many of the contemporary headlines from its debut were variations of the Los Angeles Herald’s “L.A. Man Discovers Science Fiction Death Ray,” according to Jeff Hecht’s book Beam: The Race to Make the Laser. “In reality, the laser was more of a Life Ray than a Death Ray,” Maiman would later recall thinking of his invention’s medical applications, according to his memoir.

The Pentagon began exploring the military applications of lasers almost immediately, from relatively practical uses like designators for laser-guided bombs to more far-fetched concepts like the Strategic Defense Initiative of the 1980s, also known as “Star Wars.” But only in the past few decades has the underlying technology advanced to the point where laser weapons are effective against their intended targets.

In the mid-2000s, the Air Force successfully used its Boeing 747-based YAL-1 airborne laser to defeat ballistic missiles in flight during tests, while the Army’s Humvee-mounted Zeus-HMMWV Laser Ordnance Neutralization System system deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq to zap landmines, improvised explosive devices, and unexploded ordnance. By 2014, the Navy’s AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System (LaWS) was successfully disabling drones and small boats during testing from the bow of the Austin-class amphibious transport dock USS Ponce in what the service billed at the time as the world’s first “active laser weapon.” (When the Ponce was decommissioned in 2017, the LaWS’s successor system, the Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator, was installed on the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock USS Portland, which successfully tested it in 2020 and 2021).

Apart from intermittent attempts at developing a non-lethal “laser rifle” over the decades, the Pentagon has generally envisioned employing modern directed-energy weapons primarily for defensive purposes. If successfully developed, high-energy lasers in particular could prove highly effective at short-range air defense missions against helicopters and low-flying attack aircraft, as well as blasting incoming rockets, artillery, and mortars out of the sky, according to a 2023 Congressional Research Service report on the US military’s directed-energy weapons programs. With enough power, a sustained laser beam could neutralize fast-moving hardened threats like cruise missiles and, eventually, even ballistic missiles.

After decades of technological progress, the US military is finally making the dream of laser weapons an operational reality: Not only has the Pentagon increasingly poured money into research and development, spending roughly $1 billion a year on at least 31 directed-energy programs since 2020, but the department has also finally deployed several mature laser weapons alongside US forces abroad in recent years for testing.

Those laser weapons include the Air Force’s High-Energy Laser Weapon System, a Raytheon-developed dune-buggy-mounted system developed for air base defense that saw testing overseas in 2021; the Marine Corps’ Compact Laser Weapon System, which Marines have been training on in the Middle East since 2021; Lockheed Martin’s 60-kilowatt High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS), which currently adorns the bow of the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Preble; and the Army’s 50-kilowatt Stryker-mounted Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) system, or “Guardian,” which consists of a laser turret mounted on a Stryker infantry carrier, a platoon of which arrived in the Middle East in February for “real world testing.” The Army also recently took receipt of a 300-kilowatt “Valkyrie” laser system designed explicitly to deal with incoming cruise missiles.

The adoption of BlueHalo’s Locust laser weapon system in particular likely won’t stop with the P-HEL. In 2023, the company received contracts not just to develop the new 20-kilowatt Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) system that’s designed to integrate with the service’s next-generation Infantry Squad Vehicle light utility vehicle, but also a potential laser system for the Marine Corps’ Joint Light Tactical Vehicle that’s set to replace the service’s aging Humvee fleet.

The US military isn’t the only conventional fighting force pushing for a directed-energy element of its air defenses. The UK Royal Navy in April announced that it planned to fast-track the installation of its new 50-kilowatt “DragonFire” high-powered laser onto a warship by 2027 instead of 2032 as originally planned “as the need for weapons to counter drone and missile threats—like those fired by Houthi rebels—grows,” the service said in a statement. Less than a week later, US House Republicans unveiled their long-delayed security assistance package for Israel that included $1.2 billion for the development of the Israeli military’s “Iron Beam” laser air defense system “to counter short-range rocket threats” amid attacks from Hamas militants. Meanwhile, countries like Russia, China, France, India, and Turkey, among others, have all invested heavily in the development of laser systems in recent years, according to the Rand Corporation.

During a trial at the MOD’s Hebrides Range, the DragonFire laser directed energy weapon (LDEW) system achieved the UK’s first high-power firing of a laser weapon against aerial targets. The range of DragonFire is classified, but it is a line-of-sight weapon and can engage with any visible target.Photograph: UK.gov

Cheap Threats

The development and fielding of directed-energy weapons like lasers has taken on such new urgency among world governments in recent years due to the rapid proliferation of relatively cheap one-way attack drones among both professional militaries (see: the 2020 conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine) and irregular forces like Yemen’s Houthis in the Red Sea, ISIS cells in Iraq and Syria, and Iran-backed militias across the Middle East. In 2021, then-Central Command chief Marine General Frank McKenzie Jr. warned US lawmakers that weaponized commercial off-the-shelf drones have become the greatest threat to US forces in the region since the advent of the improvised explosive device during the early years of the Global War on Terror.

That threat is very real. In January, three US service members were killed and more than 40 others were injured in a drone attack conducted by an Iran-backed militia on a military outpost in Jordan near the Syrian border. As of mid-February, more than 140 additional service members had been injured in attacks launched against American forces in Iraq and Syria since mid-October, according to the Pentagon, 130 of whom were suffering from traumatic brain injuries. That more American troops weren’t killed in these attacks was essentially a matter of luck, according to Army General Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the current head of Central Command.

“There are several incidents where [drones] coming into a base hit another object, got caught up in a netting or other incidents where, had they hit the appropriate target that they were targeting, it would have injured or killed service members,” Kurilla told lawmakers during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in March.

This rising tide of adversary drones has prompted US military commanders to clamor for more directed-energy options, as has the increased threat of missile attacks. As the rate of Houthi potshots at American warships and merchant vessels in the Red Sea began to spike in January, the Navy’s current surface warfare boss publicly emphasized that the service needed to rapidly accelerate the rate of development and fielding of its directed-energy assets not just to deal with drones but also incoming cruise and ballistic missiles.

“What we’re facing in the Red Sea is more than just drones. We’re looking at land-attack cruise missiles, we’re looking at anti-ship ballistic missiles that are getting shot in the Red Sea by the Houthis. And our ships are dealing with all of those,” the Naval Surface Forces commander, vice admiral Brendan McLane, told reporters in early January. “One of the things that I think we really need to get after quicker is we need to accelerate the development of directed-energy weapons, whether it’s a laser, whether it’s a microwave.” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro echoed McClane’s comments the next day, telling reporters that he was “very, very excited” to boost investments in laser weapon research and development for the service.

Developing and fielding laser weapons isn’t just a matter of practicality, but price tag. Rather than force warships and ground troops to expend costly munitions like the $2.1 million-a-shot Standard Missile-2 naval missile and $480,000-a-shot FIM-92 Stinger missile on comparatively inexpensive drones, a laser weapon can defeat incoming threats with a basically negligible cost-per-shot ($1 to $10, per an April 2023 Government Accountability Office assessment) and, with a suitable power source, a near-infinite magazine. Given the fact that the US military has already expended nearly $1 billion in munitions since October to defend against Iran-backed attacks in the Red Sea and elsewhere (at an average of $100,000 per shot, per officials), lasers and other directed-energy weapons may prove far more cost-effective in the long run for a Pentagon explicitly looking to keep counter-drone costs down.

“I would love to have the Navy produce more directed energy that can shoot down a drone, so I don’t have to use an expensive missile to shoot it down,” as Kurilla put it in his testimony before lawmakers in March.

The confluence of technological advancements and the urgent need posed by the rise of weaponized drones has created circumstances that may induce the US and its allies to even more rapidly develop and employ laser weapons around the world.

But challenges remain. Chief among them is ensuring that laser weapons systems actually produce a coherent laser beam as expected outside the controlled setting of a lab in the real world, where “substances in the atmosphere—particularly water vapor, but also sand, dust, salt particles, smoke, and other air pollution—absorb and scatter light, and atmospheric turbulence can defocus a laser beam,” according to the Congressional Research Service. While atmospheric problems are particularly pronounced for shipboard lasers, the CRS report notes that these systems can be engineered to hit a “sweet spot” in the electromagnetic spectrum to overcome the atmospheric absorption inherent to maritime operations. Time will tell with the operational deployment of the P-HEL and testing of the DE M-SHORAD in the Middle East whether those systems can adjust to more inhospitable conditions.

Beyond functional issues, there’s also the question of teaching service members to operate a laser effectively in a combat setting. The CRS report notes that “thermal blooming”—where a sustained laser beam heats up the air it’s passing through, which in turn defocuses the beam—makes head-on (or “down-the-throat”) shots against incoming targets less effective, a problem that will require a training and doctrinal fix in order to compensate. And while many of the US military laser weapons in development require minimal training to use (the BlueHalo Locust on which the P-HEL is based runs on an Xbox controller), the 2023 GAO assessment indicated that the US military will need to develop brand new “tactics, techniques, and procedures” for operating the novel systems in complex combat environments. The laser may work, but it’s up to service members to get the most out of it.

“What we don’t know yet for directed-energy systems necessarily is how to fight [with] them,” said Army lieutenant general Robert Rasch, head of the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, which manages its directed-energy portfolio, in August. “How to fight lasers on the battlefield, how to integrate kinetic and non-kinetic effectors, like directed energy, and our traditional air-defense missiles into the battle space.”

A Problem in Search of a Solution

Even with additional training, evolving threats like rapidly moving drones or cruise missiles hardened against interception will require a significant boost in power that most existing systems simply can’t generate yet. Take the Navy’s shipborne 60-kilowatt HELIOS laser weapon: While the service wants to scale the system to 300 kilowatts to burn through the nose cones of incoming cruise missiles, the Navy’s surface warfare boss at the time, Rear Admiral Ron Boxall, previously stated in 2019 that the fleet’s new Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are already maxed out on juice (or “out of Schlitz,” as Boxall put it) due to the requirements of operating the warships’ brand-new AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar. As laser weapons become more robust to counter increasingly complex threats, those power requirements are only going to increase.

And even if laser weapons actually do end up operating effectively downrange with the right technology and training, US service members are then faced with complicated logistics considerations when it comes to keeping them up and running. Laser weapons are extremely complex machines, which makes their repair and maintenance in austere environments a significant challenge for deployed service members who may not have the right tool or facilities on hand. Indeed, the GAO assessment noted that many of the internal mechanisms critical to directed-energy weapons are so sensitive that they typically require a specialized “clean room” for repairs; in one recent case, a laser weapon sent to an operational environment for testing “had to be returned to the manufacturer in the United States” for maintenance after encountering battery and cooling challenges.

“Lasers are complicated. This is not a Humvee that’s sitting in the motor pool,” as Lieutenant General Daniel Karbler, the head of the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command, reportedly said in August 2023. “Many of the some of the main [laser] components … you’re not going to have a supply room or maintenance office full of repair parts.”

Taken together, all of these challenges could pose a serious potential roadblock to the widespread proliferation of laser weapons across the US military. As the GAO report notes, many promising military technologies too often fall into the so-called “valley of death”—a limbo between ongoing R&D and the actual acquisition and operational use of a new system—because the various military branches “may require a higher level of technology maturity than the science and technology community is able to fund and develop.” While military commanders may clamor for laser technology today, challenges like beam coherence and thermal blooming may prove insurmountable regardless of how much time and patience the Pentagon pours into development, a prospect that could relegate laser weapons to an R&D graveyard alongside other ambitious projects like the Navy’s electromagnetic railgun. The P-HEL may represent a new beginning for laser weapons, but it could also end up as an exception that proves they aren’t ready for prime time yet.

Maiman, the physicist who invented the laser, once famously derided his creation as “a solution in search of a problem,” an idiom often used to describe innovations that don’t address any real issue and, in turn, don’t offer any real value. But more than a half-century after the laser’s introduction into America’s modern technological vocabulary, the rise of deadly drones and missile threats has presented the laser weapon with a pressing issue worth solving. And while the laser is still far from becoming a ubiquitous piece of military technology, it holds the potential to revolutionize how US troops counter airborne threats overseas—and, in time, change the face of modern warfare as we know it.