Army’s laser weapons ‘pretty mature,’ could ‘contribute’ to next-gen missile defense

SMD 2025 — The US Army has been ramping up work with directed energy weapons in recent years and is eyeing potential applications for a broader missile defense effort, according to a senior service official.

“We can contribute these non-kinetic effects,” Keith Krapels, head of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command’s Technical Center, said on Tuesday at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “The technologies for laser directed energy right now are pretty mature. … We just need to pull laser directed energy across the finish line … and start producing the numbers.”

Krapels did not say to what initiative the tech could contribute, but he was speaking on a panel dedicated to next-generation space and missile defense. That would logically include the Trump administration’s high-profile Golden Dome effort, except that the Pentagon has barred officials from discussing that specific program at the symposium, as Breaking Defense previously reported.

The Army’s Technical Center researchers, he explained, are “the owners of science and technology to develop directed energy weapons and the electronic warfare systems to counter adversary use of space.”

Work up to now on directed energy weapons has included testing out several prototypes, including the Directed Energy Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD).

While that configuration wasn’t ideal for soldiers in the field, the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) now is pursuing an Enduring High Energy Laser program, with tentative plans to move forward acquiring a new weapon system if funds are secured in fiscal 2026, RCCTO head Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch told the audience here on Wednesday.

The RCCTO directed energy team “continues to work over a variety of technologies ranging from 10 kilowatt palletized irons lasers, up to 20 to 30 kilowatt systems mounted on infantry squad vehicles and JLTVs [Joint Light Tactical Vehicles], up to the 50 kilowatt medium SHORAD, and then 300 kilowatt laser systems, as well as one as well as the high performance, high power microwave technologies,” he said

“We fielded prototypes in every one of those arenas. We tested them and tested them on our instrument and ranges. And then at the request of leaders, we did what we didn’t think we were going to have to do or that team did what we didn’t think we had to do: We put them on planes, and we sent them down range in harm’s way to see how they would really work, put them at the pointy end of the spear,” Rasch said.

Krapels said that one of the current challenges for the service’s directed energy work is that there is not yet a “robust manufacturing base for that. We do lack some engineering expertise. … There’s not an engineering base for direct energy weapon systems like there are for comms, radios or even radars.”

High-powered microwave weapons, on the other hand, are not quite ready for prime time, he said.

“High power microwave is running a little further behind [lasers] but it, too, has a lot of options that are in the technology toolbox, and we just haven’t put enough emphasis on that. The benefit there of going to high power microwave is you can do the effective effects at longer ranges. And I see this as a huge opportunity space,” Krapels said.

“The realignment of priorities means that we should see the resources to apply that,” he stressed. “We just need to generate the appropriate level of engineering to convince folks that we can actually build what we say we can build, and then demonstrate that it will be effective. And then we will have, once again, changed the game on our potential adversary, and all of their investment, or most of their investment, becomes kind of OBE. “