The US Navy’s top admiral sees laser weapons as a strategic answer to the cost challenge of combating cheap drones.
The Navy has been looking to laser and directed-energy weapons as a potentially cheaper means of neutralizing uncrewed systems, preserving limited and much more expensive interceptor missiles for higher-end threats. Laser weaponry, however, has been tricky to develop, as its effectiveness in combat depends heavily on power, cooling, and other shipboard systems.
In a Wednesday op-ed for The Washington Post, Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, identified the cost imbalance of using multimillion-dollar interceptors to take out low-cost drones as a “defining challenge for the US Navy.”
“Recent conflicts have demonstrated how quickly low-cost drones, one-way attack aircraft and other relatively inexpensive weapons can pressure even advanced air and missile defenses,” the admiral explained, cautioning that “a defender who fires multimillion-dollar interceptors against inexpensive drones may win the immediate engagement while losing the larger campaign of endurance.”
“This is why directed energy weapons — especially high-powered lasers — matter strategically,” Caudle said.
As the sea service battled the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen from October 2023 to May 2025, Navy warships routinely relied on missiles to eliminate drone threats. The Navy also regularly used top interceptors to combat ballistic missiles, straining stocks.
Last year, Adm. James Kilby, the acting chief of naval operations at that time, told Business Insider that the way the service had been heavily leaning on its interceptors in the Middle East would not be sustainable in a high-tempo fight.
During his July 2025 confirmation hearing for the CNO position, Caudle told the Senate Committee on Armed Services that the Navy faced a “learning curve” choosing the right weapons.
He said that lessons from the Red Sea led the Navy to look to cheaper air-to-air weapons and electronic warfare when possible, but further consideration is necessary.
The war with Iran this year, which has seen the US military face both drone and missile threats, has also demonstrated how quickly American forces can expend key stockpiles of high-value defensive munitions. The fighting added to concerns already sharpened by the Red Sea campaign over how long US interceptor stockpiles might last in a lengthy conflict.
While the defense industry is expediting and expanding the production of critical munitions, recent conflicts have turned up the pressure on the military to find more cost-effective, more sustainable solutions for defending against large numbers of drones.
Laser weapons are a promising capability to meet that threat and preserve those stockpiles, Caudle wrote, arguing that “lasers offer the possibility of shifting part of naval defense away from finite stored munitions toward shipboard electrical power.”
That said, “lasers are not magic weapons,” he wrote.
Lasers are line-of-sight weapons bound by combat realities like the atmosphere, ocean environment, beam strength and accuracy, and power and cooling requirements. To properly support laser weaponry, warships need enough power and the correct coolants to keep it from overheating. That means ship design has to be considered alongside weapon design.
Caudle stressed that laser weapons are not a replacement for high-end interceptor missiles. Instead, he added, directed-energy capabilities should be deployed as part of a larger, layered defense, employed against certain lower-cost threats.
The admiral said that the Navy needs to start incrementally readying the sea service for laser weaponry with more manageable, self-contained systems on ships rather than waiting for “perfect megawatt-class systems.”
He said that such systems would not represent a “final answer,” but rather “a practical bridge between promising technology and an operational capability the fleet can learn from, improve, and scale.”
The Navy has been working on laser weapons for years, evaluating them for maritime missions at its Directed Energy Systems Integration Laboratory in California.
The sea service installed an early operational laser demonstrator, the Laser Weapon System, on the Austin-class amphibious transport dock USS Ponce in the 2010s, and then it installed a 150kW Solid State Laser Technology Maturation demonstrator, or SSL-TM, on the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock USS Portland in 2019, using it to successfully destroy a drone target in May 2020 before it was uninstalled in 2023.
Additionally, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Preble is equipped with Lockheed Martin’s High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance, or HELIOS. Lockheed Martin said earlier this year that HELIOS eliminated four drones during a Navy-operated demonstration last year. Some other destroyers are equipped with the lower-powered Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy, or ODIN, which is used mainly to disrupt the optical sensors on drones and other threats.
Other services have explored the use of lasers as well. Last week, the US Army saw a laser weapons win, using the Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser to eliminate three drug cartel-linked drones at the southern US border.
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