No, The Navy's Lasers Are Not Ready for Iranian Drones

As it happens, I used to cover naval laser development. It's an endless hype cycle

Edited by Sam Thielman 

HOPE IS AFLOAT in the Strait of Hormuz for Team America, reports the New York Post. No, the dogshit-class Murdoch-owned paper that wears the skin of a once-great local tabloid wasn't talking about the negotiations gambit floated by the Iranians this week. It was talking about "war-ready" lasers fielded for "zapping drones in Iran." 

The claim attracted a lot of attention for something that will be useless in the Iran War. That was the purpose of the story—not to be, like, true. 

Fifteen years ago, I was WIRED magazine's Pentagon correspondent. One of the things I wrote about—a lot—was the Navy's investments in directed-energy weapons like shipborne lasers. These were, and remain, experimental. 

In 2011, for instance, a laser mounted on the decommissioned destroyer USS Paul Foster disabled the engines of an inflatable motorboat off the coast of California. It was a proof-of-concept for the Office of Naval Research, the Navy's laser stewards, in an operational environment, and it came after literal decades of development. Two years later, the Navy was proudly announcing that its (still-experimental) Laser Weapons System was capable of shooting down drones, a huge step for its operational applicability. In a (fleeting) environment of budget constraints for the military—who remembers the days of Sequestration?—the Navy wanted to make 2013 a big year for moving lasers out from the testing range and closer to acquisition, for eventual shipboard adoption. 

It came and went. In the course of teaching myself about lasers, I learned a whole lot about the impediments that make them a technology that's still not ship-ready after literal decades of development. 

First let's talk about the promise of lasers, outside the realm of sci-fi spectacle but beyond well-understood uses like engraving or surgery. 

If the Iran War has demonstrated anything, it's the crucial distinction between the economics of missiles when used as an offensive vs. defensive weapon. Missiles that defend, through interception, are way more expensive than missiles that attack. The math favors the attacker. For the Navy, which depends on expensive, slow-to-manufacture surface ships, the proliferation of cheap offensive ballistic missiles is a very serious problem. There's a reason why submariners like to say the Navy only has two kinds of ships: subs and targets. 

Laser weapons are—or would be—a game-changer. They offer a shipboard defense with a theoretically unlimited magazine—limited only by how much power they require, that is—at a fraction of the cost of the cheapest missile. It is not crazy, in other words, for the Navy to have been working for so long at fielding a laser-centric shipboard defense. To the contrary, a reliable onboard laser system could shift paradigms, particularly in an era of cheaper and smaller drones with serious military applicability. The math would favor the defender.

But. There are real, intractable reasons why these things aren't already fielded. First is the power-generation problem. A military-grade laser is generally thought to require 100 kilowatts. But what you really want is a megawatt laser. A megawatt laser can punch through 20 feet of steel in a second. That really will disable an incoming threat to a ship. Not a single Navy laser can come close yet. The one laser system presently in operation, the HELIOS system aboard the Burke-destroyer USS Preble since 2022, can get up to 60 kilowatts. [A megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts.—Sam] That makes it a so-called Dazzler, maybe capable of confusing a drone's targeting or control systems so it goes where it shouldn't, but not the sort of thing that the average person thinks about when imagining a laser weapon. Not that that troubled any New York Post editor.. 

With all that power comes integration problems. The laser weapon will have to draw on the same power systems as everything else on the ship. While the "magazine" of a laser is limited only by power generation, the rest of a ship's systems will face a drain from laser usage. That will force captains to make choices about expending a laser blast or devoting that energy to, say, propulsion. Now imagine the captain having to make those choices with a drone swarm above and the radars alerting the crew to inbound ballistic missiles. Would you want to be a static target in that situation? 

Then there's a problem called fluence. The more stuff a laser encounters on its path to its target, the weaker its beam becomes, since it has to expend energy on clearing the path. You know what the air over the sea is full of? Salt. Water particulates. Pollution. In other words, the sea itself is a non-ideal operating environment for a laser. Not great news for the Navy. 

Finally, a laser is a single-file weapon. I have to aim my blaster at your drone, observe an effect (or lack of one) on my target, and only then turn my attention onto the next drone, and so on. I do this while I draw energy away from the rest of my ship's systems to employ the lasers. If you've launched a swarm at my ship, I am, to use the technical term for such a situation, fucked. I can theoretically solve this problem by bolting more laser cannons onto my hull, but then I've made my power-divergence problem worse. 

Speaking of diverting energy, that's more than I cared to devote on a Friday for explaining why the Post story is nothing more than military cope for a failed war. I could probably have just noted that the Post's main source is "the president of Directed Energy Consultants, which works with the military," an interested party who makes money off laser hype. The Post's breathless quote from the Department of War—that lasers "can be used to take out both drones and incoming cruise missiles, at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles"—is about Army lasers, a different kettle of fish. There ain't no relevant base to station such a laser that could be used in this war, since Iran has already disabled or destroyed the U.S. basing infrastructure in the Gulf. But if the Post reported that accurately—assuming it appreciates this major and relevant distinction—it just wouldn't be the Post. 

Oh, and the problem set we've been talking about are the Iranian Shahed-136 drones. A ship-bound ballistic missile? Of the sort that Iran claimed earlier this month to have fired at U.S. warships? And which Central Command downplayed but didn't deny? Much harder problem, against which the Navy's lasers are even less capable of handling. You need that one-megawatt laser that isn't on the horizon.  

Trump, in other words, will not be able to pew-pew-pew his way out of the Iranian chokehold over Hormuz. There's no alternative to a negotiated settlement. 

YES, THIS IS A RARE FRIDAY edition of FOREVER WARS. This week I had to deliver my final edits—like, final-final—to the manuscript for THE DISAPPEARED: A FATHER, A SON AND THE WAR ON TERROR. I submitted my last-ever changes to my publisher this morning. With that, my second book is finished. You won't see it for something like six months, and it'll still be a little while before I can put a preorder link in every single edition of FOREVER WARS. (Rest assured, that's coming.) But THE DISAPPEARED is done. I can confidently say it's the best thing I've ever done in journalism, and, not to toot my own horn, I've done a lot. 

This morning, I packed up more than a half-dozen notebooks, my folders with additional material, reference books and earlier drafts of the manuscript. They've been by my desk for nearly three years. I can do no more with them. Into the closet they went. I thank them for their service. 

Not knowing what else to do with myself, I wrote this edition. 

Next week might be slow around here. In the middle of the week, I've got to fly to South Bend, Indiana to be part of an exciting 9/11 Anniversary panel at Notre Dame. Disappointingly, I'm there at a time where there seems not to be a single Fightin' Irish football or basketball game I can attend. But that just means, if you're in the South Bend area, I'll want to hang out. Say hi if you're there.