Welcome to the Laser Wars
Amid a rising tide of adversary drones and missile attacks, laser weapons are finally poised to enter the battlefield.
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.
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.