This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.
The U.S. Defense Department demonstrated several high-energy laser and high-power microwave weapons for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, the first publicly known instance of a sitting U.S. defense secretary personally observing a live directed energy weapon firing.
The demonstration, which occurred at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, was attended by Hegseth and Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael.
“We have dramatically increased investment in scaling directed energy technologies, signaling to our manufacturing partners that the War Department is focused on delivering rapid solutions to the warfighter,” Michael said in a statement when reached for comment. “We are directly tackling manufacturability, reliability and integration—areas that have challenged transition under previous administrations.” (The Office of the Secretary of Defense declined to comment on the record.)
According to sources familiar with the demonstration, participating directed energy weapons included the Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) based on AV’s 20 kilowatt LOCUST Laser Weapon System; the “P5 version” of the Army’s 50 kw Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE-MSHORAD) laser weapon system from nLight; the 300 kw Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) from Lockheed Martin known as “Valkyrie”; an Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Power Microwave (IFPC-HPM) system based on the Leonidas from Epirus; and a “high-power microwave variant” of Raytheon’s Coyote interceptor, likely the Block 3 Non-Kinetic (BNK) system.
While these existing programs are run out of the individual service branches, Michael’s office is “taking a more active role moving directed energy forward” through the new Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS) effort initiated last year under the auspices of the “Golden Dome for America” domestic missile defense system, said a senior Pentagon official.
The White Sands demonstration “affirmed the ability of directed energy systems, particularly high-energy lasers, to defeat high-density, highly proliferated threats from a variety of sources and power levels,” the official said. “Scaling directed energy enables our warfighters to fight beyond the limits of magazine capacity and no longer limited by how many bullets are in the chamber.”
The demonstration comes as the U.S. military aggressively pursues alternatives to costly missiles and interceptors to counter the rapid proliferation of cheap, weaponized drones—a threat urgent enough that the Pentagon has proposed a historic $2 billion in funding for directed energy weapons research and development in its fiscal year 2027 budget request. With their comparatively low cost-per-shot and “infinite” magazine, laser weapons in particular represent an increasingly alluring solution to the drone problem, and the technology appears to have finally matured to the point where military leaders firmly believe they can actually field them at scale as deployable, supportable capabilities rather than an endless parade of exquisite prototypes.
Hegseth appears to share this confidence. In a written posture statement submitted to the House Armed Services Committee in late April, the defense secretary declared that the Pentagon intends to buy “tens to hundreds” of directed energy weapons in the coming years in a “strong and consistent demand signal” to a defense industrial base currently postured to produce only “a limited number of prototypes.” Hegseth’s comments are the clearest and most senior acknowledgement yet that one of the core obstacles to fielding directed energy weapons at scale isn’t the technology itself, but overcoming the bureaucratic inertia that has consigned so many promising systems to the “valley of death” between R&D and procurement.
The Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) effort—the Army’s most serious attempt yet at translating decades of laser weapon R&D into a program of record—will be the Pentagon’s first real test whether this time is different. The successor to the DE-MSHORAD effort, the modular, 30 kw counter-drone system is moving on an unusually aggressive acquisition timeline: the first prototype was expected in the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, with production units slated for delivery by the end of fiscal year 2027. The service plans to “produce and rapidly field” up to 24 E-HEL systems over five years, an ambition that would have been unthinkable for a directed energy program just a few years ago. Even the U.S. Navy has begun exploring the system’s potential shipboard applications.
Laser weapons from two known E-HEL contenders—AV’s LOCUST and nLight’s P5 DE-MSHORAD system—were in attendance at Tuesday’s demo at White Sands. The third known contender is Huntington Ingalls Industries, the nation’s largest military shipbuilder, which was awarded an $14.82 million contract for E-HEL system design, development, and integration in February 2025 and subsequently announced a dedicated laser weapon test facility to support the effort.
LOCUST is the most battle-tested laser in the American arsenal. First deployed overseas in 2022 and integrated onto Infantry Squad Vehicles and Joint Light Tactical Vehicles under the AMP-HEL initiative, the system was responsible for the U.S. military’s first acknowledged laser kill at the southern border with Mexico in February (friendly fire, unfortunately). LOCUST also shot down multiple drones from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush last October, and Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll personally fired one at White Sands in May via Xbox controller. AV unveiled an upgraded version of the LOCUST specifically targeting the E-HEL competition last August, and with its palletized and vehicle integrations already proven, it already appears to be the frontrunner for E-HEL.
nLight’s P5 version of the DE-MSHORAD system is the predecessor to the 70 kw HADES laser weapon the company unveiled in May. Designed for mass production, HADES represents the company’s near-term bid for counter-drone contracts as it continues its ongoing work on the Navy’s 300 kw High Energy Laser Counter Anti-Ship Cruise Missile (HELCAP) effort and under the Pentagon’s High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative (HELSI) on megawatt-class lasers capable of engaging ballistic and hypersonic threats. nLight has been betting heavily on rising global demand for drone countermeasures more broadly, raising $175 million in new stock sales and announcing a 50,000-square-foot manufacturing expansion in Colorado earlier this year.
Beyond E-HEL, Tuesday’s demonstration is also the most visible expression yet of the U.S. military’s directed energy ambitions around Golden Dome. The Pentagon’s 2027 budget request contains $452 million in dedicated directed energy R&D for Golden Dome, more than triple what was enacted just last year. Separately, the Army and Navy plan on spending $676 million over five years under JLWS to develop a containerized 150 kw laser weapon capable of defeating incoming cruise missiles as part of the initiative. In May, Michael told Congress that “the commitment was made to the President that we’re going to have a demonstration that includes directed energy in our Golden Dome architecture” by summer 2028.
Between E-HEL for drones and JLWS for missiles, no Defense Department since Ronald Reagan has invested so aggressively in America’s directed energy capabilities. But while Hegseth may have watched lasers burn targets out of the sky at White Sands, the Pentagon must now prove it can do so at scale—and on a deadline.
This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.