Somewhere on the wind-scoured prairie of Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, the U.S. military is installing weapons that fight drones not with missiles but with focused beams of light and bursts of electromagnetic energy. The base is the first publicly confirmed site in a Pentagon push to place directed-energy counter-drone systems at multiple domestic installations, a program that marks the moment laser and high-powered microwave technology moved out of the lab and onto the flight line.
The effort is a direct response to a threat the military can no longer treat as theoretical. Small, cheap unmanned aircraft have reshaped combat in Ukraine, overwhelmed air defenses in the Middle East, and, closer to home, triggered security alarms when unexplained drones were spotted repeatedly over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia in late 2023 and over parts of New Jersey in late 2024. Intercepting a $500 quadcopter with a $1 million missile is a losing equation, and the Pentagon knows it.
Grand Forks: the first named site
Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota announced in early 2025 that Grand Forks had been selected for deployment, testing, and assessment of counter-UAS technology, specifying that the expected hardware included “high-powered microwave, laser or similar technologies.” The announcement tied the base to two named efforts: Project ULTRA and the Point Defense Battle Lab, both focused on developing and evaluating counter-drone capabilities under operational conditions.
Grand Forks is a logical proving ground. The base already supports unmanned aircraft missions, commands vast open airspace over the northern plains, and has the security perimeter and range access needed to fire experimental weapons without risk to nearby communities. Integrating directed-energy units into an existing command-and-control structure also lets the Air Force study the full kill chain: how operators detect, track, and classify an incoming drone before deciding whether to engage it with a laser, a microwave pulse, or a conventional weapon.
The organizational machinery behind the rollout
Getting prototype weapons off a test range and onto an active base requires more than good engineering. It requires bureaucratic plumbing. The Defense Department created JIATF-401, a Joint Interagency Task Force charged with delivering affordable counter-small-UAS capabilities across all military branches. The task force consolidates authorities and funding under a single command so that a promising system does not stall in handoffs between the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.
JIATF-401’s mandate explicitly emphasizes affordability, a signal that cost-per-engagement will be weighted as heavily as raw performance in deciding which technologies advance. That metric favors directed energy. A laser powered by a base’s electrical grid can, in theory, fire for the cost of diesel fuel or grid electricity, while a single Coyote interceptor drone costs roughly $100,000 and a surface-to-air missile far more. The challenge is proving that the cheaper option works reliably enough to replace, not just supplement, kinetic defenses.
How the weapons actually work
The Government Accountability Office published a science and technology spotlight on directed-energy weapons that serves as the clearest unclassified primer on the physics involved. Two families of weapons are relevant here.
High-energy lasers concentrate a beam of photons on a target, heating its skin until the airframe burns through or its sensors are blinded. Systems like the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Demonstrator Laser Weapon System and Lockheed Martin’s LANCE have been tested against small drones at ranges of one to several kilometers. The beam travels at the speed of light, eliminating the lead-angle calculations that complicate conventional gunnery, but it must dwell on a single spot long enough to do damage, which limits how quickly an operator can shift from one drone to the next in a swarm.
High-powered microwave (HPM) weapons take a different approach. Instead of burning a hole, they flood a cone-shaped area with electromagnetic energy that overloads and fries the circuitry inside every drone caught in the beam. The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Tactical High-Power Operational Responder, known as THOR, was designed specifically for this mission and has been tested against drone swarms in field exercises. HPM’s advantage is area effect: one pulse can disable multiple targets simultaneously. Its disadvantage is shorter effective range compared to lasers and the need for substantial electrical power.
Both approaches share engineering hurdles the GAO flagged as unresolved at the time of its report: generating and storing enough electrical power for sustained firing, dissipating the heat that high-energy systems produce, and coping with atmospheric interference from rain, dust, humidity, and turbulence that can scatter or weaken a beam. Any credible performance data from Grand Forks or other sites should address those constraints head-on.
Five bases, but only one name on the record
Pentagon officials and congressional sources have referenced a broader deployment to multiple domestic installations, and reporting from defense outlets has cited a figure of five bases. As of June 2026, however, Grand Forks is the only site confirmed by name in a primary government source. No Defense Department announcement reviewed for this article lists all five locations together, and no base commander or service spokesperson has provided on-the-record confirmation of the full roster or the timeline for each site to receive hardware.
That gap matters. Without knowing which bases are involved, outside observers cannot assess whether the Pentagon is prioritizing installations that face the highest drone threat, those with the best test infrastructure, or some combination. It also makes it difficult to track spending. Congress increased counter-UAS funding significantly in the fiscal year 2025 and 2026 defense budgets, but the line items are spread across multiple programs and services, and connecting dollars to specific base deployments requires disclosure the Pentagon has not yet provided.
Readers should treat the five-base figure as plausible but unconfirmed until the Defense Department or a congressional committee publishes a named list.
Lessons from Ukraine and the Middle East
The urgency behind this program is inseparable from what the U.S. military has watched unfold abroad. In Ukraine, both sides deploy hundreds of small drones daily for reconnaissance, artillery spotting, and direct attack. First-person-view kamikaze drones costing a few hundred dollars have destroyed armored vehicles worth millions. In the Middle East, Houthi forces and Iranian-backed militias have used drone swarms and loitering munitions to probe and sometimes penetrate sophisticated air-defense networks.
Those conflicts have demonstrated that mass matters. A defender who must spend a six-figure interceptor on every incoming drone will run out of missiles before the attacker runs out of drones. Directed energy flips that calculus, at least on paper, by making each engagement nearly free after the initial capital cost of the weapon system. But the battlefield has also shown that attackers adapt quickly, flying lower, using electronic countermeasures, and coordinating swarms to saturate defenses from multiple angles. Whether the systems at Grand Forks are being tested against threat profiles that mirror those real-world tactics is not clear from public documentation.
What success would look like
The practical test for directed-energy counter-drone defense is not whether a laser can burn a single quadcopter on a clear day. That has been demonstrated repeatedly. The test is whether these systems can operate reliably in rain, snow, dust, and darkness; retarget fast enough to handle a coordinated swarm; run for hours without overheating; and do all of that at a cost low enough to justify replacing or reducing the missile batteries they are meant to complement.
Until the Pentagon releases rigorous field data from Grand Forks and any additional sites, the deployment of lasers and high-powered microwaves at U.S. bases is best understood as an ambitious and necessary experiment. The physics works. The engineering is catching up. The question now is whether the hardware on the North Dakota prairie can perform under the conditions that matter, not in a PowerPoint briefing, but on a cold night when a swarm of cheap drones appears on radar and someone has to decide what to shoot.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
