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This article is republished with permission from <\/em>Laser Wars<\/a>, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.<\/em><\/p>\n The U.S. military is pushing to demonstrate high-energy laser weapons engineered for fielding at scale in the next two years, according to the U.S. Defense Department\u2019s top science and technology official.<\/p>\n Testifying<\/a>\u00a0before the Senate Armed Services Committee\u2019s Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee on May 19, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, Emil Michael, told lawmakers that the science of laser weapons \u201cis largely done.\u201d He said the Pentagon is focused on addressing the engineering challenges that come with transforming exquisite prototypes into mass-producible capabilities\u2014the \u201cscaled\u201d element of the department\u2019s \u201cscaled directed energy<\/a>\u201d critical technology area.<\/p>\n \u201cWe now have a suite of directed energy products that go from low end to high end, and now we have to scale production of those,\u201d Michael\u00a0said<\/a>.<\/p>\n When questioned by Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., about the\u00a0three-year timeline for fielding laser weapons at scale<\/a>\u00a0that defense officials previously publicized in March, Michael stated that President Donald Trump\u2019s planned\u00a0“Golden Dome for America<\/a>“ domestic missile shield<\/a>\u00a0would accelerate those research and development efforts due to the initiative\u2019s \u201cbig reliance\u201d on directed energy. He added, \u201cOur experience in Iran has also doubled our interest in these systems.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of the money allocated to Golden Dome is going to go to the fundamental engineering of these systems so that we can make them cheaper, smaller, and more proliferated,\u201d Michael\u00a0said<\/a>. \u201cAnd because the commitment was made to the president that we\u2019re going to have a demonstration that includes directed energy in our Golden Dome architecture, there\u2019s a lot of energy going into that.\u201d<\/p>\n The directed energy demonstration is expected to occur during the summer of 2028, Michael said, part of a series of Golden Dome-related events.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s never been more effort in the department on this particular capability,\u201d Michael said<\/a>. \u201cThere [are] several companies that are emerging that have developed it, and several companies that are taking what they\u2019ve already built and making it cheaper and better.\u201d<\/p>\n Michael’s comments effectively tie the future of U.S. military laser weapons to a presidential priority with serious money and a hard deadline behind it. The Pentagon\u2019s fiscal year 2027 budget request\u00a0contains<\/a>\u00a0$452 million in proposed R&D spending for the \u201cdevelopment, integration, and assessment\u201d of directed energy weapons in support of Golden Dome alone, more than triple the $142 million enacted under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reconciliation package Trump signed into law in July 2025. In addition, the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy together have\u00a0laid out plans<\/a>\u00a0to spent $675.9 million over the next five years on a containerized 150-300 kilowatt\u00a0Joint Laser Weapon System (JWLS) <\/a>as part of the military\u2019s broader Golden Dome architecture. In addition, Michael\u2019s mention of Iran as having \u201cdoubled\u201d the Pentagon\u2019s interest in directed energy adds an operational urgency that budget numbers alone don\u2019t capture.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s a problem with Michael\u2019s declaration that the science of laser weapons is \u201clargely done\u201d and the engineering is what remains: Engineering is exactly what has sunk U.S. military programs in the past. Building effective laser weapons means ensuring they can be operated and maintained across a range of tactical environments by soldiers who aren\u2019t laser specialists. Consider the Army\u2019s 50 kW Stryker-mounted Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD), which the service\u00a0determined<\/a>\u00a0was \u201cnot mature enough\u201d to become a program of record after\u00a0rocky operational testing<\/a>\u00a0in the Middle East in 2024 exposed issues with the system\u2019s heat dissipation and reliability in its vehicle-mounted configuration. (Robert Rasch, a retired Army lieutenant general,\u00a0summed up the problem<\/a>\u00a0with real-world directed energy weapon deployments in August 2025: \u201cWe can\u2019t get by with the thought of having clean rooms out in combat.\u201d)<\/p>\n The Pentagon\u00a0has been burning drones out of the sky with lasers<\/a>\u00a0since 1973, but it has yet to consistently translate demonstrators into battle-ready weapons that American service members can actually rely on outside a controlled environment.<\/p>\n Indeed, the last decade has proven a graveyard of promising laser weapon programs. Beyond DE M-SHORAD, the Army has also abandoned its 300 kW\u00a0Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser<\/a>\u00a0project after downshifting from an eventual program of record to a single testbed that will inform future JLWS efforts. The Navy\u2019s 60 kW\u00a0High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance <\/a>system, which only recently\u00a0began testing at full power<\/a>\u00a0and successfully engaged drone targets aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Preble after years of delays, has effectively disappeared from the service\u2019s fiscal year 2027 budget request outside a handful of sustainment dollars. The Marine Corps\u00a0returned<\/a>\u00a0its five much-hyped\u00a0Compact Laser Weapon System <\/a>units to Boeing without a replacement program in sight. The Air Force spent years testing Raytheon\u2019s\u00a0High-Energy Laser Weapon System <\/a>before\u00a0abandoning it<\/a>\u00a0without a program of record.<\/p>\n These failures share a common pattern diagnosed in a\u00a0detailed 2023 Government Accountability Office report<\/a>: promising laser weapons advanced through prototyping without ever securing formal transition partners or drafting agreements that would bind developers and the acquisition community to shared requirements, timelines, and funding responsibilities, dooming them to obsolescence simply because the bureaucratic will to fight for them across budget cycles and shifting service priorities didn\u2019t exist. In his\u00a0posture statement<\/a>\u00a0to the House Armed Services Committee in April, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called it \u201cinstitutional inertia.\u201d While Michael pointed to the Pentagon\u2019s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 counterdrone group as a demand signal aggregator alongside and Golden Dome as a political forcing function, neither of those things solves the transition problem on its own.<\/p>\n Two efforts\u2014likely Michael\u2019s \u201csuite of directed energy products that go from low-end to high-end\u201d\u2014will serve as the clearest early indicators of whether the Pentagon\u2019s engineering confidence is warranted. The first is the\u00a0Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL)<\/a>, the Army\u2019s modular 30 kW system explicitly envisioned as the service\u2019s first directed energy program of record\u2014and it appears to be moving faster than almost any laser effort before it.\u00a0Based on Army documents<\/a>, E-HEL\u2019s design philosophy looks like a direct response to DE M-SHORAD\u2019s shortcomings, with the system decoupled from a specific vehicle platform and built for soldier-performable sustainment using line-replaceable units. The service\u00a0plans<\/a>\u00a0to \u201cproduce and rapidly field\u201d 24 E-HEL systems over a five-year period, with the first prototype expected no later than the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 and initial procurement units slated for delivery by the end of fiscal year 2027. If this timeline holds, E-HEL would mark the first time the U.S. military service has successfully transitioned a laser weapon to a genuine program of record.<\/p>\n The second is the aforementioned JLWS, the Joint Laser Weapon System. The Navy\u00a0plans<\/a>\u00a0on awarding $31.7 million in contracts for the development of a Joint Beam Control System\u2014a critical component \u201ccapable of supporting\u201d a 300-500 kW laser weapon system,\u00a0according<\/a>\u00a0to the Navy\u2019s fiscal year 2027 budget request\u2014as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026, with another $30 million in contracts for the procurement and testing of containerized hardware expected by March 2027. That timeline makes a Golden Dome demonstration in the summer of 2028 plausible, but it also means whatever system appears will likely be an early-stage weapon rather than a mature one. The current JLWS R&D roadmap\u00a0runs through fiscal year 2031<\/a>, and while a successful demonstration in two years would be a genuine milestone, it would still represent the early stages of a fielding process.<\/p>\n Whether the U.S. defense industrial base is ready to answer either program\u2019s call remains an open question. Manufacturing expansions from defense contractors like Huntington Ingalls Industries, AV, IPG Photonics, and nLight are encouraging signs, but the industrial building blocks for laser weapons\u2014from\u00a0specialized optics with 12-to-18-month lead times<\/a>\u00a0to critical materials and rare earth elements\u00a0sourced from Chinese-dominated supply chains<\/a>\u2014do not yet appear in place to enable the production systems at the scale Michael is describing.<\/p>\n The development of laser weapons has been defined for decades by a seemingly inescapable cycle of enthusiasm and disappointment. Ellen Pawlikowski, a retired Air Force general and former program manager for the service\u2019s YAL-1 Airborne Laser<\/a>\u00a0effort, perfectly captured the longstanding Pentagon consensus around directed energy in an\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0for the 2018 book\u00a0Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon<\/em>: \u201cI\u2019m tough on laser people these days. It\u2019s because they have a reputation of overpromising and underdelivering.\u201d<\/p>\n With institutional support at a historic high, the Golden Dome-driven demonstration planned for summer 2028 may end up proving a moment of truth for the engineering challenges that have imperiled laser weapon programs past\u2014or, at worst, yet another setback for the U.S. military\u2019s long pursuit of directed energy.<\/p>\n This article is republished with permission from <\/em>Laser Wars<\/a>, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.<\/em><\/p>\n