The U.S. military is closing in on its high-energy laser weapon of choice for counter-drone missions. Now it needs the vehicles to support it.

With the demise of its Stryker-based Directed Energy-Maneuver Short Range Air Defense (DE-MSHORAD) program, the U.S. Army has focused its ground-based laser weapon efforts on light tactical vehicles.

AeroVironment’s 20 kW LOCUST Laser Weapon System has already been operationally tested aboard both the Infantry Squad Vehicle and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle through the Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) effort, establishing that the U.S. military’s preferred mobile platforms can carry and employ directed energy weapons in the field.

The Army has reinforced this preference with its Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) push, which is explicitly targeting light tactical vehicles like the JLTV for what might become the U.S. military’s first directed energy program of record.

Both the ISV and JLTV are at the center of the U.S. military’s emerging approach to future distributed operations. For the Army, the speedy and versatile ISV is seen as providing an essential maneuver capability for Mobile Brigade Combat Teams on a battlefield increasingly dominated by low-cost weaponized drones.

And while the ultimate fate of the JLTV remains uncertain, the vehicle is currently the chosen platform for the Marine Corps air defense system that’s the backbone of the service’s new Marine Littoral Regiments.

Both platforms, however, face the same big problem: power. The two services’ potential solutions offer a look at what the U.S. military’s future fleet of laser trucks might actually look like.

As the modern battlefield is increasingly defined by unmanned systems and the electronics needed to counter them, consistent and reliable power at the tactical edge has become as important as ammunition.

During the height of the Global War on Terrorism, a 30-soldier infantry platoon carried 400 pounds of batteries during a 72-hour mission to power equipment, a load that Army researchers have sought to lighten in the intervening years.

The U.S. military’s new crop of tactical vehicles don’t currently offer a robust solution: the JLTV can only generate up to 15 kW of exportable power, while the ISV’s output beyond baseline vehicle operations is not public (and likely negligible).

The challenge for building a laser truck is bigger than just raw power. The core problem for directed energy weapons, as Chariot Defense founder and CEO Adam Warmoth told Laser Wars earlier this month, is that while they don’t consume enormous amounts of energy in absolute terms, each engagement demands a significant spike in power sustained for several seconds.

Conventional generators are optimized for steady output but not for these spikes, and running one at the ready around the clock is not just inefficient and expensive, but actively dangerous on a battlefield where heat signatures and engine noise turn are prime targets for drone-based reconnaissance and precision strikes.

“That targetable signature is always on because you have to be ready to provide power to that laser system at any moment,” Warmoth said. “So, you have efficiency challenges, signature management challenges and then mobility problems, where you have to bring the generator sized to your peak demand, which is three to five times larger than the equivalent battery system.”

The proposed solution to this problem is a hybrid architecture: a generator sized for average load paired with a high-voltage battery system capable of delivering instantaneous surges on demand. The battery handles the spike, the generator recharges the battery between shots and the overall system is smaller, quieter and more tactically versatile than alternatives.

A vehicle with the right hybrid architecture becomes more than just a maneuver capability, but a node in a distributed battlefield power grid capable of charging drone batteries, running C2 and sensor networks and powering electronic warfare equipment — and, when the moment requires it, feeding a laser weapon the juice it needs to fry a target.

The Army and Marine Corps have understood the benefits of vehicle electrification for some time. In January 2024, GM Defense demonstrated its Next Generation Tactical Vehicle-Hybrid — built on a Chevrolet Silverado HD 3500 with the same Duramax engine used in the ISV and paired with a battery producing roughly 300 kW hours — with soldiers from the 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division in Hohenfels, Germany.

The following February, the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office demonstrated a Humvee-based Tactical Hybrid Electric Vehicle at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, highlighting silent watch, silent mobility and increased power generation and export as the core operational advantages.

And later that month, the Army’s JLTV program office released a market survey for a “projected new production effort of a light tactical wheeled hybrid-electric vehicle.”

The U.S. military has validated this technology despite ongoing concerns that the Trump administration might put the kibosh on such efforts. Now the Pentagon has to actually field it in the right package.

The Army’s answer to the power gap is the ISV-Heavy. The name is slightly misleading: what makes the vehicle “heavy” is its chassis and, more importantly, its proposed power generation capabilities.

According to a commercial solutions opening (CSO) document published in late March, the system must produce and export a minimum 60 kW of continuous high-voltage DC power to support modular mission-specific payloads, from C2 communication equipment and radar to, explicitly, future directed energy weapons.

If the original ISV, based on GM Defense’s Chevrolet Colorado ZR2, was intended as a high-speed troop transport, the ISV-H is envisioned as a mobile power plant that happens to carry soldiers.

The ISV-H is designed to fill a “niche requirement there between an ISV and then, say, a JLTV, and it’s really going to be focused on the power generation part,” Jess Tolleson, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a June 16 hearing.

“One of the things that we do have a critical capability gap on right now is power generation at that mobile brigade combat team level,” she added.

The ISV-H, meanwhile, is moving faster than the earlier CSO document might have indicated. According to the Army’s fiscal year 2027 budget request released in April, the service plans on procuring an initial tranche of 34 ISV-H vehicles at a unit cost of roughly $463,000 each, with a total procurement objective set at 606 vehicles.

The service plans to release proposal requests by the end of this year, Tolleson said, describing the platform’s development as “a top priority” that the service wants to accelerate. The Army wants to award a contract by September 2027 and accept its first deliveries by January 2028, per the budget documents.

GM Defense had previously announced it will offer the same Chevrolet Silverado model showcased as the Next Generation Tactical Vehicle-Hybrid for the effort.

The ISV-H’s power specifications track with the hybrid architecture necessary for a mobile directed energy weapon employment, while the silent operations mode addresses the generator signature problem. The vehicle is purpose-built for the demands of the electronically-defined battlefield — a laser truck designed from the outset to fight, and win, the laser wars of the future.

For the Marine Corps, there is no equivalent clean-sheet solution available. The JLTV is firmly entrenched in the Corps’ redesigned force structure: the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) counter-drone and air defense system, which carries a 30mm cannon and Stinger missiles, operates across a fighting pair of the vehicles, while the Navy-Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS), which mounts the Naval Strike Missile on a JLTV, forms the centerpiece of the service’s Indo-Pacific sea denial strategy.

The main problem is that the Army’s relationship with the JLTV has deteriorated sharply over the past year. In May 2025, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll published a directive stating that the service would cancel procurement of “excess ground vehicles like the [Humvee] and JLTV” and redirect funds toward modernizing light formations around the ISV. According to the Congressional Research Service, the service planned to procure no additional JLTVs beyond the 250 delivered in January of that year.

AM General’s JLTV A2 variant, the next-generation successor that was supposed to carry the program forward, is now running more than 20 months behind schedule with roughly 2,000 vehicles in arrears, and House appropriators have proposed cutting $133 million from the program’s $245 million budget.

The Army’s JLTV ongoing issues jeopardize the Corps’ plans for the platform. As Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith stated during a June 2025 posture hearing, the service would have to buy fewer JLTVs in the future due to the Army stoppage. The Corps has already fielded roughly half its 12,500-vehicle requirement, but with Army volume gone, per-unit costs will rise.

This past February, the service reaffirmed its commitment to fielding the vehicle as part of its new force structure, as its Marine Littoral Regiments are built around JLTV-mounted capabilities in a way that makes a clean break from the platform effectively impossible.

In May, the service released a request for information seeking “mature, production-ready, rapidly fieldable” alternatives from vendors capable of supplementing or replacing AM General’s supply, a tacit acknowledgment of the A2’s production troubles.

This is where original JLTV manufacturer Oshkosh Defense comes in.

Displaced by AM General in 2023, Oshkosh arrived at Eurosatory 2026 in Paris with a potential answer to the power problem: an upgraded version of the hybrid-electric eJLTV demonstrator the company first unveiled in 2022, capable of generating 115 kW of exportable power and operating in silent drive and watch modes that allow for full electronic functionality without the tactical liability of a engine signature.

With the purported ability to generate bursts of power up to 250 kW, the system was explicitly designed with future directed energy weapons in mind.

“[Working out where to] aim the power available for export is a consideration and the top end is kind of where we’re focused,” Logan Jones, chief growth officer of Oshkosh’s transport division, told Shephard Media. “One that we’ve been tracking is the Australian-based Electro Optic Systems Apollo high energy laser weapon. At the other end, another type of integration is the Cilas HELMA-P [counter-drone] system.”

Oshkosh is already pushing to reclaim its role as primary JLTV supplier for the Marine Corps, but its broader institutional argument for eJLTV adoption is relatively straightforward: a service that already operates JLTVs can easily integrate the electric version into existing maintenance infrastructure, draw on established spare parts supply chains and train crews already familiar with the base vehicle.

With the Army walking away from the JLTV and the Marines actively shopping for alternatives, Oshkosh’s power-capable variant may prove the most realistic near-term path for the latter service to get directed energy into the fight.

Together, the ISV-H and eJLTV offer the U.S. military a two-track approach to fielding laser weapons on light tactical vehicles at scale. The Army gets a purpose-built platform with the power architecture, silent operations capability and modular payload bays to support directed energy weapons like the E-HEL from the ground up. Meanwhile, the Marine Corps gets an evolutionary upgrade to a platform it is already committed to.

Neither track, however, is without risk. The Army has yet to select an ISV-H manufacturer, and 606 vehicles is a modest procurement objective for a capability the service describes as a critical gap.

The eJLTV remains a demonstrator, and the Marine Corps’ JLTV procurement future depends heavily on whether AM General can close its production gap and Congress will continue to fund a program it has already threatened to cut.

But if AV’s LOCUST proved the feasibility of a real-world laser truck, the ISV-H and the eJLTV are the U.S. military’s first serious attempts to build enough of the right vehicles to make laser weapons a standard battlefield capability.

The major challenge ahead, as senior defense officials have repeatedly emphasized, is whether directed energy weapons can be produced, procured, fielded and sustained at the scale required to prove effective. Without the right platforms to support them, these weapons will remain niche capabilities — impressive in demonstrations, but absent when it matters most.

The U.S. military is pushing to demonstrate high-energy laser weapons engineered for fielding at scale in the next two years, according to the U.S. Defense Department’s top science and technology official.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee on May 19, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (USD(R&E)) Emil Michael told lawmakers that the science of laser weapons “is largely done.”

The Pentagon, he added, is now focused on addressing the engineering challenges that come with transforming exquisite prototypes into mass-producible capabilities — the “scaled” element of the department’s “scaled directed energy” critical technology area.

“We now have a suite of directed energy products that go from low-end to high-end, and now we have to scale production of those,” Michael said.

When questioned by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) about the three-year timeline for fielding laser weapons at scale that defense officials previously publicized in March, Michael stated that President Donald Trump’s planned “Golden Dome for America” domestic missile shield would accelerate those research and development efforts due to the initiative’s “big reliance” on directed energy, adding that “our experience in Iran has also doubled our interest in these systems.”

“A lot of the money allocated to Golden Dome is going to go to the fundamental engineering of these systems so that we can make them cheaper, smaller and more proliferated,” Michael said. “And because the commitment was made to the president that we’re going to have a demonstration that includes directed energy in our Golden Dome architecture, there’s a lot of energy going into that.”

The directed energy demonstration is expected to occur during the summer of 2028, Michael said, part of a series of planned Golden Dome-related events.

“There’s never been more effort in the department on this particular capability,” Michael said. “There [are] several companies that are emerging that have developed it, and several companies that are taking what they’ve already built and making it cheaper and better.”

Michael comments effectively tie the future of U.S. military laser weapons to a presidential priority with serious money and a hard deadline behind it.

The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2027 budget request contains $452 million in proposed R&D spending for the “development, integration, and assessment” of directed energy weapons in support of Golden Dome alone, more than triple the $142 million enacted under the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” reconciliation package Trump signed into law in July 2025.

In addition, the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy together have laid out plans to spend $675.93 million over the next five years on a containerized 150-300 kW Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS) as part of the military’s broader Golden Dome architecture.

Michael’s mention of Iran as having “doubled” the Pentagon’s interest in directed energy, meanwhile, adds an operational urgency that budget numbers alone don’t capture.

But there’s a problem with Michael’s declaration that the science of laser weapons is “largely done” and the engineering is what remains: engineering is exactly what has sunk U.S. military programs in the past.

Building effective laser weapons means ensuring they can be operated and maintained across a range of tactical environments by soldiers who aren’t laser specialists.

Consider the Army’s 50 kW Stryker-mounted Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD), which the service determined was “not mature enough” to become a program of record after rocky operational testing in the Middle East in 2024 exposed issues with the system’s heat dissipation and reliability in its vehicle-mounted configuration.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch summed up the problem with real-world directed energy weapon deployments in August 2025.

“We can’t get by with the thought of having clean rooms out in combat,” he said.

The Pentagon has been burning drones out of the sky with lasers since 1973, but it has yet to consistently translate demonstrators into battle-ready weapons that American service members can actually rely on outside of a controlled environment.

Indeed, the last decade has proven a graveyard of promising laser weapon programs.

Beyond DE M-SHORAD, the Army has also abandoned its 300 kW Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) project after downshifting from an eventual program of record to a single testbed that will inform future JLWS efforts.

The Navy’s 60 kW High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system, which only recently began testing at full power and successfully engaged drone targets aboard the 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 a handful of sustainment dollars.

The Marine Corps returned its five much-hyped Compact Laser Weapon System (CLaWS) units to Boeing without a replacement program in sight.

The Air Force spent years testing Raytheon’s High-Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) before abandoning it without a program of record.

These failures share a common pattern diagnosed in a detailed 2023 Government Accountability Office report: promising laser weapons 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, dooming them to obsolescence simply because the bureaucratic will to fight for them across budget cycles and shifting service priorities didn’t exist.

In his posture statement to the House Armed Services Committee in April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “institutional inertia.”

While Michael pointed to the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF) counter-drone group as a demand signal aggregator alongside and Golden Dome as a political forcing function, neither of those things solves the transition problem on its own.

Two efforts — likely Michael’s “suite of directed energy products that go from low-end to high-end” — will serve as the clearest early indicators as to whether the Pentagon’s current engineering confidence is warranted.

The first is the Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL), the Army’s modular 30 kW system explicitly envisioned as the service’s first directed energy program of record — and it appears to be moving faster than almost any laser effort before it.

Based on Army documents, E-HEL’s design philosophy looks like a direct response to DE M-SHORAD’s shortcomings, with the system decoupled from a specific vehicle platform and built for soldier-performable sustainment using line-replaceable units.

The service plans to “produce and rapidly field” 24 E-HEL systems over a five-year period, with the first prototype expected no later than the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 and initial procurement units slated for delivery by the end of fiscal year 2027.

If this timeline holds, E-HEL would mark the first time the U.S. military service has successfully transitioned a laser weapon to a genuine program of record.

The second is the aforementioned JLWS. The Navy plans on awarding $31.7 million in contracts for the development of a Joint Beam Control System (JBCS) — a critical component “capable of supporting” a 300-500 kW laser weapon system, according to the Navy’s fiscal year 2027 budget request — as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026, with another $30 million in contracts for the procurement and testing of containerized hardware expected by March 2027.

That timeline makes a Golden Dome demonstration in the summer of 2028 plausible, but it also means whatever system appears will likely be an early-stage weapon rather than a mature one. The current JLWS R&D roadmap runs through fiscal year 2031, and while a successful demonstration in two years would be a genuine milestone, it would still represent the early stages of a fielding process.

Whether the U.S. defense industrial base is ready to answer either program’s call remains an open question.

Manufacturing expansions from defense contractors like Huntington Ingalls Industries, AV, IPG Photonics and nLight are encouraging signs, but the industrial building blocks for laser weapons — from specialized optics with 12- to 18-month lead times to critical materials and rare earth elements sourced from Chinese-dominated supply chains — do not yet appear in place to enable the production systems at the scale Michael is describing.

The development of laser weapons has been defined for decades by a seemingly inescapable cycle of enthusiasm and disappointment.

Retired Air Force Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, former program manager for the service’s legendary YAL-1 Airborne Laser effort, perfectly captured the longstanding Pentagon consensus around directed energy in an interview for the 2018 book Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon.

“I’m tough on laser people these days,” Pawlikowski said. “It’s because they have a reputation of overpromising and underdelivering.”

With institutional support at a historic high, the Golden Dome-driven demonstration planned for summer 2028 may end up proving a moment of truth for the engineering challenges that have imperiled laser weapon programs past — or, at worst, yet another setback for the U.S. military’s long pursuit of directed energy.

The cruise missile-killing high-energy laser weapon the U.S. Defense Department envisions as part of its “Golden Dome for America” domestic missile defense shield is beginning to take shape.

The new Joint Laser Weapon System — a collaboration between the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy that Laser Wars first reported about in June 2025 — will initially consist of a containerized 150-kilowatt system with the potential to scale to at least 300kw to defeat incoming cruise missile threats, according to the Navy’s fiscal 2027 budget request.

The system will also include a Joint Beam Control System “capable of supporting” a 300-500kw laser weapon, the documents say.

The JLWS effort will leverage research and development lessons from the Navy’s 60kw High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system, which is currently installed on the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Preble, and the Army’s 300 kw Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) system, the first prototype of which the service plans on taking delivery of later this year.

The Navy will also “conduct upgrades” to its High Energy Laser Counter Anti-Ship Cruise Missile Project (HELCAP) test bed “as appropriate” in support of future JLWS testing.

While last year’s Army budget request detailed $51 million in mandatory funding for JLWS through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reconciliation bill under its Expanded Mission Area Missile program element, this year’s request does not contain any R&D funding for fiscal 2027. Instead, the proposal details plans for $337.8 million in spending starting in fiscal 2028 and running through fiscal 2031.

Based on the budget documents, it looks as though the service plans on closing out its IFPC-HEL activities first before kicking off its part of the JLWS effort.

The Navy, however, isn’t waiting around.

The service requested $94.825 million under its Directed Energy and Electric Weapon Systems program element in fiscal 2027 — up from just $14.5 million in fiscal 2026, as Laser Wars previously reported.

That amount includes $79.84 million under its Surface Navy Laser Weapon System effort to jumpstart JLWS R&D, sustain the service’s lone HELIOS system for future testing activities and upgrade the HELCAP test bed, which is also receiving a separate $14.978 injection, according to the service’s budget request.

The service plans on investing an additional $243.3 million into JLWS R&D under that program element through fiscal 2031.

Together, the Army and Navy requests total a vision of $675.93 million in R&D spending for the JLWS through fiscal 2031. The Navy plans on awarding $31.7 million in contracts for JBCS development as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026 and the $30 million in contracts for the procurement and testing of containerized JLWS by March 2027, according to budget documents.

It seems likely that Lockheed Martin will receive those contract. Not only is the defense prime the technical lead on both the HELIOS and IFPC-HEL efforts that will inform the JLWS, but it’s also already developing a containerized version of the former, a company executive revealed in August 2025.

While the Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget request also contains $452 million in R&D spending for the “development, integration, and assessment” of directed energy weapons in support of Golden Dome, the exact relationship with the Army and Navy’s JLWS efforts is unclear.

The Navy budget documents state that the $79.84 million allocated under SNLWS also includes funds to “begin development of a consolidated implementation plan” for all Golden Dome-related directed energy projects, “leveraging synergy and common weapon architectures between these efforts where possible” in coordination with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.

The dream of a laser weapon capable of shooting down cruise missiles is nearly as old as the laser itself.

The Pentagon first demonstrated the concept in the 1970s with the Navy ARPA Chemical Laser, or NACL, a deuterium fluoride system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that successfully engaged small missile targets but proved far too large and complex for practical deployments.

Those same challenges would befall its successor, the megawatt-class Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser, or MIRACL, despite the system successfully neutralizing a supersonic MQM-8 Vandal missile during testing in 1989.

The Gulf War briefly revived this dream in the U.S. Air Force’s ill-fated Airborne Laser program, which consumed more than $5 billion over nearly two decades before its cancellation in 2012.

More recently, the Navy’s Layered Laser Defense system, developed by Lockheed Martin in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research, successfully downed a target drone simulating a subsonic cruise missile in a 2022 demonstration at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the military’s latest attempt to validate the concept under realistic conditions.

The Pentagon clearly hopes that the JLWS will finally push its laser-based cruise missile defense efforts over the finish line. But as Laser Wars previously reported when the JLWS first became public in June 2025, such threats pose a far more complex challenge for directed energy weapons than the low-cost weaponized drones that are reshaping warfare on battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East.

Cruise missiles fly low and fast, hug terrain and execute evasive maneuvers that compress reaction time, while their hardened casings require far more sustained energy to defeat than the soft-bodied drones that current tactical lasers are optimized for.

Compounding the challenge, atmospheric interference can scatter or absorb beam energy before it reaches the target; even at 300kw power levels, laser weapons demand a degree of beam control and aim-point precision that no known system has yet demonstrated against a realistic cruise missile threat.

After years attempting to scale laser weapons to power levels suitable for cruise missile defense, the Pentagon’s push for a containerized solution also represents a departure from past vehicle-mounted or warship-integrated systems.

For the Navy in particular, Chief of Naval Operations and noted laser weapon champion Adm. Daryl Caudle has explicitly emphasized the pursuit of modular capabilities that the service can rapidly swap across its surface fleet for particular missions without lengthy and expensive stays in shipyards.

Look no further than the service’s October 2025 live-fire test of the Army’s 20kw Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) system, based on the LOCUST Laser Weapon System from defense contractor AV, from the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush.

The JLWS isn’t the only modular laser weapon the Navy is exploring.

The aforementioned Directed Energy and Electric Weapon Systems program element also includes $4.82 million in funding to support the “development, integration and marinization” of the Army’s Enduring High Energy Laser systems — the modular, 30kw laser weapon based on lessons from P-HEL and the aborted Stryker-mounted 50kw Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense system that the service envisions as its first directed energy program of record.

The Army planned on procuring two E-HEL units in fiscal 2026 and another pair the following year, according to the service’s budget request, with plans to “produce and rapidly field” up to 24 systems total in the coming years.

With its LOCUST system proven as a counter-drone capability both abroad and at home, AV appears the leading contender to clinch that contract in the coming years.

With institutional support for developing and fielding directed energy weapons at scale at a historic high, JLWS may prove a significant opportunity for the Pentagon to finally make its dream of missile-killing laser weapons a reality.

But the history of counter-cruise missile laser development is littered with programs that cleared every bureaucratic hurdle only to stumble on the physics and operational realities.

A containerized 150kw system may be a more modest and achievable goal than the behemoths that came before it, but whether JLWS can survive contact with both the budget process and real-world complexities of blasting cruise missiles out of the sky remains the open question.

The U.S. military is once again pursuing flying directed energy weapons to counter threats to American airspace, according to the Defense Department’s missile defense boss.

Speaking to members of Congress during a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces hearing on April 15 on the Pentagon’s planned missile defense activities for fiscal year 2027, U.S. Missile Defense Agency director Air Force Lt. Gen. Heath Collins stated that his organization was “all in” on “bringing directed energy to the fight,” including integrating such weapons into unmanned platforms for domestic air defense against hostile missiles and drones.

“We are certainly putting more attention into bringing potentially game-changing directed energy capabilities to bear in an unmanned platform,” Collins stated in response to a question from Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-New Mexico) regarding the MDA’s adoption of directed energy weapons.

“[An] air platform is what we’re focused on, so we can bring that capability to the edge of the fight and thin the herd on [unmanned aerial vehicles], potentially air threats and the like.”

While Collins did not identify specific directed energy capabilities of interest to the MDA, his written statement to the subcommittee notes that the agency is “accelerating the operational use of high-energy lasers on various platforms” to add a “critical, non-kinetic layer” to the existing U.S. missile defense architecture.

It’s unclear how much the MDA plans on spending on these efforts. While the “skinny” version at the Pentagon’s historic $1.5 trillion fiscal year 2027 budget request published in early April includes a significant boost to directed energy research and development for homeland missile defense under the Trump administration’s “Golden Dome for America” initiative, the documents do not contain any R&D or procurement efforts explicitly tied to the agency.

As Laser Wars readers likely already know, the Pentagon has been examining airborne laser weapons for missile defense since the 1970s, when the U.S. Air Force established its Airborne Laser Laboratory (ALL) program to explore the development of a laser-armed “aerial battleship” to protect strategic bombers from incoming interceptors.

In 2010, the service’s Boeing 747-based YAL-1 Airborne Laser Test Bed successfully destroyed several ballistic missiles in flight during testing but was subsequently canceled the following year due to “significant affordability and technology problems,” as then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it at the time.

As military laser weapons have evolved from bulky chemical-based systems to more compact and efficient solid-state designs in recent decades, U.S. military planners have increasingly explored integrating them into unmanned airborne platforms.

The High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) effort, initiated in 2003 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sought to develop a 150-kW system to integrate into both manned and unmanned aircraft before grinding to a halt in 2015.

The MDA itself pursued outfitting drones with laser weapons for ballistic missile defense for more than a decade through its Low Power Laser Demonstrator (LPLD) initiative before then-Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin threw cold water on the effort in 2020, citing the unique technical and environmental challenges inherent to mounting lasers on aircraft.

“I think it can be done as an experiment, but as a weapon system to equip an airplane with the kinds of lasers we think necessary — in terms of their power level, and all their support requirements, getting the airplane to altitudes where atmospheric turbulence can be mitigated appropriately — that combination of things doesn’t go on one platform,” Griffin told reporters in May 2020, per Breaking Defense. “So, I’m just extremely skeptical of that.”

Griffin isn’t wrong. Despite advances in laser technology, engineering a directed energy weapon that’s both powerful enough to destroy an incoming target and compact enough to integrate onto a relatively small airframe like a multirole combat aircraft or drone is a significant challenge.

Even if an integration were technically simple, operational feasibility is an major question: atmospheric conditions are limiting factors for laser weapons in any domain, but turbulence is a particularly thorny one for fast-moving airborne platforms tasked with maintaining a coherent beam long enough to successfully neutralize targets moving at equally high speeds.

Despite this skepticism, the dream of laser-armed drones appears alive and well. As recently as 2024, the MDA was gearing up for another run at airborne lasers, albeit with an initial focus on low-powered systems for tracking before ramping up to high-energy weapons.

In January 2025, the U.S. Navy released a slick vision of future naval operations that included notional drone wingmen outfitted with directed energy weapons running interference for manned aircraft. And in the last year, defense contractor General Atomics has released multiple renderings of its MQ-9B SkyGuardian and MQ-20 Avenger drones outfitted with laser weapons, although a company spokesman cautioned reporters that the systems were not designed for “any specific government program or contract.”

Directed energy weapons offer an alluring alternative to traditional missile-based air defenses, with low cost-per-shot, deep magazines and the ability to engage targets at the speed of light.

But the Pentagon has been here before: airborne laser concepts have repeatedly surged on waves of optimism, only to collapse under the weight of technical complexities and ballooning costs.

Indeed, the Air Force’s Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) and Self-Protect High-Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) efforts, which respectively sought to mount laser weapons on an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship and F-15 Eagle fighter jet, proved too challenging to even advance to airborne tests. (Undeterred, the service is poised to restart airborne laser efforts in fiscal year 2027 amid a surge in broad institutional support for directed energy. Time is a flat circle.)

Whether the MDA is barreling towards a genuine directed energy inflection point or just another familiar R&D cycle remains an open question.

For now, the message from Collins is clear: when it comes to determining whether airborne laser weapons are a viable missile defense capability, the U.S. military is once again willing to find out the hard way.

The U.S. military is paving the way for the regular deployment of high-energy laser weapons on American soil for air defense amid the expanding threat of low-cost weaponized drones.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Defense Department have reached a “landmark safety agreement” regarding the use of laser weapons to counter unauthorized drones at the US-Mexico border following a safety assessment that concluded such countermeasures “do not pose undue risk to passenger aircraft,” the FAA announced Friday.

The assessment and resulting agreement were the direct result of two laser incidents along the southern border of Texas in February, which prompted the FAA to abruptly close nearby airspace amid concerns over the potential impact on civilian air traffic. The incidents involved the U.S. Army’s 20 kilowatt Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL), a vehicle-mounted version of defense contractor AV’s LOCUST Laser Weapon System.

In the first incident, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol personnel used an AMP-HEL on loan from the Pentagon to engage an unidentified target near Fort Bliss, triggering an airspace shutdown above El Paso on Feb. 11. In the second, U.S. military personnel used an AMP-HEL near Fort Hancock to neutralize a “seemingly threatening” drone that turned out to belong to CBP, spurring another shutdown on Feb. 27.

“Following a thorough, data-informed Safety Risk Assessment, we determined that these systems do not present an increased risk to the flying public,” FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement. “We will continue working with our interagency partners to ensure the National Airspace System remains safe while addressing emerging drone threats.”

The “first of its kind” safety assessment, conducted in early March by the FAA and the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401) counter-drone organization at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, reportedly yielded two significant conclusions: 1) the LOCUST’s automatic shutoff mechanism will consistently prohibit the system from firing under unsafe circumstances, a point that AV executives have emphasized in recent weeks, and 2) in the event of a system failure, the laser beam itself cannot inflict catastrophic damage even on aircraft flying at its maximum effective range, let alone those at cruising altitudes.

Here’s how Aaron Westman, AV senior director for business development, described the LOCUST’s safety protocols in a company blog post on March 23:

Every time an operator presses the “fire” button, the system runs through a series of automated checks. Some examples include:

• Is the laser pointing away from protected “keep-out” zones?
• Are all internal subsystems operating within safe parameters?
• Is the system properly locked onto a target?
• Are safety interlock switches engaged?
• Are all software safety checks satisfied?

Each of these checks acts as a safety “vote.”

If any subsystem registers a “no vote,” the laser simply will not fire. An operator can press the trigger — and nothing happens. The system refuses to engage until all conditions are verified as safe.

These automated safeguards are built into both the hardware and the software of the system.

Here’s how DefenseScoop described the LOCUST’s potential effects on passing airframes based on an account from Army Col. Scott McLellan, JIATF-401 deputy director, of the testing at White Sands:

McLellan said the evaluation involved “localized” firing of the AMP-HEL from various distances at the fuselage of a Boeing 767 airliner that testers lugged on to White Sands to assess the system’s damaging effects, “or lack thereof” on aircraft material. He said it aimed to “disprove some myths” about the capability, noting “that energy clearly dissipates over time and space and doesn’t have the effect everyone thinks it does as far as lasers are concerned.”

A JIATF 401 spokesperson said the laser was fired at its “maximum effective range for up to 8 seconds” at the grounded fuselage, “demonstrating that even at full intensity, the laser caused no structural damage to the aircraft.”

As drone warfare spreads beyond distant conflicts, laser weapons are an increasingly attractive domestic countermeasure. While kinetic interceptors and electronic warfare may be considered suitable for chaotic battlefields, their potential for collateral effects makes them far too risky for consistent domestic applications. And even if collateral damage wasn’t a concern, expending expensive missiles on the 1,000 cartel-operated drones that cross the border with Mexico monthly is economically unsustainable, especially for a Pentagon that’s already rapidly burning through munitions as part of Operation Epic Fury against Iran. On paper, the argument seems obvious: Why not save those critical interceptors for high-end threats overseas and let domestic laser emplacements, with their deep magazines and minimal cost-per-shot, pull counter-drone duty at home?

Using laser weapons for domestic air defense wouldn’t be unprecedented. France deployed two 2 kw High Energy Laser for Multiple Applications – Power (HELMA-P) systems to secure the airspace over the country’s Île-de-France region during the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics. This past September, China’s People’s Liberation Army deployed several laser weapons across Beijing during a major military parade marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat at the end of World War II. As of January, the U.K. Ministry of Defense was reportedly drawing up plans to build a domestic laser screen, albeit composed of lower-power laser dazzlers, to protect military installations and other critical infrastructure. The Pentagon has even already considered laser weapons to reinforce the airspace above Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s residences at Fort McNair in Washington following a series of unauthorized drone incursions there.

Indeed, there’s a distinct possibility that laser weapons could see increasing domestic applications amid the U.S. military’s growing appetite for novel drone defenses. On April 2, JIATF-401 announced that it had funneled $20 million in counter-drone systems like the Dronebuster EW handset and Smart Shooter computerized riflescope to the U.S.-Mexico border in just four months.

Days later, the task force announced $100 million to enhance counter-drone capabilities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup starting in June “to protect stadiums and fan zones in 11 cities across nine states,” part of larger $600 million surge in counter-drone systems that also allocated $158 million to “defend the nation’s highest-priority defense critical infrastructure.”

With the Pentagon asking for $580 million in R&D funding just for JIATF-401 in its fiscal year 2027 budget request (and potentially $800 million in procurement cash), the task force appears poised to explore any and all possible solutions to the drone problem — and operationally, the FAA-Pentagon safety agreement helps establish laser weapons as a viable option.

That said, the safety agreement on its own is unlikely to open the floodgates for a sudden spate of laser weapon deployments along the U.S.-Mexico border, let alone for major events like the World Cup or critical infrastructure just yet. First, the agreement doesn’t appear to clarify who has final say in authorizing a laser engagement when U.S. military, CBP and FAA jurisdictions overlap — the precise ambiguity that yielded February’s airspace closures and, until resolved, will complicate future engagements during a fast-moving crisis. Second, the U.S. military’s arsenal of operational laser weapons is currently limited despite a stated goal of rapidly fielding new systems at scale within three years. Even with clear plans to surge directed energy research and development for homeland defense under President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome for America” missile shield, the age of sleek beam directors quietly standing watch along the US-Mexico border remains a long way off.

The FAA agreement may end up laying the foundation for a true domestic laser air defense architecture — a “Laser Dome” in all but name. Whether the U.S. military actually builds it, however, will depend not just the Pentagon’s promise to deploy laser weapons at scale, but whether Washington can finally sort out who’s in charge when a beam crosses into civilian airspace.

For decades, the U.S. military’s dream of high-energy laser weapons has been perpetually “five years away.”

Now, the Pentagon says it wants to finally make them an operational reality within the next three.

Speaking on a panel at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Pacific Operational Science and Technology conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, on March 9, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies Michael Dodd stated that the Defense Department plans on fielding directed energy weapons such as lasers and high-powered microwaves at scale within the next 36 months to defend service members from the threat of hostile drones, National Defense magazine reports.

While the Pentagon has deployed a handful of laser weapons overseas in recent years for operational testing and officially designated “scaled directed energy” as a critical technology area in November, this accelerated push for widespread fielding comes as U.S. forces engaged in the Operation Epic Fury struggle to counter waves of Iranian Shahed drones raining down across the Middle East, according to fellow panelist Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering James Mazol.

“We need to be able to deal with mass, and we need to be able to defeat mass that’s coming at us,” Mazol said, per National Defense.

These ambitions appear to have support at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Speaking at a White House press conference on Epic Fury on March 9, President Donald Trump touted the potential of laser weapons as a cheaper alternative to the pricey interceptor missiles U.S. forces currently rely on to counter drones and other aerial threats.

“The laser technology that we have now is incredible,” Trump, who previously declared laser weapons a key feature of his proposed “Trump-class” battleship, said. “It’s coming out pretty soon. Where literally lasers will do the work of, at a lot less cost, what the Patriots are doing and what other things are doing.”

That cost difference is at the heart of the Pentagon’s growing interest in directed energy. A single Patriot PAC-3 interceptor can cost more than $3 million, while the Iranian Shahed drones pummeling battlefields across the Middle East often runs between $20,000 and $50,000 — a punishing asymmetry for conventional militaries.

Directed energy weapons like high-energy lasers promise to invert this equation, with each shot requiring little more than the electricity required to generate the beam. And while laser weapons have clear limitations, they offer a potentially attractive complement to traditional missiles and other kinetic interceptors for countering the threat of low-cost weaponized drones.

This Pentagon-level push to field directed energy weapons comes as the military services have accelerated their own laser programs. Senior U.S. Navy leaders recently trumpeted their vision of “a laser on every ship” in the surface fleet, a notable shift from the caution that previously defined the service’s approach to directed energy.

The U.S. Army has laid out draft requirements to “produce and rapidly field” up to 24 new Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) systems in what might finally become the service’s first program of record. The Air Force is taking another run at both airborne laser weapons and ground-based systems for base defense after years of disappointment. The Marine Corps says it plans on investing in a “more deliberate program of record” for laser weapons, as a service spokesman previously told Laser Wars.

The Army and Navy are even teaming up on a brand new laser weapon system as part of Trump’s ambitious “Golden Dome for America” missile shield. All of this is occurring against the backdrop of $250 million infusion of funding for directed energy research and development included in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” reconciliation package the president signed into law in July 2025.

Taken together, these efforts may represent the Pentagon’s most serious attempt to transition laser weapons from experimental prototypes to routine military capabilities since President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983.

But while the R&D breakthroughs required for the orbital laser weapons envisioned by Reagan’s “Star Wars” never materialized, the technology has now advanced to the point where they are burning drones out of the sky in active conflict zones — and, occasionally, at home. Adaptive optics, more efficient power systems, improved thermal management and AI-assisted targeting have now converged to make laser weapons reliable and compact enough for real-world operations.

Transitioning laser weapons into fully funded military programs is as much a matter of institutional will as technological maturity. Many next-generation defense technologies end up languishing in the “valley of death” between R&D and acquisition because of shifting priorities or a lack of political support from stakeholders in the Pentagon or Congress; just look at the Navy’s experience with its electromagnetic railgun, which the service abandoned in 2021 after spending nearly $1 billion over two decades.

With senior military leaders, service secretaries and the commander-in-chief extolling the virtues of laser weapons, the chances of these systems actually watching over combat formations downrange have rarely been higher.

The most significant challenge facing the Pentagon’s scaled directed energy ambitions is the “scale” part. As Laser Wars previously reported, the essential components of laser weapons require rare earth elements and other critical minerals, the global production and processing of which China dominates.

And even if those inputs were abundant, advanced manufacturing capacity is not: U.S. defense contractors like AV and nLight, as well as Australia’s Electro Optic Systems (EOS), have all announced plans to boost production of laser weapons in recent months, but those manufacturing expansions will take months to ramp up and outputs will likely remain modest at perhaps a handful of systems a year (five to 10 annually at EOS’s new hub in Singapore, for example).

This pales in comparison to, say, the hundreds of FIM-91 Stinger missiles and Coyote interceptors that defense prime Raytheon can churn out in the same period. Scaling laser weapons from prototypes to scores of systems will require a defense industrial base that largely does not yet exist.

Scaled directed energy is not a standalone solution for the U.S. military’s air defense woes. Laser weapons, after all, aren’t magic: They can be extremely effective against drones and other targets, but they still require precious seconds of dwell time to inflict catastrophic damage and their performance can degrade depending on atmospheric conditions.

This makes them best suited as one segment of a broader layered air defense architecture rather than a wholesale replacement for missiles and guns. In practice, this means pairing lasers with kinetic interceptors, electronic warfare systems and other specialized countermeasures, all coordinated through a unified command-and-control system that can assign the right weapon to the right target at the right moment. Lasers and other exotic directed energy systems may help solve the cost problem posed by drone attacks, but only by working as part of a larger air defense ecosystem designed to handle the full spectrum of aerial threats.

After decades of laser weapons promises, the Pentagon has given itself a deadline. Now it has to prove that it can deliver — fast.