Sometime in the last several months, a laser or microwave weapon turret arrived at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota. It was not there for a demonstration. According to Sen. John Hoeven, whose office confirmed the selection, Grand Forks is now a live testing and assessment site for directed-energy counter-drone technology, part of a broader Pentagon push to install such weapons at five U.S. military installations. The goal: give base defenders a way to destroy cheap, fast drone swarms without burning through million-dollar missiles to do it.
The effort is being run by a new Pentagon organization called Joint Interagency Task Force 401, or JIATF 401, which the Defense Department formally established to deliver affordable counter-small-unmanned-aircraft-system (C-sUAS) capabilities. The word “affordable” is the operative term. A single surface-to-air interceptor missile can cost anywhere from $100,000 to north of $400,000. The commercial drones it might be asked to shoot down often cost a few hundred dollars apiece. Directed-energy weapons, which fire concentrated beams of light or electromagnetic energy, promise to flip that math: their per-shot cost is closer to the price of diesel generator fuel than the price of a missile.
Why the urgency is real
The Pentagon did not create JIATF 401 in a vacuum. Over the past two years, small drones have proven their lethality and their nuisance value in ways that directly threaten U.S. installations. In Ukraine, $500 first-person-view quadcopters have destroyed armored vehicles worth millions. Houthi forces in Yemen have launched drone and missile barrages that forced U.S. Navy destroyers to expend expensive SM-2 and SM-6 interceptors at an unsustainable rate in the Red Sea. Closer to home, unexplained drone swarms were spotted over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia during late 2023 and into 2024, and a wave of mysterious drone sightings over New Jersey in late 2024 rattled the public and drew sharp questions from Congress.
Fixed military bases, with their known GPS coordinates and large, static footprints, are especially vulnerable. A coordinated swarm of small drones carrying explosives or surveillance payloads could overwhelm a base’s existing defenses, which were designed to track and intercept larger, faster aircraft and missiles, not dozens of low-and-slow quadcopters arriving simultaneously. JIATF 401 exists to close that gap before an adversary exploits it on American soil.
What directed-energy weapons actually do
The term “directed energy” covers two main categories relevant to drone defense. High-energy lasers focus an intense beam of light on a target, heating its structure until it burns through a wing, ignites a battery, or detonates an onboard payload. High-power microwave systems emit a focused burst of electromagnetic energy that fries a drone’s electronics, effectively killing its flight controller, GPS receiver, and communications link in a fraction of a second. Both types offer a key advantage over traditional interceptors: they draw from electrical power rather than a finite supply of missiles, giving defenders a theoretically unlimited magazine as long as the generator keeps running.
The U.S. military has tested several such systems in recent years. The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Tactical High-power Operational Responder, known as THOR, is a microwave weapon specifically designed to knock down drone swarms and has been deployed to overseas locations for evaluation. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin have both developed high-energy laser prototypes for the Army’s Indirect Fire Protection Capability program. None of these systems have been named in connection with the JIATF 401 deployments, and neither the task force’s announcement nor Hoeven’s statement identifies a specific contractor or platform. But the technology is no longer experimental in the laboratory sense; it has been tested in field conditions, and the Pentagon is now moving it onto operational bases.
Grand Forks is confirmed; the rest is less certain
Grand Forks Air Force Base is the only installation confirmed by a primary U.S. government source. Hoeven’s statement described the selection as a step toward strengthening the defense of critical installations, and the base’s existing role in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations makes it a logical proving ground. The broader claim that five bases have been selected traces to secondary reporting, including coverage by a Ukrainian news outlet with close exposure to modern drone warfare. Several U.S. defense trade publications have repeated the five-site figure, but as of June 2026, no official DoD press release, congressional notification, or budget justification document has listed all five locations by name.
That does not mean the claim is wrong. The Pentagon routinely withholds specific site information for security reasons, and the five-base figure is consistent with the scale of investment JIATF 401’s creation implies. But readers should understand the distinction: one base is confirmed on the record, and the total count awaits corroboration from a primary government source.
The interagency angle matters
JIATF 401’s full name includes the word “interagency,” and its mission statement explicitly covers countering “unlawful” drone activity, not just adversarial military threats. That language signals coordination well beyond the uniformed military. Unauthorized drone flights near airports, power plants, and government buildings have surged in recent years, and federal agencies from the Department of Homeland Security to the Federal Aviation Administration have struggled with fragmented authorities over who can detect, track, and neutralize rogue drones in domestic airspace.
The task force’s cross-government structure suggests the Pentagon is positioning itself to share directed-energy tools and tactics with civilian agencies that currently lack effective options for dealing with drone incursions. Whether that means deploying military-grade systems at civilian critical infrastructure sites or feeding sensor data to law enforcement remains to be seen, but the institutional framework is now in place for that kind of cooperation.
What we still do not know
Several important questions remain unanswered. No official cost-per-shot data tied to the JIATF 401 program has been released, though Pentagon officials have cited figures as low as a few dollars per laser engagement in congressional testimony on related programs. Performance metrics, including effective range, the time a laser must dwell on a target to destroy it, degradation in rain or fog, and how many drones a single system can engage per minute, are absent from the public record. The timeline for moving from testing to a declared operational capability is also unclear; JIATF 401’s own release frames its work in terms of delivering capabilities, not hitting a fixed deadline.
The identities of the four unconfirmed bases, the specific systems being installed, and the contracts funding them will likely surface through future budget documents, environmental assessments tied to base modifications, or additional statements from defense officials and lawmakers. Until then, the confirmed picture is narrower than the headline suggests but still significant: the Pentagon has created a dedicated organization for affordable drone defense, and it is placing real directed-energy hardware at real bases for real-world evaluation.
A cost curve the military cannot ignore
Strip away the unknowns and the strategic logic is hard to argue with. The proliferation of small, cheap drones has created a threat that legacy air defenses were never built to handle. Every interceptor missile fired at a $300 quadcopter deepens a cost imbalance that an adversary can exploit simply by building more drones. Directed-energy weapons offer the most promising path to reversing that equation, trading the expense of kinetic munitions for the relative cheapness of electrical power. JIATF 401’s creation and the confirmed deployment at Grand Forks show the Pentagon is no longer content to study the problem. Whether the technology performs as advertised under operational conditions, at scale, and across multiple bases will determine whether this moment marks a genuine shift in how the United States defends its home installations or another chapter in the long, uneven history of directed-energy promises.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
