A military laser mounted on a truck chassis shot down a U.S. Customs and Border Protection drone near Fort Bliss, Texas, earlier this year, forcing the FAA to shut down surrounding airspace and triggering pointed demands from Congress about who authorized the shot. Weeks later, the Pentagon doubled down: five domestic military bases now host directed-energy weapons specifically designed to kill small drones at a cost the Army says can be measured in single-digit dollars per shot, a fraction of the six-figure price tag attached to conventional interceptor missiles.
The five installations, announced by the Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401) through U.S. Northern Command, are Fort Bliss and Fort Huachuca near the southwestern border, Naval Base Kitsap in Washington state, Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Together they form the Pentagon’s first domestic counter-drone laser pilot, authorized under the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.
Why these five bases
The selection is not random. Each installation protects a different category of high-value asset and sits inside a different kind of airspace, giving the military a broad test bed for directed-energy operations on American soil.
Fort Bliss and Fort Huachuca straddle the border region where unauthorized drone flights have surged in recent years, some linked to cartel surveillance and smuggling operations. Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor is home to the Pacific Fleet’s Trident ballistic-missile submarine force, among the most sensitive military targets in the country. Grand Forks AFB supports intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. And Whiteman AFB is the sole operating base for the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber fleet, making it a natural priority for any air-defense upgrade.
The geographic spread also tests how laser weapons perform across drastically different climates and terrain, from the arid desert Southwest to the damp Pacific Northwest, a variable that matters because atmospheric moisture, dust, and turbulence can all degrade a laser beam’s effectiveness.
The Fort Bliss shoot-down that forced the conversation
The pilot program did not emerge in a vacuum. According to an Associated Press investigation, a U.S. military laser system at Fort Bliss engaged and destroyed a CBP drone operating in American airspace near the Fort Hancock area along the Texas border. The FAA subsequently closed portions of the surrounding airspace, a step that disrupted civilian flight operations and drew immediate scrutiny.
Members of Congress who learned of the incident demanded formal notification procedures, arguing that the military had fired a high-energy weapon domestically without adequate coordination with civilian agencies or legislative oversight bodies. The specific details of the engagement, including whether the CBP aircraft had filed a flight plan, whether the laser crew positively identified the target before firing, and what deconfliction procedures were in place, have not been publicly disclosed.
Fort Bliss now appears on both sides of the ledger: the site of the first known friendly-fire laser incident on U.S. soil and one of the five installations chosen to expand directed-energy operations. That overlap signals the Army views the technology as too important to pause, even as the regulatory framework around it remains unsettled.
The economics behind “pennies a shot”
The cost argument is central to why the Pentagon is pushing laser weapons so aggressively. A solid-state laser converts diesel-generated electricity into a focused beam of light. Once the system is powered up, each additional shot consumes only the electricity needed to sustain the beam for a few seconds, a marginal cost that Army officials and defense contractors have publicly estimated at roughly $1 to $10 per engagement. By contrast, a single Coyote interceptor drone, one of the military’s current counter-UAS tools, costs approximately $100,000. A Stinger missile runs north of $120,000.
That asymmetry matters because the drone threat is defined by volume. A small commercial quadcopter rigged with explosives can cost a few hundred dollars. Defending against swarms of cheap drones with six-figure missiles is economically unsustainable, a lesson driven home by battlefield experience in Ukraine, where both sides have launched thousands of low-cost unmanned systems. The laser flips the cost curve: the shooter becomes cheaper than the target.
Exact per-shot cost data from the five pilot sites has not been published. The figures cited by Army leadership and manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin come from controlled testing environments, and real-world costs will depend on maintenance cycles, power generation logistics, and how often atmospheric conditions force operators to increase beam dwell time. Still, even skeptical analysts generally accept that directed-energy engagements are orders of magnitude cheaper than kinetic alternatives.
Which laser systems are in play
JIATF-401 has not publicly identified the specific hardware deployed at each of the five bases. The Army has, however, been developing and testing several directed-energy platforms in recent years that fit the “truck-mounted” description.
The most prominent is the Directed Energy Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense system, or DE M-SHORAD, which mounts a 50-kilowatt-class laser on a Stryker armored vehicle. Developed by Raytheon (now RTX), DE M-SHORAD completed a series of live-fire tests and was delivered to Army units for operational evaluation. A second candidate is the Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL), a more powerful system intended for fixed-site or semi-fixed base defense.
Whether the pilot uses one of these systems, a combination, or a different variant tailored to each site’s threat profile has not been confirmed. That ambiguity extends to key operational specs: effective range, beam power, engagement timeline from detection to destruction, and how many consecutive shots each unit can fire before requiring cooldown or maintenance.
The airspace problem no laser can burn through
Destroying a drone with a beam of light is, in some respects, the easy part. The harder challenge is integrating a weapon that fires at the speed of light into an airspace system built around the assumption that only aircraft, not directed-energy beams, move through it.
The FAA manages the national airspace system and has regulatory authority over everything that flies, including drones. Military bases operate under special-use airspace designations, but the boundaries are not impermeable. Commercial flights, general aviation, and other government agency aircraft (like the CBP drone destroyed at Fort Bliss) routinely transit near or through military airspace. A laser powerful enough to melt a drone’s electronics can also damage a manned aircraft’s sensors, windshield, or the eyesight of its crew.
The FY2026 NDAA gave the Defense Department legal authority to employ directed-energy weapons against unmanned aircraft over domestic military installations, but it did not resolve the practical question of how laser crews will coordinate in real time with FAA controllers, neighboring airports, and other agencies operating drones in the same region. The Fort Bliss incident demonstrated that those coordination gaps are not hypothetical.
Neither the JIATF-401 announcement nor available reporting specifies what deconfliction protocols are now in place at the five pilot sites, whether the FAA has embedded liaison officers at any of the installations, or what notification procedures exist for nearby civilian airports when a laser system is active.
What drove the urgency
Several converging pressures explain why the Pentagon moved to deploy laser counter-drone systems at domestic bases in 2026 rather than continuing to test them overseas or on remote ranges.
The most immediate catalyst was a string of unexplained drone incursions over U.S. military installations in 2023 and 2024. Langley Air Force Base in Virginia reported repeated nighttime drone flights over the installation that went on for weeks before the military could identify or stop them. Similar incidents occurred at other bases. The episodes exposed a gap: the U.S. military, which fields the most advanced air-defense systems on the planet, had limited tools to deal with small, slow, low-flying unmanned aircraft over its own domestic facilities.
Overseas, the threat had already matured. Houthi forces in Yemen used Iranian-supplied drones to attack Saudi oil infrastructure and coalition military positions. In Ukraine, Russia and Ukraine both employed massive drone campaigns that overwhelmed traditional air defenses. The Pentagon’s own operations in the Middle East, including counter-drone engagements at bases in Iraq and Syria, reinforced the conclusion that kinetic interceptors alone could not keep pace with the volume and low cost of drone attacks.
Congress responded with the NDAA provisions that authorized domestic directed-energy use, and JIATF-401 was stood up specifically to coordinate the counter-drone mission across military and interagency lines. The five-site pilot is the first visible product of that effort.
What to watch as the pilot unfolds
The next several months will determine whether truck-mounted lasers become a permanent fixture at U.S. military bases or remain an experimental capability hemmed in by regulatory and safety concerns.
The most telling indicators will not be the number of drones destroyed. They will be the transparency and rigor of the data the Pentagon releases. Engagement logs showing how many targets were detected, tracked, and successfully destroyed, along with any misses or aborted shots, would allow independent analysts to evaluate the technology’s real-world reliability. Published cost-per-engagement figures from operational settings, not manufacturer estimates, would test the “pennies a shot” premise. And documented coordination protocols with the FAA, including any airspace closures or near-miss incidents, would show whether the military has solved the deconfliction problem that the Fort Bliss shoot-down exposed.
Equally important is whether the program expands. Five bases is a pilot. The U.S. military operates hundreds of domestic installations, many of them near population centers with busy airspace. Scaling directed-energy defenses beyond a handful of test sites will require not just more hardware but a regulatory framework that civilian aviation authorities, local governments, and the public can accept.
For now, the lasers are live at five bases, the cost math favors directed energy over missiles, and the first real-world engagement on American soil ended with a friendly drone in pieces and an airspace shutdown that nobody planned for. The technology works. The question is whether everything around it, the rules, the coordination, the oversight, can keep up.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
