How the U.S. military is preparing for laser attacks on drones
This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology. The U.S. military has spent billions of dollars over decades building high-energy laser weapons capable of burning drones out of the sky, but it has spent considerably less money and time exploring what happens when an adversary does the same thing. With China fielding a growing arsenal of laser weapons capable of killing drones at ranges up to 25 kilometers, Russia’s Peresvet reportedly in active service, and various laser systems now spreading across the world through indigenous development, proliferation, and a burgeoning export market, that oversight is becoming harder to ignore. The U.S. military’s answer to this problem has a name: counter-directed energy weapons (CDEW). It’s a nascent field—no dedicated CDEW system is publicly known to have been fielded, and most related research and development remains conceptual. But a 2023 study published in the Journal of Directed Energy by researchers at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) offers the clearest public picture yet of what defending against a laser weapon looks like. The NPS study—which draws on a comprehensive 2020 NPS systems engineering capstone report by the same team of researchers—is focused specifically on naval unmanned aerial vehicles, and with good reason. Drones are arguably the most exposed military asset in the world: increasingly designed for expendability, they operate in lethal proximity to adversaries and, unlike a destroyer or a tank, carry no meaningful armor. The same principles that makes drones attractive as delivery mechanisms for attritable mass also makes them highly susceptible to a weapon optimized for persistent energy delivery. And while the laser threat calculus the NPS researchers present also applies to manned aircraft, surface ships, missiles, satellites, and ground vehicles, naval drones just happen to sit at the acute end of th