This text is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a e-newsletter about navy laser weapons and different futuristic protection expertise.
The U.S. Navy has a weird proposition for the U.S. protection business: take your high-energy laser weapons and break them into items.
In a draft request for options (RFS) published on August 12 via the Nationwide Safety Expertise Accelerator (NSTXL), the Workplace of Naval Analysis (ONR) detailed plans to discover the event of “distributed” laser weapons, the place a system’s laser supply and the beam director that truly delivers results on track aren’t bolted collectively in the identical equipment, however as a substitute linked via a specialised optical fiber spooled throughout a ship, base, or battlefield. For this explicit venture, dubbed the ‘Common Optical Transport for Distributed Laser Weapons’ and valued at $10.25 million, ONR is in search of prototype connectors and fiber able to transmitting 10 kilowatts over 10 kilometers with minimal energy loss and excessive beam high quality.
“The shift to distributed laser weapons permits for considerably expanded geographic protection and multi-sector drive safety” in assist of expeditionary airbase protection and counter-drone missions ashore, the draft doc says, a departure from the service’s previous deal with shipboard directed power methods working on the excessive seas.
Distributed laser weapons have apparent attraction. Such methods might enable U.S. and allied forces to maintain a power-hungry, heat-generating laser supply in a fortified place whereas deploying a relatively light-weight and agile beam director across the perimeter of a base or formation. With the precise fiber connection, a single supply might plausibly feed multiple directors that concurrently have interaction incoming targets. Certainly, the ONR doc describes U.S. Marines uncovered to drone assaults and rocket, artillery, and mortar fireplace whereas seizing ahead airfields beneath the service’s Expeditionary Superior Base Operations (EABO) idea as a possible real-world utility.
However ONR’s imaginative and prescient of chopping up laser weapons into distributed elements additionally seems to face in distinction with the Navy’s present strategy to laser weapons, which primarily entails bundling critical laser components up into a single container that may be rolled on and off a warship with relative ease.
As I previously reported, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle spent the higher a part of 2026 pushing the service towards what he calls the Containerized Functionality Marketing campaign (C³), a doctrine constructed round cramming novel capabilities into standardized containers that may be swapped throughout platforms and fielded “on the velocity of relevance—not the velocity of platform-centric acquisition.” It’s the identical logic that led the Navy to conduct live-fire testing of the U.S. Military’s Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) system off the flight deck of the usGeorge H.W. Bush in October 2025. Congress is now making an attempt to increase that logic to the Navy’s lone 60 kilowatt High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) with a $5 million funding addition for a containerized version of the long-suffering shipboard laser system.
ONR’s distributed structure and Caudle’s containerization marketing campaign each seem like responses to the identical recurring downside: making an attempt to bolt beautiful laser weapons onto platforms that had been by no means designed to hold them within the first place, whether or not a Stryker infantry carrier vehicle or Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, has persistently yielded important energy, cooling, and integration challenges. Distribution is primarily a physics and technical requirements problem that, if solved, might enable the Navy to combine and match laser sources and beam administrators from totally different distributors via an open photonic interface.
By comparability, containerization is as a lot an acquisition technique as an engineering one, enabling the service to avoid bespoke integrations for each new functionality it must quickly discipline on a warship. And these two approaches aren’t mutually unique: a containerized laser supply might doubtlessly feed fiber out to a number of modular beam administrators which can be themselves swappable throughout varied websites, ship or shore.
The 2 approaches are unlikely to converge anytime quickly. ONR’s present efficiency targets for distributed laser prototypes (transmit 10 kw over 10 km) counsel the initiative continues to be an early-stage engineering guess on enabling applied sciences which can be years away from producing something a floor combatant or Marine detachment can really deploy within the discipline. Apart from, there isn’t a unprecedented amount of money out there for the hassle in the meanwhile: $10.25 million is a comparatively meager quantity of funding in comparison with the roughly $350 million the Navy has sunk into HELIOS since awarding Lockheed Martin a contract for the system in early 2018.
Whether or not the ONR’s experiment finally ends up validating the promise of distributed laser weapons or just yielding the identical integration complications stays to be seen. However the truth that the Navy is pursuing the expertise alongside containerization suggests the service continues to be not sure whether or not the very best repair for its laser woes is a greater field or no field in any respect.
This text is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a e-newsletter about navy laser weapons and different futuristic protection expertise.
