By Patrick Mondaca – Warrior Contributor
For troops on today’s battlefields, death from the sky increasingly comes in the form of unmanned aircraft, and the buzz of an explosive-laden suicide drone is too often the last thing a frontline soldier hears. As the threat of these drones to personnel and equipment becomes ever more sophisticated and lethal, modern militaries are ramping up their efforts to counter it. At the forefront of the technological advancements designed to counter such airborne threats are direct energy weapons (DEW). DEW’s, which include high-energy lasers and other high-power electromagnetics, fire beams of concentrated atomic or subatomic light particles to degrade, damage, or destroy airborne threats. No longer just a thing of science fiction, gunners in combat theaters will soon be firing high-energy lasers at incoming drones, missiles, and mortars to defend themselves and other troops on the ground.
The war in Ukraine offers a premonition of what the future for modern warfighters will be, depicting a battlefield where the threat to ground forces from explosive-laden drones is real and increasing. No longer is the trench or fighting hole protection from incoming airborne threats when kamikaze drones can be steered into those trenches by enemy operators. No longer are columns of vehicles and personnel able to push through a kill zone when swarms of drones can instantly redirect that kill zone into a column’s path. The U.S. effort to equip its ground forces to defeat these killer drones began in August 2019 when the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) contracted with Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, subcontractors of Kord Technologies, to develop 50-kilowatt laser weapons on four Stryker combat vehicles. Raytheon’s winning prototype, part of the U.S. Army’s Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD), defeated multiple 60mm mortar rounds and drones in a series of continuous live-fire exercises in May 2022 at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The prior tactic of concentrating all of a convoy’s kinetic firepower on an airborne threat is not effective against swarms of explosive suicide drones. With a vehicle’s defenses limited to the ability and speed of its gunner to accurately target, fire, and reload while death rains from above, a gunner armed with high-energy lasers firing at the speed of light will have a fighting chance at bringing his vehicle through a kill zone unscathed. The Army’s Stryker combat vehicles armed with high-energy lasers are intended to give its gunners the capabilities to effectively detect and defeat airborne threats without the expense of wasted ammunition and risk of missed or errant fire. Instead of hearing the dreaded sound of a bolt slamming forward into an empty chamber, a gunner with a high-energy laser weapon has an almost limitless magazine. Powered by high-capacity batteries charged by the Stryker’s diesel engine, a gunner can fire the DE M-SHORAD 50-kilowatt laser as long as the vehicle’s engine is running and “zap a hole through a small consumer drone in a flash while detonating or deflecting a mortar within seconds.”
Other, similar weapons systems for American ground forces are in the works as well. The U.S. Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) awarded a contract to BlueHalo to outfit its new Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) with a 20 kilowatt Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) weapons system in April 2023. The U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research and Naval Surface Warfare Center then awarded BlueHalo a contract on November 9, 2023, to develop and integrate its LOCUST Laser Weapon System prototype onto the Marine Corps’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV). According to BlueHalo’s press release, the “LOCUST system combines precision optical and laser hardware with advanced software, artificial intelligence (AI), and processing to enable and enhance the directed energy ‘kill chain’, which includes tracking, identifying, and engaging a wide variety of targets with its hard-kill HEL.”
Future warfare will include gunners armed with high-energy laser weapons “zapping” drones and mortars as fast as they can push a button, and that future is rapidly approaching.
Patrick Mondaca, PhD candidate is a Warrior Contributor — Mondaca is a PhD candidate at The Royal Military College of Canada in War Studies
