Mike Dodd, the Pentagon's assistant secretary of defense for critical technologies, used an August 12 post on X to press industry directly for "lighter, more efficient" directed energy weapons small enough to mount on aircraft and high-altitude platforms, explicitly for counter-drone, expeditionary, and special operations missions, as well as disrupting adversary command and control. His framing was blunt about what's actually holding the technology back: "Size, weight, and power decide what flies," he wrote, adding a pointed challenge to contractors: "Bring us your best. Not slideware, hardware we can put on a range and stress." Dodd's post came the same day as Space and Missile Defense Symposium remarks from David Bagnati, executive director of Joint Interagency Task Force 401, who separately announced that restrictions on testing high-energy lasers in U.S. national airspace have eased, with the southern border now serving as JIATF 401's live operational test bed.
The strategic logic behind this push isn't new, it's the same cost-exchange problem this blog has tracked in exhaustive detail through the Patriot and THAAD interceptor drawdown following Epic Fury and the 12-Day War. Directed energy weapons offer something no missile-based interceptor ever can: a magazine that doesn't run out mid-fight, since a laser shot costs pennies in electricity rather than millions of dollars in hardware, precisely the asymmetry that's been forcing $3-12 million interceptors into catastrophically lopsided exchanges against $20,000-50,000 drones throughout this year's conflicts. Where CENTCOM's newly announced Task Force Falcon Strike represents one answer to that cost problem, fighting cheap drones with cheap drones, airborne directed energy represents the other: fighting cheap drones with a weapon that has effectively unlimited ammunition as long as the aircraft carrying it stays powered and airborne.
The Air Force's actual track record on this technology, though, tells a story of repeated stalling rather than steady progress, and it's worth being honest about that gap rather than treating Dodd's post as evidence of imminent fielding. The Airborne High Energy Laser program, meant to arm the special operations AC-130J Ghostrider gunship, was cancelled outright in 2024 after missing its integration and flight-test window, and the Air Force Research Laboratory's THOR high-power microwave system, despite being "exceptionally effective at disabling" a drone swarm in its last publicly known test, hasn't had a disclosed test since 2023, with its planned successor, tellingly named Mjolnir after Thor's hammer, generating no public test announcements since being unveiled. Budget documents tell a similarly modest story: the Air Force's fiscal 2027 request includes just $91.8 million for directed energy research and development, with zero funding in the procurement account, meaning nothing is currently slated to actually enter service, and a projected $406.6 million across fiscal 2028-2031 for further research rather than fielding.
That gap between urgent rhetoric and modest funding is really the story here, and it connects to a pattern this blog has now documented across multiple domains. Just as the Army opened test ranges to non-traditional vendors specifically to compress a test-and-evaluation bottleneck for cheap interceptors, and just as Falcon Strike is fielding attritable drones because expensive interceptors can't be produced fast enough, Dodd's directed energy push is aimed at the same structural problem from yet another angle: America's defense-industrial base has spent decades optimizing for exquisite, expensive, kinetic solutions, and every recent conflict has exposed how badly that model scales against mass, cheap threats. Directed energy has been the theoretical answer to exactly this problem for over a decade without ever reaching the "hardware we can put on a range and stress" standard Dodd is now demanding, and AHEL's 2024 cancellation is a direct, recent example of the technology failing to clear that bar even when a specific aircraft and mission were already assigned to it.
What's genuinely different this time, and worth watching, is the testing-restriction change Bagnati announced alongside Dodd's post: the FAA's April agreement easing high-energy laser testing in national airspace, following the embarrassing February incident where a counter-drone laser test forced a full airspace shutdown over El Paso, removes a real regulatory bottleneck that has slowed this technology for years independent of the engineering challenges. Combined with JIATF 401 treating the southern border as an active operational test bed rather than a one-off range event, that's a meaningful process change even if the underlying "smaller, lighter, more efficient" hardware problem Dodd is publicly begging industry to solve remains, by his own account, unsolved.
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