The hottest new defence against drones? Lasers

Cheaper than advanced air defences and more versatile than low-tech options, lasers have become a popular choice for nations worried about drone attacks.

Drone swarms that have deluged Ukraine for years — and crossed the border into Poland last week — have sent NATO militaries in Europe rushing to upgrade air defences in case they ever face a similar threat. Soon they will have a new solution: lasers.

Scientists have for decades sought to harness directed energy beams into weapon systems that would be cheaper and more efficient than missiles or rockets. A growing number of countries are developing or deploying their own laser air defences, and some have already been used in war, by Israel and Ukraine.

A NATO nation in Europe is now buying an air defence laser from an Australian company, which officials, experts
and industry executives said appears to
be the highest-power direct energy system to be sold on the global weapons market. That is a sign that they are becoming more widely available and could be a mainstay for future warfare.

The Australian laser’s maker, Electro Optic Systems, advertises it as able to shoot down 20 drones a minute, at a cost of less than 10 cents per shot. Nicknamed “Apollo” for the Greek god of light, it has about the same level of power as Israel’s highly anticipated Iron Beam air defence laser, which is being built for its own military.

“The Ukrainian war and the Gaza war were key trigger events that everybody thought, ‘It’s the time now to make this operational. We should not spend any more years in doing demonstrations, tests and prototyping,’” Andreas Schwer, Electro Optic Systems’ chief executive, said in a recent interview.

“We have some clients which are so much under actual threat that they say, ‘Listen, we can’t wait — we need something tomorrow,’” Schwer added. He declined to say which NATO nation is buying the laser.

Air defences have been in high demand for years, particularly to protect targets in the Middle East, East Asia and the United States. Houthi fighters in Yemen have long used low-cost drones and cheap cruise missiles against Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The advanced drone swarms in Ukraine showed other European countries that they would also be vulnerable if they failed to quickly ramp up protection, experts said. Days before Russian drones entered Polish airspace, Moscow launched more than 800 exploding drones and decoys across Ukraine, its largest such assault of the war.

For Europe, “the salience, and importance, of this kind of capability has been reinforced by what’s happened in Ukraine,” said Sidharth Kaushal, an expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a military research institution in London.

Wreckage of some of the drones that flew into Polish airspace last week revealed them to be cheap aircraft, nicknamed “Gerbera,” typically made of plywood and Styrofoam. That some of them got past multimillion-dollar Western interceptors highlighted Europe’s potential shortfall against Russia — having too few air defences, which are costly to use, against a barrage of cheap but potentially deadly drones.

The most powerful air defence system in Ukraine, the American-made Patriot, costs more than $1 billion and can take years to build, which is why only a few hundred of them exist worldwide. It uses million-dollar missiles to intercept incoming airstrikes and is mostly meant to stop high-altitude projectiles — not lower-flying, cheap drones that attack in swarms.

The new Australian 100-kilowatt laser is being marketed at about $83 million
for each system, including training and spare parts, and will be delivered to its buyer by 2028.

Low-tech defences that Ukraine and Russia have used — like capturing drones with nets, shooting them down with rifles and building protective cages around military equipment — are far cheaper. But they are not versatile enough to keep up with fast-moving swarms of drones, especially those that are armed.

Lasers have drawbacks, and some European defence officials remain sceptical about their effectiveness, which is limited by weather. Rain, fog and humidity can throw off a laser’s precision, making it harder to hit its target. Most existing laser weapons have a range of a few kilometres and far too little power to stop ballistic missiles.

But it may not be long before high-energy laser weapons are more often used in warfare.

“We’re on the cusp of wider military adoption,” said David C Stoudt, the executive director of the Directed Energy Professional Society in New Mexico. He said it was a “significant advancement” that a NATO country is buying an air defence laser from a foreign producer.

“That is the big trend — to get higher-power lasers into platforms, to get into an operational environment as quickly as possible,” said Stoudt, who has been working on laser and other directed energy weapons for more than 30 years, including advising NATO on them. Given its low cost per shot and unlimited firepower, a laser weapon “starts to be almost the only game in town,” he said.

Lasers were first developed in the United States in 1960, and the Pentagon began testing them in weapons within a decade. They use electricity to heat a target with light particles until it melts, ignites or otherwise burns.

Some failed. An Air Force effort known as the Airborne Laser programme, which aimed to shoot down ballistic missiles from the nose of a Boeing 747 jet, produced unremarkable results, was deemed too expensive and ended in 2011. Others have proven successful, like a 30-kilowatt laser that the Navy used for air defence in the Persian Gulf in 2014.

More lasers are in various stages of testing and use across the US military, which is working to develop a one-megawatt weapon next year, according to the Congressional Research Service. At that level of power, lasers potentially could shoot down ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons; the 100-kilowatt laser is more limited to targeted drones, artillery and mortars.

The Pentagon spends about $1 billion each year on developing laser weapons, according to a 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office.

The United States and Israel, protective of secretive technology in high-energy laser weapons, have barred most from being sold on the global market out of fear that adversaries could exploit them, officials, experts and industry executives said. That also appears to be true for other countries building similar lasers.

Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Israeli weapons supplier Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, is awaiting approval from Israel’s defence ministry to sell his company’s laser weapons to allies.

One of them, the Iron Beam, will be transferred to Israel’s military in the coming months, officials said Wednesday. Two smaller versions, which were used to shoot down Hezbollah drones from Lebanon, are already being displayed at weapons expos.

The Iron Beam — which Steinitz has suggested be renamed Laser Dome — will be another layer in the Israeli air defence shield against short- and medium-range airstrikes that includes the Iron Dome system. It has intercepted nearly 40,000 rockets and missiles over the past two years.

In the decades to come, “it’s going to be a total revolution in the history of warfare,” Steinitz said. “This is just the beginning of the beginning.” And it may be all the more necessary in Europe, where Russia’s war is testing NATO’s borders as President Trump looks to retrench at least some American defence support.