Red Sea Commander Sees “Lasers” As Future Sea-Based Drone & Missile Defense

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

Incinerating a hole directly through the metal of an enemy drone at stand-off distances, disabling an incoming enemy cruise missile with “jamming” directed energy or intercepting a small swarm or incoming salvo of drone attacks at one time …. are all operations US Navy maritime warfare commanders expect lasers can perform in the future.

The threat of enemy drones at sea has of course long been on the radar as a growing concern for future threats on the ocean, yet the Red Sea further highlighted and accelerated concerns that the drone threat is quickly expanding to include “multiple-drones” at one time or “drone swarms” at sea.

The intent with a drone swarm attack, not entirely unlike some of the recent Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, is to overwhelm a ship’s layered defense system by blanketing a ship with incoming projectiles making too many targets for any countermeasure to track and intercept at one time.

Therefore, learning to counter many drones at once is a key focus or take-away lesson learned from recent maritime combat in the Red Sea, according to the Commanding Officer of Carrier Strike Group 2. Given this tactical scenario, an ability to succeed against drone swarms depends heavily upon “magazine size,” simply how many bullets or how much directed energy can be available instantly at one time to manage a swarm of drones.

“Obviously drones have been around for a while and we’ve been training to deal with drones. But I think what we have started to recognize, what the Red Sea really taught us was it’s not going to be just one or two drones, it’s going to be a lot more. So you got to be able to train to deal with a lot of those (drones),”  Commanding Officer of the US Navy’s Carrier Strike Group 2, Rear Adm. Javon “Hak” Hakimsadeh told Warrior in an interview about his Carrier Strike Group’s Red Sea deployment

Surging into the future, optimal ship-based drone defense is described by Navy commanders in terms of a significant duality, meaning it would be important to identify, target and destroy the “launcher,” “archer” or point of origin and also use a non-kinetic, directed energy or “laser” weapon with a potentially very large magazine size to address an otherwise overwhelming threat. “Directed Energy” … is a key part of this equation,

“How do we expand the options that a sailor has to be able to take care of a drone? And I think in the near term, it’s probably going to be something along the lines of a gun system or a kinetic way to do it with guns and ordnance, but the long -term, I’d love to see things like directed energy, you know, something that can just recharge and give you that almost infinite magazine size, right? You don’t have to worry about your magazine size, because if you can keep generating the power to be able to launch your directed energy, if you will.,” “Hak” told Warrior.