The Defense Innovation Unit announced in a LinkedIn post last month that the winners — Bravo Ordnance, Kela Technologies, Kraken Kinetics, Mountain Horse Solutions and Northrop Grumman — developed “cost-effective, mass-producible, and easily integrated lethal payloads for small drones.”

According to the program’s Industry Day presentation, military officials reviewed submissions from 17 vendors. Evaluators examined both the payloads themselves and how they interfaced with various Electronic Safe and Arm Devices, or ESADs, as well as their compatibility with drones being considered in the program’s broader competition.

Although the cash prize was just $10,000 — a modest sum compared to the scale of the Pentagon’s investment — the selected designs will be presented to companies participating in the program as “preferred munitions” for one-way attack drones.

Northrop Grumman’s winning design, dubbed the Common UAS Payload, was built to require “no redesigns” and is “ready to integrate and deploy immediately,” according to a statement from Tanya Santers, the company’s director of fuzes and warheads.

The company added that it has invested more than $2 billion over the past several years in technologies and manufacturing facilities to meet the program’s requirements and accelerate delivery timelines.

Unlike Northrop Grumman, which enters the competition with an established defense-industrial base and decades of experience producing munitions for the Pentagon, most of the other winners are relatively young companies hoping to capitalize on the military’s growing demand for drone warfare technology.

The Texas-based Bravo Ordnance launched in 2025 with $3.5 million in venture capital. The company bills itself as capable of creating custom warheads in “two weeks or less.”

Founder Devan Plantamura, a Navy and Army veteran, told GQ magazine that his experience working at military technology startups convinced him the industry focused too heavily on drone platforms and not enough on the weapons they carry.

Without a warhead, he said, an attack drone is “just a flying object.”

The Israeli defense startup Kela Technologies was founded in July 2024 following the Oct. 7 attack as a software company focused on helping Western militaries rapidly integrate commercial technology into existing military systems.

The company quickly attracted backing from Silicon Valley investors as well as IQT, the CIA’s investment arm.

In just two years, Kela has raised roughly $100 million, secured an additional $200 million in financing and earned a reported valuation of $1.2 billion.

Although software integration remains its primary business, Kela was also named a winner of the Lethality Prize. The company reportedly partnered with fellow Israeli defense firm Autonomous Guard, which specializes in border security technology, including drones.

The North Carolina-based Kraken Kinetics was founded in 2023 to manufacture warheads for drone combat. Since then, the company has heavily promoted its Terminus payload, a warhead designed for first-person-view attack drones.

Kraken has demonstrated the system with Army Rangers, Marines and other military units, emphasizing its ability to be quickly attached to commercial drone platforms through its ESAD.

The Colorado-based Mountain Horse Solutions is one of the older companies in the group. Founded in 2014, about a year after its parent company, Global Ordnance, the firm initially focused on personal protective equipment before expanding into military drones in 2025.

That year, Mountain Horse and its partner Rotron Aerospace secured a spot on the Defense Department’s Blue UAS list of approved drone systems.

For the Lethality Prize, Mountain Horse partnered with several other companies to develop a payload system designed to work with “any drone on the market.”

In a statement, Bill Allen, Mountain Horse’s president, called the challenge “exactly the kind of problem set we are built for — delivering adaptable, scalable lethal solutions that keep pace with the lightning-fast evolution of drone warfare.”

The Defense Department launched the Drone Dominance program in July 2025 and in December of that year, revealed a three-phase effort to acquire roughly 300,000 drones by 2028.

For the first phase, the Pentagon invited 26 companies to demonstrate their systems. In the second and current phase, military officials are evaluating 79 drones from 49 companies for both long-range and close-quarters missions.

Over the remaining phases, the Pentagon plans to narrow the field to a select group of vendors. According to Pentagon officials, the goal is to reduce the average cost of a military drone from roughly $5,000 to $2,300.

The third phase of the Drone Dominance program is set to begin around November 2026, with final testing six months after that.

Kuwait requested the c-UAS platforms, built by Anduril, in an effort to improve the country’s ability to counter current and future threats, according to a Friday release. The request followed attacks last week carried out by Iran on Kuwait infrastructure.

“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally that has been an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East,” a statement from the State Department reads.

The approval comes days after Iran launched a drone and missile attack on June 3 that damaged the Kuwait International Airport, killing one and injuring more than 60 people.

Three days later, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said it targeted U.S. bases in Kuwait and Bahrain in response to U.S. strikes. There were no casualties, but the Saturday attack did cause some material damage, according to Kuwait’s army.

Gulf nations have been the target of strikes throughout the ceasefire and during negotiations between the U.S. and Iran to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, showcasing the frustration among the countries and a need for more defense capabilities, like this deal.

“The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the basic military balance in the region,” the announcement says.

The estimated $1.98 billion sale will include “non-major defense equipment,” such as lattice command and control, personnel training and software development, and it will supply Kuwait with electronic and kinetic “defeat capabilities” against unmanned aerial systems.

U.S. industry became complacent and got “ambushed by the future,” said Christian Brose, who was on hand last week at the Washington Post’s inaugural Building America Summit to discuss defense industry developments.

“There was just no way of thinking that this formidable capability institution could be disrupted, and I think that there was a failure of imagination,” Brose said.

Brose added that the nation has been “systematically failing” at making necessary changes to project a stronger footing in the U.S.-China competition. He pointed to lessons from the Ukraine war and Operation Epic Fury, adding that Tehran has been evolving technologically and ramping up asymmetric capabilities.

“We’re struggling right now with a regional power of Iran that isn’t even close to what China would present to us,” Brose said. “And we’re struggling to some extent because we haven’t necessarily learned our own lessons of Ukraine and other recent events.”

Anduril recently opened a new 5-million-square-foot facility in Columbus, Ohio, where the company produces a range of munitions destined for the U.S. military.

Brose pointed to the new facility as evidence of Anduril meeting the military’s demands — under one roof — for mass produced, quickly built weapons that cost a fraction of a munition like a PAC-3 interceptor or Tomahawk missile.

“The point is not that the government should stop buying the exquisite weapons and instead just buy ours,” Brose said. “It’s that if all you have in a fight is a Tomahawk, that’s all you’re going to use, which is why in the first opening weeks of Epic Fury, we shot eight to 10 years of Tomahawk production in a few weeks.”

Brose added that once the military puts significant dents in stockpiles of munitions that are “artisanally built and incredibly expensive,” it can take years to replenish that production capacity.

He said that Anduril is instead building systems that can be completed by workers with minimal training and simple tools, much like how the country built weapons during World War II.

“It was Rosie the Riveter, not like Martha, the master welder, who took 14 years to become proficient at every craft,” Brose said, noting that to quickly build at scale, the nation has to take advantage of the country’s industrial workforce.

“It’s a whole different approach to the manufacturing philosophy, and it enables you to scale 10x [or] 20x to get to that order of magnitude ... that I think we’re going to need to be able to be relevant in these protracted conflicts,” Brose said.

America, Brose added, has been too concerned with creating perfect technology, making the process long and failures unacceptable.

He highlighted the belief of how certain older systems, like the Tomahawk and Patriot, have given the country military advantage for a generation, but the nation needs to be constantly producing, testing and learning from mistakes.

With the Ukraine war, Brose said that there’s no piece of technology that jumps out at him. Instead, it is the cycle of innovation and rebuilding at scale.

“When you look at the opening days of Epic Fury, obviously the United States and Israel have inflicted an enormous amount of damage on Iranian leadership, government, military, industrial base, but Iran’s still in the fight,” Brose said.

“They’re still in the fight because they’re using a lot of these asymmetric capabilities, low-cost drones, different types of systems.”

The French have been developing the system with local companies including Mistral AI, Safran.AI, Thales and Airbus, Justel said in a media briefing on Thursday. The French Army has already tested the system, dubbed Arcadia, in exercises including Dacian Fall in Romania and Orion 26 in France.

NATO military personnel started training with Palantir’s Maven Smart System in August 2025, the alliance’s first use of AI-enabled command and control software. The platform is derived from the Pentagon’s Project Maven and ties together massive amounts of battlefield data and AI analysis to help commanders identify targets and make decisions more quickly.

Arcadia “is our response to Maven,” said Justel. He said NATO’s use of Maven raises issues of digital sovereignty, “so the question arises whether should we adopt Maven blindly, or should we look for other solutions.”

France’s army, general staff and Defense Digital Commission “have been working on what other solutions might look like,” Justel said. France will deploy Arcadia during NATO’s Coalition Warrior Interoperability Exercise, or CWIX, a live exercise held in Poland June 8-26.

Justel said several NATO countries including France have raised questions around interoperability with the Palantir system. The Army deputy chief of staff said Arcadia is designed to comply with NATO’s Federated Mission Networking standards, or FMN, and contrasted that with Maven, which he said hasn’t integrated FMN requirements.

Palantir said Maven Smart System is “compliant with the principles of FMN” and that it is working with NATO toward official certification, in an emailed response to a request for comment. The company added that the platform has proven compliance with two NATO data-security standards that are “key building blocks” of FMN.

“NATO Maven Smart System is compatible, and does allow interoperability, but of course nations are free to choose what systems they use,” said Martin O’Donnell, a spokesperson for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, in an emailed reply to questions.

The Palantir system is already integrated with more than 10 NATO systems, according to U.S. Army Col. Arnel David, the director of Task Force Maven at SHAPE, who said his team is “focused on securing final certification across all FMN milestones,” with the declaration of full operational capability imminent.

France plans to propose Arcadia to its European partners, with a number of countries expressing interest, and has organized demonstrations for NATO, which is also interested, the general said. “When we talk to our European partners, we get the same reaction of, `well, we’ve kind of gone with Maven because there’s no choice, but if countries in Europe are able to build an alternative, we’ll go for it.’”

Palantir said it “welcomes the opportunity to integrate with Arcadia, or any other national system.”

Arcadia builds on previous work by the Armed Forces Ministry as part of the Artemis project started in 2022, which uses AI to process massive amounts of defense data. The French Army has been developing use cases for Arcadia internally as well as in cooperation with the industry partners, according to Justel.

The United Kingdom is working on a similar AI-enabled command and control system, and is also in discussions on how to interface with Maven, according to Justel.

Based on discussions with the British, “their concept is well-established, but they don’t yet have all the technological building blocks,” said Col. Frédéric Vola, head of the planning and capacity development office in the Army general staff, in the briefing.

While Palantir is behind the version of Maven used by NATO, the system is not the same as that used by the U.S., with different databases and functionality and “certainly not the same performance,” according to Justel.

The French system is conceived to be a more resilient alternative to Maven because it will be “highly decentralized” rather than a centralized system, with all command posts connected to field-deployed servers in a mesh-network architecture rather than a distant central cloud. The French Army already has a network of data hubs and is acquiring more, Justel said.

“First, it distributes the data, and in the event of destruction or loss of connection, it allows us to maintain the autonomy of what remains, and second, it’s easier to implement,” Justel said.

The system has an open architecture, with the French armed forces inviting “all the major players in artificial intelligence” and being open to working with others, according to Justel. “We don’t want to enter into the logic that we’ve known for years, where we give a manufacturer the system and then everything goes via them, everything is closed, they own all the data,” Justel said. “We want an open system where any manufacturer can plug in, and all data can be shared by everyone, without any notion of exclusive ownership.”

As part of its work on AI for command and control, the French Army has developed its own large-language model for staff officers, called Berthier, named after Napoleon’s chief of staff, and which Justel said is used to synthesize information, retrieve operational data, and support drafting of proposed courses of action, while leaving decisions to commanders.

On the heels of President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on AI innovation, Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said that he’s concerned about the category of “cyber weapons” that companies are releasing, such as Anthropic’s Mythos.

“These companies have a responsibility to ensure that their weapons, what they call weaponization potential of these models, to be careful and thoughtful about what they’re doing,” Michael said Thursday at The Washington Post’s inaugural Building America Summit.

Lawmakers have increasingly warned against the weaponization of AI models by U.S. adversaries against citizens, businesses and government agencies, calling for their crafting to include resilient security measures to safeguard against hacks.

On Tuesday, the White House released an executive order that establishes an “AI cybersecurity clearinghouse,” through which AI industry partners can volunteer to have the Defense Department scan their systems for software vulnerabilities before their release.

Michael said that companies that have models with a “weaponization capability” could allow the federal government to spend 30 days examining their systems. The government could potentially identify vulnerabilities across the country in systems with IP that could be susceptible to hacks, such as electricity grids or public hospitals.

“I think they’ve all agreed and think it’s a good idea to do that. That’s been a good constructive process,” Michael said. “I give all the companies, Open AI, even Anthropic, and Google credit for sort of agreeing that was a smart thing to do.”

Anthropic has been left out of deals with the Pentagon after the firm refused to allow unrestricted access to its Claude models for fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance.

The company sued the Trump administration over the federal government labeling the firm as a supply chain risk over its decision to restrict the military’s use of its technology.

Mythos, Anthropic’s new model, has drawn criticism as skeptics of the program point out that it could pose a danger with its hacking and cybersecurity capabilities. Anthropic previewed the model and announced that it was capable of finding ways to exploit vulnerabilities in software.

Meanwhile, the DoD has integrated AI throughout the department.

When posed a question at the summit about the government’s usage of AI, Michael said that six months ago, only about 80,000 federal employees were AI users each month. But now, there are 1.5 million, he stated, saying that the government has “raced” to ramp up usage among workers for efficiency, intelligence and warfighting.

“I think by the end of this year, I’d be shocked if three quarters of the department isn’t using AI in some way,” Michael said. “We’ve integrated all the biggest AI companies over the last few months, so, we’re, in one year, going to make progress more than the five years before it.”

If lawmakers decided to move forward with the development of a U.S. Cyber Force, there would be challenges to its implementation because current responsibilities are shared between the various services and U.S. Cyber Command, per the Wednesday report written by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“Many observers contend that the challenge of generating military capability and capacity necessary to deter, compete, fight and win in the cyber domain can be directly attributed to the lack of a single organization responsible and accountable for force generation in cyberspace — or organizing, training and equipping the military forces operating in this domain,” the report states.

Lawmakers have contemplated the necessity of a Cyber Force for over a decade since the 2010 establishment of U.S. Cyber Command, or CYBERCOM, one of the Department of Defense’s 11 unified combatant commands.

Current efforts to create a standalone Cyber Force are spearheaded by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, as an amendment to the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.

The report showcases how CYBERCOM is expected to perform the functions of both a combatant command and a military service, but a proposed Cyber Force would take over most of its “service-like” responsibilities, and thus organizing, training and equipping forces for the cyber domain.

The think tanks examined ways Congress and the Defense Department could stand up and implement a Cyber Force as a new military service with a cyber-specific mission that centers around assisting forces in conducting offensive and defense cyberspace operations.

The initial budget for standing up a Cyber Force is an estimated $10 billion to $11 billion, the report says, although that budget is already currently allocated into other services and cyber capabilities.

In the fiscal 2027 defense budget request, the Pentagon distributed $7.7 billion to cyberspace operations, according to budget documents, with $4.1 billion designated to CYBERCOM and the remaining $4.6 billion set aside for other defense organizations, such as the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The budget request also emphasized the need for $20.5 billion for cyberspace activities and $12.1 billion for cybersecurity.

At least 20,000 active-duty personnel, 3,500 to 5,000 National Guard members and a civilian workforce of 6,000 would be needed to staff a Cyber Force if established, the report reads, highlighting that the commission envisions the force as a relatively small military organization.

“By grouping personnel into broad occupational categories within which they can specialize or generalize, the Cyber Force will preserve distinct competencies, support future changes in how cyber missions are conducted and create a professional identity strong enough to anchor training, career development and long-term readiness,” the report says.

Instead of following the precedent of other military branches, the commission recommended that a Cyber Force follows in the footsteps of the U.S. Public Health Service by employing commissioned and warrant officers for uniformed personnel without an “enlisted cadre.”

The think tanks weighed two options for institutional alignment: placing the Cyber Force within the Department of the Army, like the Space Force is attached to the Department of the Air Force, or making the Cyber Force its own military department.

If included in the Army, the force could have increased speed and efficiency since it would belong to an already existing DoD bureaucracy, but it could be then considered a lower priority.

By having its own military department, the Cyber Force could ensure prioritization of cyber issues within the Pentagon, but standing up a new DoD bureaucracy would require substantial time and resources.

Regardless of organizational structure, it would take between 12 to 18 months to reach initial operating capacity, the report states.

Announced June 3, the live-fire demonstration paired the radars, Sanctum software and launcher to destroy the target at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, according to the company. Lockheed said it integrated the system and completed live-fire testing in under 45 days.

The Fortem R-40 comes from a counter-drone partnership Lockheed strengthened in April, when it invested $25 million into the Utah-based firm to incorporate its radars and interceptors more tightly into the Sanctum system.

The test builds on GRIZZLY’s first live-fire in March, when Lockheed fired a Hellfire missile from the same container system during a vertical-launch test at Yakima Training Center, Washington, six months after the program began.

The launcher is designed to fire both the Hellfire and JAGM and borrows design elements from Lockheed’s M299 launcher. Where March proved the launcher, the June test added the JAGM and a full detect-track-engage kill chain against a live Group 3 drone target, a class the Defense Department defines as drones weighing up to 1,320 pounds and flying below 18,000 feet at under 250 knots.

“Built on existing prototype architecture, GRIZZLY enables users to employ the ready-to-fire Sanctum C-UAS system without extensive infrastructure and logistical footprints. By integrating advanced sensor, battle management and missile technologies, Lockheed Martin delivers a decisive C-UAS capability that aligns with our customers’ needs for agile and distributed lethality,” the company said.

The GRIZZLY holds up to eight missiles in a 10-foot shipping container, offers toolless reloading and can operate from ground sites or ships. Wireless links among the radars, battle manager and launcher allow for quick setup. Lockheed billed the system as a low-cost way to shield forward bases, key assets and vessels.

The maritime pitch tracks with Navy interest in containerized weapons that can ride on unmanned surface vessels to add firepower at sea, a demand signal Lockheed cited when it first showed the launcher in March.

“The ability to integrate GRIZZLY’s proven launch architecture with Sanctum’s battle manager on an accelerated timeline demonstrates how Lockheed Martin is applying battlefield innovation and cross-program collaboration to rapidly deliver layered defense capabilities to the warfighter,” said Randy Crites, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Advanced Programs.

“This test demonstrates a rapid, low-cost and modular point-defense solution that can be deployed on land or maritime platforms within days,” added Paul Lemmo, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Sensors, Effectors and Mission Systems.

The demonstration comes as the Pentagon and allies push for better layered protection against growing drone threats.

In a new solicitation, SOCOM is asking for a new M4 upper receiver capable of firing “emerging hyper velocity ammunition” modeled after the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge.

SOCOM said the Hypervelocity Improved Carbine, or HICAR, program will “leverage the performance benefits of current and future experimental hypervelocity rounds” and called it “vital to addressing future capability gaps on the battlefield.”

When fired out of a standard-issued M4, the military cartridge known as M855A1 has “a recognized effective range of approximately 300 meters,” but SOCOM wants the new upper designed to fire hypervelocity ammunition known as M855A1+.

“This weapon system will allow an operator to effectively engage targets at extended distances while maintaining the portability and ergonomics of a lightweight carbine,” the solicitation says, adding the desired effective range is “600 meters and beyond.”

“The goal is to integrate advancements in material science and weapon design to provide operators with a technically superior individual weapon system,” SOCOM adds.

In the solicitation, SOCOM says M855A1+ is loaded to 82,000 pounds per square inch. That measurement refers to the amount of pressure generated to push the bullet out of the casing. While more pressure results in greater velocity, it can also damage a firearm not designed to handle it.

Last month, SOCOM said it will begin fielding the MK24 Medium Range Gas Gun Assault rifle, which is part of a family of squad weapons chambered in 6.5mm Creedmoor and .338 Norma Magnum, before the end of this fiscal year.

Also, both the Army and Marine Corps have been shifting away from the M4 with the adoption of the Next Generation Squad Weapons and M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle, respectively.

For the HICAR program, white paper submissions are due June 8 and SOCOM will host pitch meetings Sept. 15 and 16.

During testing, the M4 uppers will fire 600 rounds of primarily M855A1+ and some M855A1.

The U.S. military is pushing to demonstrate high-energy laser weapons engineered for fielding at scale in the next two years, according to the U.S. Defense Department’s top science and technology official.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee on May 19, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (USD(R&E)) Emil Michael told lawmakers that the science of laser weapons “is largely done.”

The Pentagon, he added, is now focused on addressing the engineering challenges that come with transforming exquisite prototypes into mass-producible capabilities — the “scaled” element of the department’s “scaled directed energy” critical technology area.

“We now have a suite of directed energy products that go from low-end to high-end, and now we have to scale production of those,” Michael said.

When questioned by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) about the three-year timeline for fielding laser weapons at scale that defense officials previously publicized in March, Michael stated that President Donald Trump’s planned "Golden Dome for America" domestic missile shield would accelerate those research and development efforts due to the initiative’s “big reliance” on directed energy, adding that “our experience in Iran has also doubled our interest in these systems.”

“A lot of the money allocated to Golden Dome is going to go to the fundamental engineering of these systems so that we can make them cheaper, smaller and more proliferated,” Michael said. “And because the commitment was made to the president that we’re going to have a demonstration that includes directed energy in our Golden Dome architecture, there’s a lot of energy going into that.”

The directed energy demonstration is expected to occur during the summer of 2028, Michael said, part of a series of planned Golden Dome-related events.

“There’s never been more effort in the department on this particular capability,” Michael said. “There [are] several companies that are emerging that have developed it, and several companies that are taking what they’ve already built and making it cheaper and better.”

Michael comments effectively tie the future of U.S. military laser weapons to a presidential priority with serious money and a hard deadline behind it.

The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2027 budget request contains $452 million in proposed R&D spending for the “development, integration, and assessment” of directed energy weapons in support of Golden Dome alone, more than triple the $142 million enacted under the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” reconciliation package Trump signed into law in July 2025.

In addition, the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy together have laid out plans to spend $675.93 million over the next five years on a containerized 150-300 kW Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS) as part of the military’s broader Golden Dome architecture.

Michael’s mention of Iran as having “doubled” the Pentagon’s interest in directed energy, meanwhile, adds an operational urgency that budget numbers alone don’t capture.

But there’s a problem with Michael’s declaration that the science of laser weapons is “largely done” and the engineering is what remains: engineering is exactly what has sunk U.S. military programs in the past.

Building effective laser weapons means ensuring they can be operated and maintained across a range of tactical environments by soldiers who aren’t laser specialists.

Consider the Army’s 50 kW Stryker-mounted Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD), which the service determined was “not mature enough” to become a program of record after rocky operational testing in the Middle East in 2024 exposed issues with the system’s heat dissipation and reliability in its vehicle-mounted configuration.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch summed up the problem with real-world directed energy weapon deployments in August 2025.

“We can’t get by with the thought of having clean rooms out in combat,” he said.

The Pentagon has been burning drones out of the sky with lasers since 1973, but it has yet to consistently translate demonstrators into battle-ready weapons that American service members can actually rely on outside of a controlled environment.

Indeed, the last decade has proven a graveyard of promising laser weapon programs.

Beyond DE M-SHORAD, the Army has also abandoned its 300 kW Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) project after downshifting from an eventual program of record to a single testbed that will inform future JLWS efforts.

The Navy’s 60 kW High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system, which only recently began testing at full power and successfully engaged drone targets aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Preble after years of delays, has effectively disappeared from the service’s fiscal year 2027 budget request outside a handful of sustainment dollars.

The Marine Corps returned its five much-hyped Compact Laser Weapon System (CLaWS) units to Boeing without a replacement program in sight.

The Air Force spent years testing Raytheon’s High-Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) before abandoning it without a program of record.

These failures share a common pattern diagnosed in a detailed 2023 Government Accountability Office report: promising laser weapons advanced through prototyping without ever securing formal transition partners or drafting agreements that would bind developers and the acquisition community to shared requirements, timelines and funding responsibilities, dooming them to obsolescence simply because the bureaucratic will to fight for them across budget cycles and shifting service priorities didn’t exist.

In his posture statement to the House Armed Services Committee in April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “institutional inertia.”

While Michael pointed to the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF) counter-drone group as a demand signal aggregator alongside and Golden Dome as a political forcing function, neither of those things solves the transition problem on its own.

Two efforts — likely Michael’s “suite of directed energy products that go from low-end to high-end” — will serve as the clearest early indicators as to whether the Pentagon’s current engineering confidence is warranted.

The first is the Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL), the Army’s modular 30 kW system explicitly envisioned as the service’s first directed energy program of record — and it appears to be moving faster than almost any laser effort before it.

Based on Army documents, E-HEL’s design philosophy looks like a direct response to DE M-SHORAD’s shortcomings, with the system decoupled from a specific vehicle platform and built for soldier-performable sustainment using line-replaceable units.

The service plans to “produce and rapidly field” 24 E-HEL systems over a five-year period, with the first prototype expected no later than the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 and initial procurement units slated for delivery by the end of fiscal year 2027.

If this timeline holds, E-HEL would mark the first time the U.S. military service has successfully transitioned a laser weapon to a genuine program of record.

The second is the aforementioned JLWS. The Navy plans on awarding $31.7 million in contracts for the development of a Joint Beam Control System (JBCS) — a critical component “capable of supporting” a 300-500 kW laser weapon system, according to the Navy’s fiscal year 2027 budget request — as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026, with another $30 million in contracts for the procurement and testing of containerized hardware expected by March 2027.

That timeline makes a Golden Dome demonstration in the summer of 2028 plausible, but it also means whatever system appears will likely be an early-stage weapon rather than a mature one. The current JLWS R&D roadmap runs through fiscal year 2031, and while a successful demonstration in two years would be a genuine milestone, it would still represent the early stages of a fielding process.

Whether the U.S. defense industrial base is ready to answer either program’s call remains an open question.

Manufacturing expansions from defense contractors like Huntington Ingalls Industries, AV, IPG Photonics and nLight are encouraging signs, but the industrial building blocks for laser weapons — from specialized optics with 12- to 18-month lead times to critical materials and rare earth elements sourced from Chinese-dominated supply chains — do not yet appear in place to enable the production systems at the scale Michael is describing.

The development of laser weapons has been defined for decades by a seemingly inescapable cycle of enthusiasm and disappointment.

Retired Air Force Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, former program manager for the service’s legendary YAL-1 Airborne Laser effort, perfectly captured the longstanding Pentagon consensus around directed energy in an interview for the 2018 book Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon.

“I’m tough on laser people these days,” Pawlikowski said. “It’s because they have a reputation of overpromising and underdelivering.”

With institutional support at a historic high, the Golden Dome-driven demonstration planned for summer 2028 may end up proving a moment of truth for the engineering challenges that have imperiled laser weapon programs past — or, at worst, yet another setback for the U.S. military’s long pursuit of directed energy.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna’s Instagram was compromised as the hackers posted multiple artworks and stories depicting anti-American messaging.

By 1 a.m. EST on Monday, the stories and posts were removed, according to Task & Purpose, which first reported on the hack.

A Space Force spokesperson confirmed to Military Times on Tuesday that Bentivegna’s account was compromised but denied to comment about how long the hackers had access to the account or who was responsible. All unauthorized content was removed with assistance from Meta, the owner of Instagram, the spokesperson said.

“This incident serves as a good reminder that online threats are constantly evolving, and users must remain alert to suspicious activity while exercising strong cybersecurity practices,” the spokesperson concluded.

Before they were taken down, the images and stories posted to Bentivegna’s account circulated unofficial U.S. military social media accounts, including the Reddit page r/AirForce and the Facebook page Air Force amn/nco/snco.

One post depicted a figure known as Imam Ali holding the Sword of Zulfiqar, which was given to Ali by the Prophet Muhammad and is a symbol of justice and knowledge in Islamic tradition. The hackers also posted a depiction of Husayn ibn Ali, a political and religious figure in Islam.

A story posted by the hackers included audio of Trịnh Thị Ngọ, also known as “Hanoi Hannah,” a Vietnamese radio personality known for releasing English-language broadcasts during the Vietnam War. Ngọ delivered three broadcasts a day during the war, written by the North Vietnamese Defense Ministry’s propaganda department and aimed at American troops to demoralize and frighten them.

The audio was posted with a caption in Arabic that roughly translates to “This is your fate if you get close to the Middle East.”

Another story, which appeared to be directly after the “Hanoi Hannah” audio, was an edit of Ali Larijani, a prominent Iranian national security official, with a caption in Arabic that roughly translates to “I set foot in America.” Larijani died in mid-March 2026 in an Israeli military airstrike during the Iran war.

As well as the other two stories, the hackers posted a photo of Game of Thrones character Jon Snow during an episode titled Battle of the Bastards, with a graphic that included Arabic text reading “Abu Al-Ahmar Army,” or “Army of the Red One,” and text underneath that roughly translates to “ban the accounts of the haters.”

Bentivegna did not address the hack on Instagram but did post on his Facebook on Sunday around 8:30 p.m. EST, saying that “appropriate teams” were working to regain access to the account and resolve the issue.

“If you receive any direct messages, requests, links or unusual posts from that account, please do not engage with them,” Bentivegna wrote in the Facebook post.

“Experiences like this are a good reminder that cybersecurity isn’t just an issue for organizations, it’s something we all deal with in our daily lives,” Bentivegna added.

The hackers also targeted former President Barack Obama’s White House Instagram account, posting the same image of Imam Ali holding the Zulfiqar sword, as well as stories, with one being a photo of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian military officer killed in January 2020 in a U.S. drone strike, with a caption in Arabic that roughly translates to “The White House is under Shiites’ control.”

The hacks follow the recent reports received by military officials of service members’ commercial location data being used by adversaries to target personnel deployed to war zones. U.S. lawmakers said in a letter to the Pentagon that the location data can be used to identify where troops are congregated and their patterns, which then can be used to target the troops for various attacks.

Both abroad and domestically, U.S. service members have also been receiving threats through email, social media and text messages that appear to have originated from individuals connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The U.S. Navy announced Friday that it selected seven companies to compete for the service’s Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel contract.

At-sea testing of the vessels is slated to begin next month, with companies whose MUSVs successfully complete the trials set to receive $15 million and be eligible for “follow-on production,” according to the Navy.

Testing is set to wrap up by October of this year.

The companies chosen to for the trials include Sea Machines, Leidos, Saronic Technologies, Galliano Marine Services, PacMar Technologies, Birdon and Huntington Ingalls Industries.

This announcement comes as the Navy seeks to expand its unmanned service vessels fleet, with officials hoping to swell its numbers sevenfold, from four to 30 vessels by 2030 in the Indo-Pacific.

The four USVs that were deployed in the Indo-Pacific for five months in 2024 were the Sea Hunter, Sea Hawk, Mariner and Ranger vessels, and all four are still being used to further develop the Navy’s USV program, according to previous Military Times reporting.

The Navy is utilizing the MUSV marketplace to solicit bids from “smaller, non-traditional shipyards” in the hopes of creating new opportunities to build out the Navy’s unmanned fleet. The initiative, according to the release, “represents a strategic shift in naval acquisition, designed to rapidly field unmanned technologies by leveraging mature, existing commercial solutions.”

In March, the MUSV marketplace — which received roughly $2.1 billion in funding from President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” — replaced the Modular Attack Surface Craft program, causing some consternation among companies that had spent time developing unmanned vessels for the MASC marketplace.

The latest solicitation, published on March 26, calls for MUSVs that are capable of traveling 2,500 nautical miles at 25 knots while carrying a 25-ton load on the payload deck in moderate conditions. The MUSV must be fully autonomous day and night, capable of operating through different weather conditions in moderate to rough seas and “survivable through sea state 7.” In addition, the vessel must be able to restrict “all Radio Frequency (RF) emissions when commanded while continuing to autonomously operate” and having a “passive mode with no RF emissions.”

The MUSV should also be able to monitor its health and status while “autonomously report[ing] conditions to the offboard C2 station, providing situational awareness of the condition of the vessel to the operator,” according to the solicitation.

After the sea trials, the contractor should be prepared to field five to 10 operation MUSVs in fiscal year 2027 to help rapidly usher in the unmanned era in the U.S. Navy.

Russia’s interference reached Lithuania’s capital on May 20, when a drone forced Vilnius into shelters, shut its airport and cleared parliament, the first such alert in the city since 2022.

The jamming has been escalating for nearly three years, since Russia began disrupting signals around the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, and now spikes whenever Ukrainian drones fly toward Russian targets.

“This is the new reality of what the Baltic states face,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas said last week.

Romanian F-16s scrambled in response, President Nicușor Dan said.

Unlike the attacks that struck homes in Romania on Friday, most of the drones that have crossed into Baltic airspace over the last few months have not been launched by Russia, but instead have been operated by Ukraine and thrown off course by Russia.

Both strike drones launched at refineries and ports inside Russia and interceptor drones meant to take out incoming attacks have been steered off course and into NATO airspace by Russian spoofing several times over the last few years.

They have already done damage on allied soil: one struck a Latvian oil depot on May 7, exploding on impact. On May 19, a Romanian F-16 on NATO patrol shot another down over Estonia, the first time an allied jet had downed a drone believed to be Ukrainian.

From Kaliningrad, Russian transmitters broadcast counterfeit satellite signals strong enough to seize a drone’s navigation in flight, feed it false coordinates and send it off course.

Lithuania counted 36 of those spoofing transmitters this week, up from three at the start of 2025, reaching 450 kilometers (280 miles) across the region, according to Reuters.

NATO has condemned each strike and scrambled jets to meet them, but has not threatened any retaliation.

Romania’s foreign minister said the Galați strike could justify emergency consultations under NATO’s Article 4, the treaty’s mechanism for talks when a member’s security is threatened.

After speaking with Dan on Friday, Secretary-General Mark Rutte said the alliance stands ready to defend “every inch” of allied territory.

No member, though, has invoked Article 5, the clause that treats an attack on one ally as an attack on all.

Spoofing, meanwhile, is a form of electronic warfare that works by deception rather than brute force.

While jamming overwhelms a drone’s receiver with noise until it can no longer fix its position, spoofing instead sends a stronger, counterfeit signal that the receiver treats as genuine.

“The idea behind spoofing is to create deception,” Thomas Withington, an electronic-warfare specialist at the Royal United Services Institute, told PBS.

When a drone is fed a false fix, it can fly on a completely different path than its operator intended.

The drones most exposed are Ukraine’s long-range models, which fly north toward Russian oil-export terminals on the Gulf of Finland, including Ust-Luga and Primorsk near St. Petersburg.

Their routes hug the Baltic coast, where Russian electronic warfare is densest, and a drone that loses its true fix drifts into allied airspace, according to the Atlantic Council.

Drones crossed into Latvia “as a result of Russian electronic warfare systems,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said this month.

Ukraine’s own investigations, he said, “proved that this was the result of Russian electronic warfare deliberately diverting Ukrainian drones from their targets in Russia.”

Outside researchers have started to locate the transmitters.

A team from Gdynia Maritime University and the University of Colorado traced Baltic interference over the last year to two coastal sites in Kaliningrad, near the town of Okunevo and the naval base at Baltiysk, each beside known Russian electronic-warfare units.

“Interfering with GNSS signals is, unfortunately, very easy,” Ralf Ziebold of the German Aerospace Center told Defense News.

The network has only grown more entrenched.

“Now they have built up the infrastructure and the interference has become systemic, permanent,” Darius Kuliešius, deputy head of Lithuania’s communications regulator, told Reuters this week.

Ukraine has spent weeks insisting the strays are not its fault. Kyiv says it never routes attacks through allied airspace and has apologized to the Baltic states for drones it argues Russian jamming pushed off course.

Heorhii Tykhyi, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said as much after the Estonia shootdown on May 19.

“Moscow does this on purpose,” he said, apologizing to “Estonia and all our Baltic friends” and noting Ukraine’s only targets lie inside Russia.

Russia has denied steering the drones, casting the incursions instead as proof that the Baltics are abetting Ukrainian attacks.

To beat the spoofing, Ukraine is building drones that can fly without satellites at all.

Newer long-range models carry controlled-reception-pattern antennas that filter out spoofing signals, plus cameras and inertial backups that hold a course when the satellite link drops. Kyiv unveiled one, the Sichen, built to fly “under conditions of active electronic warfare,” in April, according to Militarnyi.

Countering wired drones that emit no signal at all is another challenge.

“Fiber-optic drones have shown us that drones insensitive to electronic warfare are a serious threat to logistics and personnel,” Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said last month.

Kyiv is racing to field more of them, even building a shared ground station to fly them at scale, he said, though the skyrocketing cost of fiber-optic cable limits how far they reach.

Officials from Kyiv and the Baltic states said they hope that increasing air defense coordination between countries in the region will help counter the threat, according to ERR.

Sybiha has offered to send Ukrainian experts to strengthen Baltic air defenses, and Kyiv and Vilnius agreed this week to build drones together and station Ukrainian specialists in Lithuania, according to Militarnyi.

The decision to fire on an intruding drone rests with national governments, not the alliance: NATO’s Baltic air-policing mission, run from a combined air operations center in Uedem, Germany, intercepts only on a member’s behalf, and each country sets its own rules of engagement.

Romania changed its law in 2024 to let its military shoot down intruding drones as a last resort, and its pilots were cleared to fire over Galați had they been able to do so without endangering civilians.

For the alliance’s frontline states, the working assumption is that the drones will keep coming.

“We need to adapt,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas said, “because the possibility of repeated similar scenarios is very high.”

The U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command is looking to change that with its new Intrepid Battlefield EXoskeleton, or IBEX, system, a shoulder-to-foot brace that can be worn to allow injured troops to stand, walk and shoot when evacuation is impossible or delayed.

The device was designed to make an injured soldier more self-sufficient, so they can move themselves to safety instead of relying on the two-to-four additional troops it takes to carry a victim on a litter. The goal, the Army said in a release Wednesday, is to keep more soldiers firing until help arrives.

“In combat, troops suffer tibia fractures, torn knee ligaments, high-grade ankle sprains, and foot fractures; these are the most common but survivable battlefield injuries,” said Dr. Lee Childers, a senior scientist at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

“The IBEX enables more walking wounded, which means more warfighters putting bullets downrange while providing a smaller target for enemy drones to attack,” he said.

Drone warfare has dramatically changed the nature of combat and thus changed the way the military medical community must prepare to treat battlefield injuries.

In Ukraine, drones are routinely inflicting devastating limb injuries and drone swarms can cause high numbers of casualties in a short amount of time, overwhelming traditional field medicine tactics.

Weighing just seven pounds, the IBEX can fold into the size of a one liter bottle and be carried quickly to an injured soldier. It relieves the pressure on soft tissue, nerves and blood vessels, and is able to bear body weight.

Lower-leg injuries are often from gunshots or bomb blasts, the Army said, and soldiers suffered many such injuries during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They can also be injured operating in rough terrain or bad weather.

Troops deployed to combat zones sustained over 22,000 non-amputated lower leg injuries between 2001 and 2018, according to the National Library of Medicine, which also reported that 68% of extremity injuries were fractures or open wounds.

The project was initiated in 2020 and has been tested by the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. It is now on its third round of funding and has been licensed by a commercial partner.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Dr. Lee Childers is a senior scientist at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Within weeks of the United States launching its bombing campaign, SpaceX executives met Pentagon officials and argued the military had been paying about $5,000 for connection per terminal while effectively using a higher tier of service worth closer to $25,000, according to two sources familiar with the matter and Pentagon documents reviewed by Reuters.

The disagreement over Starlink’s use on LUCAS suicide drones — a cheap U.S. model comparable to Iran’s Shahed that can circle over a target area before diving to detonate on impact — is part of increasing tensions between SpaceX and the Pentagon over Starlink pricing in recent months, according to interviews with five people familiar with the matter and the documents.

The Pentagon, which is seeking to help Iranian citizens bypass government-imposed communications blackouts, has also been at odds with SpaceX over pricing for a plan to provide the populace direct-to-cell connections with Starlink akin to 5G service, two of the sources said.

The ongoing disputes, which have not previously been reported, underscore how the Pentagon’s growing reliance on SpaceX is handing Musk greater leverage over a critical layer of U.S. national security – at a time when SpaceX is seeking to boost revenue ahead of an IPO next month that could be among the biggest in history.

Unlike consumer Starlink terminals available at stores including Walmart, SpaceX sells a military-specific version called Starshield to the Pentagon under a 2023 agreement. Starshield terminals can connect to both commercial Starlink satellites and a separate, more secure constellation, also called Starshield, according to a person familiar with the matter.

SpaceX argued the LUCAS drones were operating under conditions that aligned more closely with its aviation tier subscription rather than a lower priced land or mobility service. Pentagon officials argued that the $25,000 price tag — a monthly fee — was designed for aircraft, not kamikaze drones that used Starlink connection for a matter of minutes or hours, according to one of the sources.

The Pentagon, which was ramping up strikes on Iran, ultimately agreed to pay SpaceX’s proposed price increase, almost doubling the cost of each LUCAS drone. The Pentagon was initially paying about $30,000 per unit.

SpaceX didn’t respond to a comment request.

The Pentagon declined to comment on Reuters reporting that SpaceX increased its pricing, its decision to pay, or the plan to provide Iranian citizens with Starlink cell service. In a statement, a Pentagon official said the office responsible for acquiring the terminals, the Commercial Satellite Communications Office, is working to find other competitors.

“The Department of War is committed to fostering a competitive environment for commercial satellite communications,” an official said.

After the Reuters story was published, Elon Musk called it “false” without elaborating in a post on X. He added that the civilian Starlink system had been improperly used “for military purposes.” In a separate post, he said “the company” was at fault, not the Pentagon.

A spokesperson for Spektreworks, which makes the LUCAS drone, directed all questions to the Pentagon.

In a post on X, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said Reuters reporting was “wrong” without providing further information. SpaceX “remains a strong and valued partner to the Department of War,” he wrote.

But no other company provides a comparable alternative to Starlink, which has become an increasingly critical tool in modern warfare since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The satellite network provides global coverage, enabling battlefield communications and precision targeting even in remote areas. SpaceX’s constellation of roughly 10,000 satellites accounts for more than 60% of those in orbit — dwarfing the constellations being built by other companies, including OneWeb and Amazon Leo.

The risks of reliance on Starlink were first thrown into sharp focus during the Ukraine war, when Musk ordered Starlink service switched off in parts of the country in 2022 as Ukrainian forces advanced on Russian positions, disrupting a key counteroffensive, Reuters previously reported. More recently, U.S. Navy tests were disrupted last summer when a global Starlink outage cut off connection to unmanned military boats, leaving them bobbing in the ocean.

SPACEX HAS U.S. GOVERNMENT ‘OVER A BARREL’

Unlike traditional defense contractors, SpaceX holds greater leverage over the Pentagon because it also has a large commercial market for Starlink, alongside its rocket launch and artificial intelligence businesses, said Clayton Swope, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security-focused think tank. SpaceX generates about 20% of its total revenue from the U.S. government, according to an SEC filing.

SpaceX “certainly has the U.S. government over the barrel,” Swope said.

At the outset of the Iran war, Starlink was already a core part of U.S. military operations. In testing and early deployments, it supported a range of systems, from aerial attack drones such as the LUCAS to unmanned surface vessels used for maritime surveillance and strike missions. When the U.S. launched its bombing campaign, Starshield terminals were being used across more than a dozen drone systems, according to a source familiar with the matter.

But tensions between the Pentagon and SpaceX emerged quickly after the U.S. launched its February 28 assault on Iran. On March 1, SpaceX chief Elon Musk responded on X to a user’s post featuring an image of the LUCAS drone that said it “appears to have an integrated Starlink” terminal.

“It is a violation of commercial Starlink terms of service to use the terminal for weapon systems. This applies to all users and is shut down when discovered,” Musk posted. “There is a separate network called Starshield, which is operated by the US government.”

The Pentagon official, in a statement to Reuters, denied any violation of its agreement with SpaceX.

In the days that followed, SpaceX executives met Pentagon officials and argued the military was underpaying for the service, two sources familiar with the matter said.

Although the Pentagon initially agreed to the higher fee for satellite Wi-Fi connections used by attack drones, senior officials including Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg remained uneasy about the arrangement, one of the sources said. Pentagon officials, during an April ceasefire, met to revisit the pricing with Terrence O’Shaughnessy, a retired four-star Air Force general who now leads SpaceX’s defense business.

Still, the Pentagon is currently considering an additional purchase of more than 3,500 Starshield terminal subscriptions, including 100 with the higher-priced aviation tier, according to Pentagon documents reviewed by Reuters. The deal could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue for SpaceX, though Reuters could not determine whether an agreement has been finalized, or what price is being discussed.

SPACEX PRICES IRK PENTAGON

Starlink has also proved crucial to other operations. After Iran cracked down on protests in January, killing thousands of people, the Trump administration smuggled in more than 6,000 Starlink terminals to provide internet access to citizens, the Wall Street Journal previously reported.

As the war intensified, however, Iranian authorities confiscated the terminals and deployed jamming devices across major cities to disrupt connections, according to a source familiar with the matter. Within a week of the conflict beginning, Pentagon officials began discussions with SpaceX about deploying direct-to-cell service that could bypass those disruptions, two people familiar with the matter said. The capability, similar to a 5G connection, would allow users to connect without terminals on the ground.

SpaceX, which generated $11.4 billion in revenue from Starlink in 2025, proposed charging as much as $500 million to launch the capability, along with a $100 million monthly fee to operate it, according to one of the people and Pentagon documents - prompting alarm from defense officials over the price.

Reuters could not determine whether an agreement has been reached.

During the test, Marines launched a Neros Archer first-person-view, or FPV, drone from the ground before transferring control to operators aboard a helicopter orbiting miles away, the Corps announced in a statement last week, saying that the move was a step towards integrating inexpensive drones into aviation operations.

The goal, according to the release, was to see if aircraft like the UH-1Y Venom and AH-1Z Viper could extend the reach of FPV drones, which let operators watch a live feed of unmanned aircraft system from a screen or goggles.

“The primary objective was to test the feasibility of a non-kinetic drop and deployment of a first-person view drone from a moving helicopter, which we were able to do today,” said Capt. Quinton Thornbury, a UH-1Y Venom pilot with Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron (HMLA) 169, Marine Air Group 39, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing. “From there, validate that we can control the maneuver of that drone from the back of the aircraft.”

The service said it used the Neros Archer system because it has already been widely used and tested by Marine infantry units, which makes it easier to integrate into aircraft operations.

Low cost drones have become one of the defining weapons of today’s warfare, with widespread use in conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East, forcing the military to wrestle with new doctrine and cost calculations as it seeks to modernize its forces.

Recently, the service announced that it had quickly expanded its FPV attack drone inventory, fielding more than 3,500 after officials greenlit integration of the new tech.

Garrett Smith, Reveal’s chief executive officer, explained that the “milestone represents years of partnership” needed to develop the technology.

“Identifi ensures that biometric identification and verification remain accessible, secure and mission-ready across the spectrum of operations,” he said.

The Identifi tool is an application programmed on a mobile device that allows operators to check and review fingerprints, analyze faces and voices, and scan irises in the field. They can upload or cross reference the information with a Defense Department database known as the Automated Biometric Identification System, or ABIS, to identify individuals or enemy combatants.

In an email to Military Times, McKenna Miller, the company’s communication director, explained that Identifi was originally developed by the company DFL Technology. DFL won a contract from Special Operations Forces Works, or SOFWERX, a non-profit that partners with SOCOM to bridge the gap between the public and private sectors for technological solutions.

Using input from SOCOM subject matter experts, the company built a prototype for Identifi. In 2023, they entered it into SOCOM’s Tactical Biometric Event, which was an open competition for industry with a technical and operational evaluation, and won. A year later, Reveal acquired DFL, and they have been working on the project together ever since.

Although using biometric data for identification is nothing new, the way in which the information is digitally collected and stored is.

Smith told Axios that when he deployed to Afghanistan with the Marine Corps, they used decades-old technology, so the hope is the Marines and Army will also adopt Reveal’s biometric tool. He called SOCOM the “trendsetter” for the U.S. military and intelligence communities.

Miller declined to disclose the value of SOCOM’s Identifi contract. But, according to a search of USA Spending, since 2019 Reveal has been awarded some 15 contracts totaling more than $13 million from the DoD, General Services Administration and Small Business Administration.

Since launching in 2018, Reveal said it has increased its revenue tenfold year over year. Last July, it announced that it had raised some $30 million in funding and with that investment, it has doubled its workforce to include more than a hundred employees.

According to Reveal’s announcement, SOCOM has already begun fielding the Identifi tool and it’s planning for broader deployment throughout the fiscal year.

Operation Epic Fury may have strengthened the case for directed energy weapons, but the U.S. Navy’s dream of putting “a laser on every ship” may take significantly longer than expected to realize.

In a posture statement delivered to the House Armed Services Committee on May 14, Chief of Naval Operations (and noted directed energy champion) Adm. Daryl Caudle delivered a forceful argument for why high-energy laser weapons are a necessity for the sea service — namely, to take over missile defense from kinetic interceptors and free up space for offensive weapons across the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, which he proclaimed “the workhorse of the surface Fleet, as illustrated clearly by Operation Epic Fury.”

“Directed energy is a critical component of future naval warfare, particularly for ballistic missile and terminal defense,” Caudle stated. “The current paradigm, which forces a trade-off between defensive interceptors and offensive strike weapons within the limited space of the Vertical Launching System (VLS), is unsustainable. Every VLS cell used for a defensive missile is a lost opportunity for a long-range offensive strike.”

But Caudle’s testimony also contained an admission that the dream of a laser fleet remains a dream deferred — at least, until the Navy can actually build it.

The vision of a laser fleet Caudle laid out in his posture statement is anchored in the Navy’s proposed nuclear-powered battleship and future surface combatants, platforms that must be “designed with the power and cooling capacity necessary to scale these systems to very high energy levels, thereby providing lethality against exquisite threats.”

To translate those designs into real-world capabilities, the service “must prioritize and fund R&D for compact, high-density energy storage and thermal management systems capable of handling the demands of [directed energy weapons],” he said, as well invest in “digital engineering and land-based test facilities to de-risk the complex integration of DEW systems with legacy combat and ship control systems.”

The structural reason for Caudle’s emphasis on future warships is one Laser Wars readers will recognize immediately: the Navy’s current surface fleet — including its most modern warships, the Flight III Burke-class destroyers — simply cannot support the power demands of laser weapons at scale.

As the service’s then-surface warfare boss Rear Adm. Ron Boxall bluntly put it back in 2019, the Flight III Burkes are already “out of Schlitz with regard to power,” their generators fully committed to feeding the new AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar system.

Caudle isn’t pretending a viable laser weapon for missile defense can be engineered around existing hulls; they must be built into the next generation of warships from the keel up.

The implication is stark: the first vessel in America’s true laser fleet won’t set sail until the first battleship or next-generation frigate steams out of a shipyard. Battleship procurement isn’t planned until 2028, with delivery to the fleet projected for the 2030s, if at all.

The Navy may see directed energy as a critical capability, but don’t expect it to show up on any active warships outside of its existing Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN)-equipped fleet anytime soon.

None of this makes Caudle’s urgency any less real. Indeed, Epic Fury offers the most vivid illustration yet of exactly why he feels it so acutely.

Consider the Presidential Unit Citation recently awarded to the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group. According to the citation, nine surface combatants — eight as part of Destroyer Squadron 2, plus the USS Winston S. Churchill — fired 207 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles at Iranian targets between February 28 and May 1.

Assuming all of these combatants were Arleigh Burke destroyers with 96 VLS cells apiece, that’s a potential combined ceiling of roughly 864 cells, with those 207 Tomahawks representing roughly one offensive strike weapon for every four cells.

The citation makes clear where the rest of the magazine went: the strike group “protected vital sea lines of communication while under persistent threat from enemy missiles and one-way attack drones,” meaning the remaining cells were loaded with (and presumably expending) the defensive interceptors required to keep the formation in the fight.

This is Caudle’s unsustainable paradigm in action: the destroyers that prosecuted one of the most significant U.S. naval combat operations since World War II potentially went into the fight with roughly three-quarters of their magazine committed to self-defense.

And once those interceptors are spent, they are not easily replaced. Unlike fuel or food, vertical launch weapons cannot be reliably transferred at sea under operational conditions. The Navy has been pursuing an underway VLS reloading capability through its Transferrable Reload At-Sea Method (TRAM) program, but the system is not yet operationally fielded.

The directed energy solution to this problem is, in theory, elegant: a laser weapon defending a warship at $10 per shot leaves every VLS cell free for Tomahawks for offensive strikes and SM-6s for remaining high-end threats, converting the destroyer from a platform split between offense and defense into one optimized for offensive power projection.

“Every VLS cell used for a defensive missile is a lost opportunity,” Caudle told lawmakers — and directed energy, as he envisions, eliminates the choice. The problem is that the ships capable of hosting those laser weapons at the power levels required haven’t been built yet.

Caudle’s posture statement does offer something of a bridge between the Navy’s current surface combatants and the laser fleet of the future: the Containerized Capability Campaign (C³), an initiative he describes as enabling “missiles, unmanned systems, sensors, electronic warfare packages, and directed energy” to be deployed across “a wide range of platforms and shore sites” without major structural redesigns.

Caudle explicitly frames containerization as a workaround for the power and integration constraints that make bolting high-energy laser weapons onto existing warships so difficult.

It “decouples payloads from platforms,” as he puts it, allowing the Navy to “adapt capability faster than traditional acquisition timelines” and deliver combat power “at the speed of relevance — not the speed of platform-centric acquisition.”

Caudle had previously made the vision concrete at the McAleese Defense Programs conference in Arlington, Virginia in March: “From towed array sensors to drone swarms to electronic attack systems to high-powered lasers, I want to containerize everything.”

There is evidence to support this approach. In October 2025, the Navy conducted a successful live-fire test of the palletized 30 kW LOCUST Laser Weapon System from the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, demonstrating that a containerized laser could draw cleanly from a carrier’s nuclear reactors without the issue that plagues the Burke fleet.

Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, is developing a containerized version of the service’s lone 60 kW High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system currently installed aboard the destroyer USS Preble specifically so the system can be seamlessly transferred across vessels in maintenance rather than sitting idle pierside.

The Navy’s fiscal year 2027 budget request also supports the “development, integration and marinization” of the U.S. Army’s Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) systems for potential shipboard applications.

The most significant containerized effort reaches considerably higher up the power curve. The Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS) — the collaboration between the Army and Navy whose existence Laser Wars first reported in June 2025 — is designed from the outset as a containerized system, initially aiming for 150 kW with potential to scale to at least 300 kWs specifically for cruise missile defense, according to the Navy’s fiscal year 2027 budget request. The system will also include a Joint Beam Control System capable of supporting a 300-500 kW weapon.

Together, the Army and Navy have outlined a vision of $675.93 million in combined R&D spending through fiscal year 2031, with the Navy planning to award the first JBCS development contracts as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026. If JLWS delivers on its promise, it would represent a containerized laser weapon powerful enough to engage the missile threats that sit at the heart of Caudle’s VLS argument without requiring a keel-up redesign.

What Caudle’s testimony describes, then, are two directed energy tracks running in parallel — with a third, more tentative one emerging between them.

One narrative is near-term and modest: containerized, lower-power systems like LOCUST and even HELIOS, deployable across the surface fleet now and effective against the ever-expanding drone threat.

The second is transformational and distant: megawatt-class systems embedded in the hull of a battleship that won’t reach the fleet for close to a decade.

The JLWS represents an attempt to thread the needle between them with a containerized missile defense capability that could arrive before the battleship does.

For Caudle and his fellow Navy leaders, Epic Fury may have crystallized a need for a laser fleet that matches their ambition for one.

Time will tell if they can actually build it.

Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defense minister, announced at a press conference in Berlin that Germany is developing a European Space Component Command alongside a Weltraumakademie − a multilateral space training academy − and insisted that partner nations will be “embedded in the design phase” rather than presented with finished structures.

The meeting, billed as the first “DACH+L” format, expanding the traditional German-Austrian-Swiss defense dialogue to include Luxembourg, served as a platform for Pistorius to demonstrate traction on Germany’s €35 billion ($40.7 billion) military space investment pledged last fall. That program spans encrypted low-earth-orbit satellite constellations, military-grade launch capacity, and an expanded Space Command within the Bundeswehr.

Austria’s Defense Minister Claudia Tanner reaffirmed that Austria plans to put three operationally designated military satellites plus a test object into orbit next year, developed partly with Austrian startups. The program centers on two projects: LEO2VLEO, a joint initiative with the Netherlands covering imaging and navigation in very low Earth orbit, and BEACONSAT, an Austrian navigation satellite built for under €1 million ($1.16 million). Tanner said the satellites would be made available to partners and framed the push as essential for communications independence in a crisis.

Austria is neutral by constitution, though some have questioned how its deepening defense ties with European neighbors can be squared with this tradition and legal requirement.

Luxembourg’s Defense Minister Yuriko Backes, attending a DACH meeting for the first time, pointed to her country’s niche: established SATcom and Earth observation expertise that Luxembourg is “very willing to make available to allies and partners.” She and Tanner both referenced a forthcoming cooperation deal between the two countries on satellite use in July, without elaborating.

Swiss Federal Councilor Martin Pfister noted that there is no domain where Europe faces a greater dependency on non-European technology providers than in the space domain. “It is not possible for one country to solve this alone,” he said, though he called out Swiss state-owned company Beyond Gravity as a potential industrial contributor to a European solution.

Switzerland, too, has bent the limits of its longstanding neutrality to deepen its integration into European defense projects since the war in Ukraine. The joint accession of both Austria and Switzerland to the German-led European Sky Shield Initiative in 2023 was a prime example of this new thinking.

The latest moves signal a further deepening of these Central European defense ties. The conference alone was a remarkable signal, expanding the more established German-Austrian-Swsiss DACH format to Luxembourg as a fourth member.

What Monday’s meeting produced in concrete terms was modest: a reaffirmation of existing cooperation threads, a cyber exercise result − Luxembourg, together with the three other German-speaking countries, placed second at NATO’s Locked Shields event under German leadership in April − and political momentum behind space initiatives that remain largely conceptual. But the message was still clear: German-speaking Europe is serious about wanting to become a player in space, and the push for independence from the U.S. has gained additional momentum.

The single-engine, prop-driven OA-1K, a militarized version of the Air Tractor AT-802 crop duster, is built to give isolated special operations teams eyes overhead and firepower on call from rough dirt strips with little support.

“It is essentially a Swiss Army Knife of airborne capability,” Lt. Col. Robert Wilson, AFSOC’s armed overwatch requirements branch chief, told reporters.

“Rapid disassembly and reassembly means, in a matter of hours, the aircraft can be loaded into mobility aircraft like a C-5 or C-17 for worldwide deployment,” Wilson said in an AFSOC release. “With the OA-1K, ‘any place, any time, anywhere’ is not just a motto, but an actual capability.”

Lt. Gen. Mike Conley, AFSOC commander, added in the release that the OA-1K “offers a unique and modular solution for a wide range of operations, including armed overwatch, at a fraction of a cost of other platforms.”

The cost case rests on platform consolidation. A 2023 Government Accountability Office report noted SOCOM refers to the mix of close air support, strike and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft flown over a single special operations mission as “the stack.” AFSOC has pitched the modular Skyraider II as a cheaper airframe that can do the work of many.

The Air Force now flies 18 Skyraider IIs and expects “a handful more” by October, Wilson said.

The aircraft, named for the Vietnam-era A-1 Skyraider, currently operates out of Will Rogers Air National Guard Base, Oklahoma, and will eventually operate from Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico, and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona.

The program of record is 75 aircraft, but the Pentagon has cut the funded total to 53. The same GAO report found that SOCOM had not justified the 75-aircraft fleet and urged a slowdown.

The cuts align with a broader Pentagon shift toward a potential high-end fight with China, where a slow, low-flying turboprop with no ejection seat is a hard sell.

“The 75 quantity figure is the program record,” Wilson said. “I would say, as the capability sponsor, less than 75 is not desirable. We would like to see it at the program record of 75, but ... just being pragmatic, obviously, with resource constraints that could potentially limit the program less than that.”

According to Monday’s press release, the decision to award the contract was made by the Joint Interagency Task Force 401, or JIATF-401, a Defense Department organization charged with researching, testing, and procuring counter-drone technology.

Perennial will deliver a range of AI-enabled counter-unmanned aerial systems currently used by U.S. forces. These include Merops interceptors, Bumblebee quadcopters and Hornet midrange strike drones.

In a statement, the company said the contract “validates the operational reliability of that technology in the world’s most actively contested environments,” and “deepens the existing strategic partnership” between it and the Defense Department.

U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, director of JIATF-401, in the statement called drones “the defining threat of our time,” and reiterated the need to maintain partnerships with companies like Perennial.

“We must be proactive with creating a layered defense that deploy and scale low-cost, attritable air-to-air drone interceptors at all our facilities at home and abroad,” he added.

In December, the Pentagon launched the billion-dollar Drone Dominance initiative to equip troops with cheap, disposable drones and prepare them for technological changes on the battlefield, many of which were demonstrated in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Another part of the initiative included investing heavily in the domestic drone industry, so within the next few years, equipment could be produced at scale for significantly less money.

But the Iran war further accelerated the U.S. military’s demand for the types of drones combatants have been using to attack or harass troops, destroy equipment or infrastructure and conduct surveillance, among other things.

During last month’s budget hearings, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told lawmakers that Perennial began rapidly scaling production of its Merops drones.

Perennial, originally launched by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as Project Eagle, developed the Merops interceptor for Ukrainian forces to counter Russia’s one-way attack drones known as Shaheds.

The U.S. military is using the interceptors the same way against Iran’s Sheheds.

When answering questions about the investment, Driscoll described a war of attrition, saying the Merops currently costs about $15,000 per unit, whereas a Shahed costs somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000.

Additionally, JIATF-401 awarded Perennial a separate $5.2 million contract in January for the Bumblebee V2 counter-drone system, and the Army reportedly tested the Hornet midrange strike drones in March.

The company has also opened manufacturing operations in Europe through a partnership aimed at expanding production of its Merops drones.

Perennial’s contract will end in three years or whenever the Pentagon pays out the full $500 million, whichever comes first.

Speaking at a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Michael Conley said “necessity had been the mother of invention” in spurring the service to apply available machine learning tools to combat operations.

“On the first day, they realized that our MQ-9 [Reaper drones] and other aircraft were at risk in a very hostile environment, and they were able to take some smart people, use artificial intelligence tools, and put humans on the loop, instead of in the process the whole time, and move Top Secret national-level intel,” Conley said, referring to his “small team” of AI and tech specialists.

The process of moving intelligence would have taken human operators “20 to 30 minutes to get that to a crew, into a cockpit, or into a ground control station,” he said.

Instead, Conley said, nine crew members were able to use AI “bots” to convert applicable data to a Secret clearance level and make it available in the cockpits of aircraft — all within two to three seconds.

“We have data that indicates that we’ve saved a lot of aircraft over the last 60 days using that tool, just to provide a better battlefield situational awareness,” Conley said.

Conley also confirmed the Air Force was using its AI-powered exploitation and dissemination tools to help intelligence analysts process huge amounts of complex data, including full-motion video.

“[In] a very heavy, human-intensive process, they’ve been able to use AI again, just smart humans getting together, figuring out solutions in order to proliferate that information across the intel community in seconds, rather than what could take hours in normal processes,” he said. “So we’re learning every day, and we’re getting better every day.”

To date, two U.S. aircraft have been downed by hostile fire over Iran: an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet and an A-10 Thunderbolt attack plane. Three more F-15s were lost to friendly fire over Kuwait.

Reportedly, some 24 Reaper drones have been destroyed by Iran over the Strait of Hormuz and elsewhere. An Air Force F-35A Joint Strike Fighter also sustained severe damage over Iran.

While aviation losses have been significant, Conley’s comments offer a rare window into prospective casualties that may have been averted, and how AFSOC is employing emerging tools to expand its operational picture.

The Air Force recently released contracting documents for a desired “Next-Generation Air Operations Center Weapon System” that would deliver more AI tools to planners at the geographic combatant commands, an effort for which it has not specified a procurement timeline.

Conley hailed MQ-9 operations in Epic Fury particularly noteworthy.

“Our MQ-9 enterprise proved that adaptive airmen can transform any platform and mission envelope, destroying hundreds of targets in contested operating areas,” he said. “I believe recent operations have been the MQ-9 community’s finest hour.”

He also hailed the work of AFSOC in rescuing two downed F-15 pilots in April in a daring and widely praised joint operation. The mission resulted in the loss of two MC-130 aircraft as well as four Army MH-6 Little Bird helicopters. Conley said he’d like to see the aircraft replaced quickly, although he said he expected it to “take some time.”

A statement seen by Reuters ahead of its release said that the Pentagon’s agreements are with Anduril, CoAspire, Leidos and Zone 5, and will together launch the “Low‑Cost Containerized Munitions (LCCM) program.”

The assessment phase of the program will involve purchasing test missiles from all four companies starting in June 2026. The statement did not provide a cost or specify the weapons systems from the four firms, but said the agreements established the terms for future firm-fixed-price production contracts.

The Army has long touted containerized weapons systems as a low-cost, mobile way to deploy missiles in standard shipping containers.

A separate agreement with defense startup Castelion lays out a plan to award a two-year contract for a minimum annual purchase of 500 Blackbeard missiles, which are Castelion’s first hypersonic strike weapon, once Castelion achieves testing and validation, the statement said.

It said the Pentagon was seeking authorizations and appropriations to purchase over 12,000 Blackbeard missiles over five years.

US Air Force looks to launch cheap missiles from cargo aircraft

Michael Duffey, who as under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment is the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, said in the statement that the agreements show how the U.S. is moving beyond traditional “prime” contractors to expand the industrial base.

The agreements, he added, send “a clear, long-term demand signal to innovative new entrants.”

Emil Michael, under secretary of defense for research and engineering, said the agreements commit the firms to on-time, on-cost delivery.

“We will deliver affordable mass for our warfighters at unprecedented speed,” Michael said in the statement.

The Pentagon is ramping up its requests from Congress for funding for munitions, which are in high demand with the ongoing war in Iran.

General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in written testimony this week that the Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget would fund over $26 billion for multi-year procurement contracts for critical munitions.

When U.S. Navy leaders declared that “the dream of a laser on every ship can become a real one” earlier this year, they apparently had one particular ship in mind.

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush shot down multiple drones with a high-energy laser weapon stationed on its flight deck during a first-of-its-kind live-fire test in October 2025, the Navy recently revealed.

Photos published to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service on April 20 show a 20 kilowatt Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) system — based on the LOCUST Laser Weapon System from defense contractor AV and on loan from the U.S. Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) — ahead of testing in the Atlantic Ocean.

The laser weapon “tracked, engaged, and neutralized multiple target drones, including drone swarms” from the deck of the Bush, AV officials said in a press release, “marking a major milestone toward fielding operational directed energy capabilities across all domains and platforms.”

John Garrity, AV vice president for directed energy systems, told Laser Wars that the live-fire test involved 17 drones.

Beyond the containerized P-HEL, which has been protecting U.S. service members from low-cost weaponized drones overseas for years, the Army currently possesses at least four LOCUST systems integrated onto M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicles and Joint Light Tactical Vehicles through the service’s Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) initiative.

The U.S. Marine Corps also awarded a contract to AV in November 2023 to deliver a LOCUST laser weapon for integration into a JLTV, although it’s unclear if the service has taken receipt of that system yet.

As previously reported, AV predecessor company BlueHalo had been in discussions with the Navy since at least 2024 to test the LOCUST not just on aircraft carriers, but potentially on submarines as well.

The live-fire aboard the Bush represents a departure from the Navy’s previous shipboard laser weapon efforts.

As Laser Wars has previously noted, the service’s Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers that host the 60 kW High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) and lower-power Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN) systems are inherently strapped for juice due to existing power demands from capabilities like the Flight III variants’ new AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar systems.

As Garrity told Laser Wars, the Bush live-fire showed that LOCUST can not only recharge from an aircraft carrier’s nuclear reactors with ease, but that power requisition aboard Flight III destroyers should prove no significant obstacle to keeping the system in a fight.

Then there’s the space element.

While the Navy had previously integrated the HELIOS and ODIN systems directly into Aegis Combat Systems across the service’s Arleigh Burke fleet, the employment of a palletized LOCUST is firmly in line with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle’s vision of a future surface fleet augmented by modular, containerized capabilities that can be rapidly configured for specific missions and deployed aboard warships without a costly and time-consuming integration process. (Indeed, HELIOS maker Lockheed Martin is also developing a containerized version of the laser weapon, a company executive revealed in August 2025.)

“Missiles and [unmanned surface vehicles] are not the only thing that can fit inside of these, from towed-array-systems, to drone swarms, to electronic attack systems, to high-powered lasers,” Caudle stated at the McAleese Defense Programs conference in Arlington, Virginia, on March 17. “I want to containerize everything.”

At first glance, the aircraft carrier seems like the ideal naval platform for laser weapons, containerized or otherwise, simply because it does not suffer the same power or space constraints as smaller surface combatants.

This isn’t a totally new concept: Navy Capt. William McCarthy, at the time the commander of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George Washington, argued in a study for the U.S. Air Force Center for Strategy and Technology in 2000 that “given the sheer size and the margin of power available, the [Carrier Vessel Nuclear] is the best-suited warship to integrate the directed energy technologies” like laser weapons.

Just as importantly, aircraft carriers sit at the center of the Navy’s most valuable and threatened formations — prime targets for drone and cruise missiles attacks and other asymmetric threats like explosive-laden drone boats.

The service has increasingly fielded novel counter-drone capabilities like Coyote and Roadrunner interceptors to carrier strike groups deployed to the Middle East for this exact reason following attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen on military and merchant vessels in the Red Sea.

With their low cost-per-shot and relatively deep magazines, laser weapons and other directed energy systems could potentially offer carriers a “robust self defense capability” so they can save their limited kinetic interceptor stockpiles for higher-end threats, or as McCarthy put it, a capability that may also come with restored maritime mobility.

“Freed from the need for a layered defensive screen of ships, the nuclear powered carrier, operating in tandem with a nuclear powered submarine, could exploit its inherent speed and self-sufficiency to deny its adversaries an opportunity for conducting asymmetric attacks,” McCarthy argued.

“By dispersing the battle group, each platform could choose the optimum location for its primary mission of launching cruise missiles, defending against theater missiles, protecting commerce, or maritime interdiction,” he continued. “This flexibility will become increasingly important as the Navy moves to a smaller and more capable force that operates in the littoral region close to the shore.”

Of course, the challenges that come with employing laser weapons in a maritime environment do not simply evaporate on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. As Laser Wars previously noted, atmospheric instability wrought by water vapor, dust, salt aerosols and temperature fluctuations can all contribute to bending, diffusing, or bleeding off energy from a laser beam — reducing even the most powerful system’s effectiveness.

Meanwhile, access to a potent power source like a carrier’s nuclear reactors can’t overcome the fact that laser weapons require dwell time to neutralize incoming targets, meaning they can be easily overwhelmed by saturation attacks like those that have defined the rise of drone warfare.

Sure, a single successful strike that squeaks through is nowhere near powerful enough to sink an aircraft carrier, but adversaries could plausibly exploit these dwell time constraints by using drones to run interference against laser emplacements or deplete interceptor arsenals to pave the way for devastating anti-ship cruise missiles.

But the more significant problem for carrier-based laser weapons may be actually using them during a high-intensity combat engagement.

The flight decks on carriers are arguably among the most congested and dynamic airspace in military operations, with multiple aircraft launching and recovering during combat. Introducing a weapon that requires a stable, uninterrupted beam (that’s also invisible to the naked eye) adds a punishing layer of complexity to an already crowded battlespace, requiring meticulous deconfliction with friendly aircraft and sensors to avoid a catastrophic mishap.

Now imagine that deconfliction playing out against, say, a swarm of incoming Iranian Shahed-136 drones. A carrier obviously does not suffer from the same jurisdictional or governance ambiguity that yielded the airspace-closing laser shootdown in El Paso, Texas in February, but the same risk of friendly fire remains a valid concern even with automated safety layers like those integrated into the LOCUST system

The Bush live-fire proves that laser weapons are a natural fit for large, power-rich aircraft carriers, but the more pressing question is whether they can function effectively within the compressed and chaotic battlespace that such capital assets are designed to survive.

Once thing is certain: when the Navy’s laser carrier is ultimately put to test, it will almost certainly be a trial by fire — or, in this case, light.

The cruise missile-killing high-energy laser weapon the U.S. Defense Department envisions as part of its “Golden Dome for America” domestic missile defense shield is beginning to take shape.

The new Joint Laser Weapon System — a collaboration between the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy that Laser Wars first reported about in June 2025 — will initially consist of a containerized 150-kilowatt system with the potential to scale to at least 300kw to defeat incoming cruise missile threats, according to the Navy’s fiscal 2027 budget request.

The system will also include a Joint Beam Control System “capable of supporting” a 300-500kw laser weapon, the documents say.

The JLWS effort will leverage research and development lessons from the Navy’s 60kw High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system, which is currently installed on the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Preble, and the Army’s 300 kw Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) system, the first prototype of which the service plans on taking delivery of later this year.

The Navy will also “conduct upgrades” to its High Energy Laser Counter Anti-Ship Cruise Missile Project (HELCAP) test bed “as appropriate” in support of future JLWS testing.

While last year’s Army budget request detailed $51 million in mandatory funding for JLWS through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reconciliation bill under its Expanded Mission Area Missile program element, this year’s request does not contain any R&D funding for fiscal 2027. Instead, the proposal details plans for $337.8 million in spending starting in fiscal 2028 and running through fiscal 2031.

Based on the budget documents, it looks as though the service plans on closing out its IFPC-HEL activities first before kicking off its part of the JLWS effort.

The Navy, however, isn’t waiting around.

The service requested $94.825 million under its Directed Energy and Electric Weapon Systems program element in fiscal 2027 — up from just $14.5 million in fiscal 2026, as Laser Wars previously reported.

That amount includes $79.84 million under its Surface Navy Laser Weapon System effort to jumpstart JLWS R&D, sustain the service’s lone HELIOS system for future testing activities and upgrade the HELCAP test bed, which is also receiving a separate $14.978 injection, according to the service’s budget request.

The service plans on investing an additional $243.3 million into JLWS R&D under that program element through fiscal 2031.

Together, the Army and Navy requests total a vision of $675.93 million in R&D spending for the JLWS through fiscal 2031. The Navy plans on awarding $31.7 million in contracts for JBCS development as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026 and the $30 million in contracts for the procurement and testing of containerized JLWS by March 2027, according to budget documents.

It seems likely that Lockheed Martin will receive those contract. Not only is the defense prime the technical lead on both the HELIOS and IFPC-HEL efforts that will inform the JLWS, but it’s also already developing a containerized version of the former, a company executive revealed in August 2025.

While the Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget request also contains $452 million in R&D spending for the “development, integration, and assessment” of directed energy weapons in support of Golden Dome, the exact relationship with the Army and Navy’s JLWS efforts is unclear.

Pentagon seeks funds for Golden Dome, drones, AI in largest-ever budget request

The Navy budget documents state that the $79.84 million allocated under SNLWS also includes funds to “begin development of a consolidated implementation plan” for all Golden Dome-related directed energy projects, “leveraging synergy and common weapon architectures between these efforts where possible” in coordination with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.

The dream of a laser weapon capable of shooting down cruise missiles is nearly as old as the laser itself.

The Pentagon first demonstrated the concept in the 1970s with the Navy ARPA Chemical Laser, or NACL, a deuterium fluoride system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that successfully engaged small missile targets but proved far too large and complex for practical deployments.

Those same challenges would befall its successor, the megawatt-class Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser, or MIRACL, despite the system successfully neutralizing a supersonic MQM-8 Vandal missile during testing in 1989.

The Gulf War briefly revived this dream in the U.S. Air Force’s ill-fated Airborne Laser program, which consumed more than $5 billion over nearly two decades before its cancellation in 2012.

More recently, the Navy’s Layered Laser Defense system, developed by Lockheed Martin in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research, successfully downed a target drone simulating a subsonic cruise missile in a 2022 demonstration at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the military’s latest attempt to validate the concept under realistic conditions.

The US Navy brought a ‘one-of-a-kind’ laser weapon back from the dead

The Pentagon clearly hopes that the JLWS will finally push its laser-based cruise missile defense efforts over the finish line. But as Laser Wars previously reported when the JLWS first became public in June 2025, such threats pose a far more complex challenge for directed energy weapons than the low-cost weaponized drones that are reshaping warfare on battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East.

Cruise missiles fly low and fast, hug terrain and execute evasive maneuvers that compress reaction time, while their hardened casings require far more sustained energy to defeat than the soft-bodied drones that current tactical lasers are optimized for.

Compounding the challenge, atmospheric interference can scatter or absorb beam energy before it reaches the target; even at 300kw power levels, laser weapons demand a degree of beam control and aim-point precision that no known system has yet demonstrated against a realistic cruise missile threat.

After years attempting to scale laser weapons to power levels suitable for cruise missile defense, the Pentagon’s push for a containerized solution also represents a departure from past vehicle-mounted or warship-integrated systems.

For the Navy in particular, Chief of Naval Operations and noted laser weapon champion Adm. Daryl Caudle has explicitly emphasized the pursuit of modular capabilities that the service can rapidly swap across its surface fleet for particular missions without lengthy and expensive stays in shipyards.

Look no further than the service’s October 2025 live-fire test of the Army’s 20kw Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) system, based on the LOCUST Laser Weapon System from defense contractor AV, from the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush.

The JLWS isn’t the only modular laser weapon the Navy is exploring.

The aforementioned Directed Energy and Electric Weapon Systems program element also includes $4.82 million in funding to support the “development, integration and marinization” of the Army’s Enduring High Energy Laser systems — the modular, 30kw laser weapon based on lessons from P-HEL and the aborted Stryker-mounted 50kw Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense system that the service envisions as its first directed energy program of record.

The US Army is already ditching its most powerful laser weapon yet

The Army planned on procuring two E-HEL units in fiscal 2026 and another pair the following year, according to the service’s budget request, with plans to “produce and rapidly field” up to 24 systems total in the coming years.

With its LOCUST system proven as a counter-drone capability both abroad and at home, AV appears the leading contender to clinch that contract in the coming years.

With institutional support for developing and fielding directed energy weapons at scale at a historic high, JLWS may prove a significant opportunity for the Pentagon to finally make its dream of missile-killing laser weapons a reality.

But the history of counter-cruise missile laser development is littered with programs that cleared every bureaucratic hurdle only to stumble on the physics and operational realities.

A containerized 150kw system may be a more modest and achievable goal than the behemoths that came before it, but whether JLWS can survive contact with both the budget process and real-world complexities of blasting cruise missiles out of the sky remains the open question.

The U.S. military is once again pursuing flying directed energy weapons to counter threats to American airspace, according to the Defense Department’s missile defense boss.

Speaking to members of Congress during a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces hearing on April 15 on the Pentagon’s planned missile defense activities for fiscal year 2027, U.S. Missile Defense Agency director Air Force Lt. Gen. Heath Collins stated that his organization was “all in” on “bringing directed energy to the fight,” including integrating such weapons into unmanned platforms for domestic air defense against hostile missiles and drones.

“We are certainly putting more attention into bringing potentially game-changing directed energy capabilities to bear in an unmanned platform,” Collins stated in response to a question from Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-New Mexico) regarding the MDA’s adoption of directed energy weapons.

“[An] air platform is what we’re focused on, so we can bring that capability to the edge of the fight and thin the herd on [unmanned aerial vehicles], potentially air threats and the like.”

While Collins did not identify specific directed energy capabilities of interest to the MDA, his written statement to the subcommittee notes that the agency is “accelerating the operational use of high-energy lasers on various platforms” to add a “critical, non-kinetic layer” to the existing U.S. missile defense architecture.

It’s unclear how much the MDA plans on spending on these efforts. While the “skinny” version at the Pentagon’s historic $1.5 trillion fiscal year 2027 budget request published in early April includes a significant boost to directed energy research and development for homeland missile defense under the Trump administration’s “Golden Dome for America” initiative, the documents do not contain any R&D or procurement efforts explicitly tied to the agency.

As Laser Wars readers likely already know, the Pentagon has been examining airborne laser weapons for missile defense since the 1970s, when the U.S. Air Force established its Airborne Laser Laboratory (ALL) program to explore the development of a laser-armed “aerial battleship” to protect strategic bombers from incoming interceptors.

In 2010, the service’s Boeing 747-based YAL-1 Airborne Laser Test Bed successfully destroyed several ballistic missiles in flight during testing but was subsequently canceled the following year due to “significant affordability and technology problems,” as then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it at the time.

As military laser weapons have evolved from bulky chemical-based systems to more compact and efficient solid-state designs in recent decades, U.S. military planners have increasingly explored integrating them into unmanned airborne platforms.

The High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) effort, initiated in 2003 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sought to develop a 150-kW system to integrate into both manned and unmanned aircraft before grinding to a halt in 2015.

The MDA itself pursued outfitting drones with laser weapons for ballistic missile defense for more than a decade through its Low Power Laser Demonstrator (LPLD) initiative before then-Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin threw cold water on the effort in 2020, citing the unique technical and environmental challenges inherent to mounting lasers on aircraft.

“I think it can be done as an experiment, but as a weapon system to equip an airplane with the kinds of lasers we think necessary — in terms of their power level, and all their support requirements, getting the airplane to altitudes where atmospheric turbulence can be mitigated appropriately — that combination of things doesn’t go on one platform,” Griffin told reporters in May 2020, per Breaking Defense. “So, I’m just extremely skeptical of that.”

Griffin isn’t wrong. Despite advances in laser technology, engineering a directed energy weapon that’s both powerful enough to destroy an incoming target and compact enough to integrate onto a relatively small airframe like a multirole combat aircraft or drone is a significant challenge.

Even if an integration were technically simple, operational feasibility is an major question: atmospheric conditions are limiting factors for laser weapons in any domain, but turbulence is a particularly thorny one for fast-moving airborne platforms tasked with maintaining a coherent beam long enough to successfully neutralize targets moving at equally high speeds.

Despite this skepticism, the dream of laser-armed drones appears alive and well. As recently as 2024, the MDA was gearing up for another run at airborne lasers, albeit with an initial focus on low-powered systems for tracking before ramping up to high-energy weapons.

In January 2025, the U.S. Navy released a slick vision of future naval operations that included notional drone wingmen outfitted with directed energy weapons running interference for manned aircraft. And in the last year, defense contractor General Atomics has released multiple renderings of its MQ-9B SkyGuardian and MQ-20 Avenger drones outfitted with laser weapons, although a company spokesman cautioned reporters that the systems were not designed for “any specific government program or contract.”

Directed energy weapons offer an alluring alternative to traditional missile-based air defenses, with low cost-per-shot, deep magazines and the ability to engage targets at the speed of light.

But the Pentagon has been here before: airborne laser concepts have repeatedly surged on waves of optimism, only to collapse under the weight of technical complexities and ballooning costs.

Indeed, the Air Force’s Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) and Self-Protect High-Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) efforts, which respectively sought to mount laser weapons on an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship and F-15 Eagle fighter jet, proved too challenging to even advance to airborne tests. (Undeterred, the service is poised to restart airborne laser efforts in fiscal year 2027 amid a surge in broad institutional support for directed energy. Time is a flat circle.)

Whether the MDA is barreling towards a genuine directed energy inflection point or just another familiar R&D cycle remains an open question.

For now, the message from Collins is clear: when it comes to determining whether airborne laser weapons are a viable missile defense capability, the U.S. military is once again willing to find out the hard way.