A single Stinger missile costs roughly $400,000. A Patriot interceptor runs closer to $4 million. The small drones they are increasingly being asked to shoot down can be built for a few hundred dollars. That math, Pentagon officials have argued, is unsustainable. Their proposed solution: directed-energy weapons, systems that use high-energy lasers or high-power microwaves to destroy targets at a cost of just dollars per shot, drawing power from a generator rather than a finite magazine of munitions.
During Senate Armed Services Committee testimony on the fiscal year 2027 defense budget request, senior defense officials described plans to procure directed-energy weapons in quantities of “tens to hundreds” over the coming years. The language, while imprecise, marks a significant shift from decades of small-batch experimentation. If the Pentagon follows through, it would represent the first large-scale operational buy of laser and microwave weapons in U.S. military history.
The push comes as cheap, lethal drones have reshaped warfare from Ukraine to the Red Sea, exposing gaps in air defenses designed to counter missiles and manned aircraft rather than swarms of expendable unmanned systems.
Why drones broke the old playbook
The urgency behind directed energy is rooted in what militaries have witnessed since 2022. In Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian forces have deployed tens of thousands of first-person-view (FPV) drones and Iranian-designed Shahed one-way attack drones, overwhelming conventional air defenses through sheer volume. In the Red Sea, Houthi forces have used drone and missile barrages to threaten commercial shipping, forcing U.S. Navy destroyers to expend multimillion-dollar interceptors against threats costing a fraction of the price.
Traditional air defense was built around a simple assumption: the interceptor is cheaper than the thing it intercepts. Drones have inverted that equation. A military that fires a $400,000 missile at a $500 drone loses the cost exchange every time, and eventually runs out of missiles before the adversary runs out of drones.
Directed-energy weapons promise to flip the math back. A high-energy laser can disable a drone’s optics, burn through its airframe, or detonate its payload at a marginal cost that the Congressional Research Service has described as negligible compared to kinetic interceptors. A high-power microwave system can fry the electronics of multiple drones simultaneously, offering a potential answer to swarm attacks. And neither system runs out of ammunition as long as it has electrical power.
What the Pentagon is actually building
The military services have several directed-energy programs in various stages of development, cataloged in detail by the Congressional Research Service in its report on DoD directed-energy weapons (R46925). Among the most prominent:
- DE M-SHORAD (Directed Energy Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense): An Army program that mounts a 50-kilowatt-class laser on a Stryker armored vehicle. Prototypes have been tested and the Army has signaled intent to field initial units, though production timelines have shifted repeatedly.
- IFPC-HEL (Indirect Fire Protection Capability – High Energy Laser): A higher-power Army laser designed to defend fixed sites and formations against rockets, artillery, mortars, and drones.
- HELSI (High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative): A broader effort to push laser power levels to 300 kilowatts and beyond, which would extend effective range and allow engagement of faster, more durable targets.
- THOR (Tactical High-power Operational Responder): An Air Force high-power microwave system designed to disable drone swarms by disrupting their electronics across a wide area.
The CRS report identifies persistent technical challenges across these programs: generating enough electrical power in a mobile platform, managing the intense heat that high-energy lasers produce, and compensating for atmospheric conditions like dust, humidity, and rain that degrade laser beams. None of these problems are new. They have dogged directed-energy research for decades.
A history of promising prototypes that went nowhere
The Pentagon’s enthusiasm for directed energy is not new, and neither is its failure to deliver. A Government Accountability Office assessment found that directed-energy systems have repeatedly struggled to transition from successful prototypes into fielded programs of record. The GAO attributed the pattern to gaps in transition planning: the bureaucratic process by which a demonstration project secures sustained funding, established requirements, and a path to production.
The report, published in 2023, recommended that the Defense Department improve coordination between its research laboratories and acquisition offices so that promising technology does not stall indefinitely in the demonstration phase. Without clear requirements and long-term funding commitments, the GAO warned, even technically viable systems tend to wither.
That history looms over the current scale-up ambitions. The Pentagon has announced directed-energy breakthroughs before, only to see programs canceled, restructured, or quietly shelved when performance fell short of expectations or costs ballooned. The Airborne Laser, a modified Boeing 747 carrying a megawatt-class chemical laser, was canceled in 2012 after more than $5 billion in spending. The Navy’s Laser Weapon System (LaWS), deployed experimentally aboard the USS Ponce, demonstrated the concept but was never scaled into a fleet-wide capability.
The new task force and what it signals
In a sign that senior leaders view the drone threat as requiring a coordinated institutional response, the Defense Department in 2025 established a Joint Interagency Task Force focused on delivering affordable counter-small-UAS capabilities. The task force is designed to cut across service boundaries and synchronize efforts that had previously been fragmented among the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and various defense agencies.
Directed-energy weapons sit near the center of that effort. The task force’s mandate explicitly emphasizes affordability, a tacit acknowledgment that the current approach of firing expensive missiles at cheap drones is financially untenable at scale.
But creating a task force is an organizational decision, not a technical achievement. It signals bureaucratic urgency and high-level attention, which can accelerate procurement timelines and break logjams between competing offices. It does not, by itself, prove that directed-energy systems are ready for combat. As of June 2026, no public follow-up reports, performance metrics, or independent evaluations of the task force’s progress have surfaced in unclassified sources.
What allies are doing
The United States is not working in isolation. Several allied nations are pursuing their own directed-energy programs, creating both competitive pressure and opportunities for cooperation:
- Israel’s Iron Beam: A laser-based air defense system developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, designed to complement the Iron Dome by intercepting short-range rockets, mortars, and drones at a fraction of the cost per shot. Israel has indicated it intends to deploy Iron Beam operationally, and combat conditions in the region have provided urgent motivation.
- The United Kingdom’s DragonFire: A laser directed-energy weapon developed by a consortium led by MBDA. The UK Ministry of Defence conducted successful trials and has described the system as a potential game-changer for naval and ground-based air defense.
These allied programs matter for the Pentagon’s calculus. If allies field operational laser weapons first, it could accelerate U.S. procurement by validating the technology and creating interoperability requirements. It could also intensify pressure on Congress to fund American systems competitively.
The budget question no one has answered
The phrase “tens to hundreds” of directed-energy weapons, referenced during the Senate Armed Services Committee’s FY2027 budget hearing, is deliberately vague. No unclassified budget document released as of June 2026 specifies exact unit counts, cost-per-system estimates, or firm delivery timelines for a large-scale directed-energy procurement.
That ambiguity matters. Congressional appropriators, not Pentagon planners, ultimately decide how much money flows to any weapons program. A procurement target announced during testimony can shrink dramatically by the time it survives markup, negotiation, and final appropriation. The history of defense budgeting is littered with ambitious plans that were scaled back when lawmakers redirected funds to competing priorities.
There are also unresolved questions about industrial capacity. Building dozens or hundreds of directed-energy systems requires production lines, trained maintainers, and supply chains for specialized components like high-power fiber lasers and advanced cooling systems. None of the publicly available primary documents detail how defense contractors will scale manufacturing or how the Pentagon will manage lifecycle costs over the systems’ operational lives.
And there is a tension between the services over which technology deserves priority. High-energy lasers offer precision against individual targets at range. High-power microwaves offer area effects against swarms. Both have legitimate use cases, but competing service preferences could fragment limited budgets in ways that slow progress across the board.
Where this leaves the U.S. military
The available evidence, drawn from CRS and GAO reports, the DoD task force announcement, and congressional testimony, supports a clear but limited conclusion: the Pentagon is serious about attempting to buy directed-energy weapons in operationally meaningful numbers, driven by the drone threat’s escalating urgency and prodded by congressional oversight demanding affordable solutions.
Whether that intent will overcome the technical, bureaucratic, and industrial obstacles that have stalled every previous directed-energy scale-up remains genuinely uncertain. The physics problems documented by CRS have not been solved by announcement. The transition failures cataloged by GAO have not been fixed by task force creation alone. And the budget realities of competing defense priorities have not been resolved by testimony.
What has changed is the battlefield pressure. Drones are no longer a theoretical future threat. They are killing soldiers, sinking ships, and reshaping conflicts in real time. That operational reality, more than any technology breakthrough or bureaucratic reorganization, is what makes this moment different from the Pentagon’s previous directed-energy false starts. The question is whether “different” will finally mean “successful.”
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
