Somewhere in the Atlantic this spring, the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush pointed a laser at an incoming drone and burned it out of the sky. The weapon, called LOCUST, was bolted to the flight deck not as an experiment in some distant future of naval warfare but as a live-fire answer to a problem the Navy faces right now: swarms of cheap, expendable threats that traditional missiles were never designed to stop.
AV Inc. announced in April 2026 that it had successfully demonstrated the LOCUST directed-energy weapon system aboard the Bush, engaging both airborne drones and small surface craft during at-sea testing. The demonstration marked the first confirmed instance of this particular laser system firing from a carrier deck against representative threats in open-ocean conditions, where ship vibration, salt spray, and unpredictable target geometry all conspire against precision optics.
Why the Navy wants a laser on every hull
The urgency behind LOCUST traces directly to the Red Sea. Since late 2023, Houthi forces have launched waves of one-way attack drones and anti-ship missiles at commercial tankers and U.S. Navy destroyers transiting the Bab el-Mandeb strait. The USS Carney and USS Mason each expended dozens of surface-to-air missiles during those engagements. An Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) costs roughly $1 million to $2 million per round. A Rolling Airframe Missile runs close to $1 million. The drones they were shooting down cost a few thousand dollars each.
That arithmetic is unsustainable. A directed-energy weapon that can disable an inbound drone for the cost of the electricity drawn from the ship’s own generators would fundamentally reshape the economics of fleet defense. The Navy has been chasing that goal for more than a decade, fielding earlier prototypes like the Laser Weapon System (LaWS) aboard the USS Ponce in 2014 and the more powerful HELIOS system aboard the destroyer USS Preble. LOCUST represents the latest entry in that progression, though its exact power output, beam type, and effective range have not been disclosed in any public filing.
What the demonstration actually proved
The confirmed facts are narrow but significant. AV’s announcement, distributed through Business Wire, establishes that a physical event occurred: a laser weapon was installed on a named warship, taken to sea, and fired at targets meant to simulate the drone and fast-boat threats the fleet encounters in contested waterways. That is a verifiable milestone, and it matters because many directed-energy programs have stalled at the land-based testing stage, never making the leap to a pitching, rolling ship.
What the announcement cannot confirm is how well LOCUST performed against military effectiveness thresholds. The filing comes from the system’s manufacturer, and like most defense announcements distributed through commercial newswires, it is crafted to highlight progress. No independent assessment from the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) or the Navy’s Operational Test and Evaluation Force (OPTEVFOR) has been released to corroborate the claimed results.
A separate U.S. Government Accountability Office report, cataloged as GAO-26-108781, sheds light on the institutional gauntlet any new shipboard weapon must survive. The report examines how OPTEVFOR and DOT&E approve and oversee realistic combat evaluations of systems destined for the fleet. While it does not name LOCUST, it describes the exact pathway the laser must travel before it earns a recommendation for full-rate production: warfighter involvement in test planning, operationally realistic scenarios including electronic warfare interference and multi-axis attacks, and an independent verdict on whether the system is effective, suitable, and survivable.
The gaps that matter
Several questions sit unanswered in the public record, and they are not minor.
Power and range. LOCUST’s output class has not been disclosed. Earlier Navy laser prototypes ranged from 30 kilowatts (LaWS) to 60 kilowatts or higher (HELIOS). The power level determines whether the weapon can defeat only slow, unarmored drones at close range or whether it can engage faster, harder targets at tactically useful distances. Without this figure, analysts cannot compare LOCUST to competing systems.
Multi-target capacity. A single laser engaging one drone at a time is useful but insufficient against a coordinated swarm. Whether LOCUST can slew rapidly between targets, or whether multiple units would need to be installed per ship, remains unknown.
Weather and sustained use. Lasers lose effectiveness in rain, fog, and heavy humidity because water droplets scatter the beam. The at-sea demonstration presumably occurred in conditions favorable enough to proceed, but the Navy’s operational need spans the North Atlantic in winter, the Persian Gulf in summer, and everything in between. No environmental performance data has been published.
Cost per shot. Advocates routinely cite the near-zero marginal cost of a laser engagement compared to a kinetic interceptor. That framing omits the cost of the weapon system itself, thermal management hardware, optics maintenance, and the additional electrical generation capacity a ship may need. None of these figures appear in the available sources.
Who is AV? The Business Wire filing provides limited detail on AV Inc.’s corporate background, ownership structure, or prior defense contracts. Readers should note that the company’s own characterization of the test is the only public account so far.
The testing road ahead
The GAO report offers a useful map of what comes next, even if it does not mention LOCUST by name. GAO found that the Navy’s operational testing process works best when the sailors who will actually fight with a system are brought into test planning early. When that engagement is delayed, test results tend to arrive late, answer the wrong questions, and force expensive retesting. The report documents recurring delays in Navy shipbuilding programs tied to exactly this problem.
For LOCUST, the first major milestone to watch is an OPTEVFOR announcement that the system has entered formal operational testing. That step would signal the Navy believes the technology is mature enough to evaluate under conditions far more stressful than a manufacturer’s demonstration: degraded sensor environments, electronic jamming, simultaneous inbound threats from multiple bearings, and sailors operating the system under fatigue and time pressure.
The second milestone is any public reference by DOT&E or GAO to the results of that testing. A DOT&E annual report or a follow-on GAO review that names a shipboard laser and grades its performance would carry far more weight than a press release. Those independent evaluations would be the first real indication of whether LOCUST is not just technically promising but operationally reliable enough to earn a permanent place in the fleet.
A carrier’s defense calculus is changing
What is clear, even with the gaps, is that the Navy has moved a directed-energy weapon from a laboratory bench to the flight deck of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and fired it at targets meant to simulate the threats keeping fleet commanders up at night. That is not a small thing. The Bush is not a test barge; it is a frontline warship with a crew of roughly 5,000 and an air wing worth billions of dollars. Putting an unproven laser on that deck signals that the service considers the drone and fast-boat threat serious enough to accept the risk of testing aboard a capital ship.
Whether LOCUST clears the demanding evaluation process that stands between a successful demo and a fleet-wide installation order is a question the available evidence cannot yet answer. The technology has taken a visible step forward. The harder steps, proving it works when everything else is going wrong, are still ahead.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
