Navy still bullish on lasers but widely-deployed directed-energy ship defense remains years away

“I'm just frustrated that it's taking so long, but that's not due to lack of effort in trying,” said the commander of U.S. Navy Pacific surface warships, describing the service’s latest projects that seek practical anti-air defenses of pure energy. 

One problem—in fact, “the No. 1 barrier,” according to Vice Adm. Brendan McLane of Surface Forces Pacific—is that there’s no commercial market for lasers powerful enough to down an incoming missile from miles away.

But the military’s own need for defenses that are less expensive and more flexible than interceptor missiles grows more urgent by the day. Offensive missiles and armed drones are getting cheaper, deadlier, and more widely used; witness the anti-shipping campaign in the Red Sea and the April 16 aerial attack on Israel.

To be sure, the Navy has deployed experimental and prototype lasers and other directed-energy weapons for more than a decade. Eight warships currently carry the Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy, or ODIN, a small laser to blind the sensors of incoming drones and missiles. But it doesn’t do well against weapons that move really fast or lack optical sensors. 

“We'll continue operational deployments and provide key data to inform our defensive efforts for that,” McLane said. 

The Navy has higher hopes for the 120-kilowatt High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance, or HELIOS, even if enthusiasm has waned since a 2022 deployment aboard the destroyer Preble.

“We've tested it a few times. It hasn't turned out the way we want, yet,” McLane said. “We continue to partner with Lockheed Martin to kind of get it there. But the potential and the capability is impressive. It's going to be capable of counter-UAS, counter-ISR,” among other things. 

The Navy is also working on a prototype 300-kilowatt laser with the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The service “will continue the initiative by commencing testing and then development up to 500 kilowatts for further advanced technical understandings, experimentations,” said McLane.

Yet another effort is the Office of Naval Research’s High Energy Laser Counter-ASCM Program, a 300-kilowatt laser specifically designed to take out the sort of anti-ship missiles that Iranian-backed forces are shooting in the Red Sea. The service is trying to build a beam test site and hoping to demonstrate it on land next year. 

“We hope to be able to transfer to our ships if they prove to be successful,” McLane said. 

The Navy is also looking to test METEOR, a high-powered microwave weapon that can defend a wider area (but at shorter range) than narrow-beamed laser, on its ships as early as 2026. 

But even if all of these efforts are successful, the Navy still has a ways to go before lasers play a more regular role in ship defense. It will be especially important to see how all those types of systems work together against a variety of threats. 

“There's a lot of prototypes out there for both high-powered microwave and lasers. Right now, the issue is partially the maturity, but partially the [concepts of operation] of how it would work in terms of: how you would use a laser in conjunction with other things,” William LaPlante, the Pentagon’s chief buyer, told reporters on Wednesday. “All these things have to be used together, and they all have limitations, and they all have sweet spots.”

The bottom line, said LaPlante, is that getting new lasers and directed-energy weapons on ships is only the first step to making them effective. 

“We're finding that there's a lot of promise in those systems. But they're not the only answer, and they're going to have to be part of a layered system of defenses."

McLane said the Navy is starting to think about that.

 “We're still kind of with one piece of directed-energy equipment per ship as we're testing and learning. We haven't gone to the point where we can put multiple things on one ship to test the—as you suggest—like the layered defense of something. But I think in the next few years we should be able to get there.”

For now, the military will keep firing expensive missiles at cheap drones.

“We would welcome being able to bring systems in, but direct energy is not the panacea,”  CENTCOM command Gen. Michael Kurilla told Congress in March. “I would tell you: what's worse than shooting a million-dollar missile on a $20,000 drone is that $20,000 drone hitting a $2 billion ship with 300 sailors on it.”

Audrey Decker contributed to this post.