The Army's Last Attempt at a Combat Laser Struggled in the Field. This One Just Got Its First Production Order Anyway.

 

Soldiers who used the Army's earlier attempt at a vehicle-mounted combat laser had real complaints. The Directed Energy Maneuver Short Range Air Defense system, built around a Stryker combat vehicle and deployed to the Middle East for real-world testing, ran into reliability and performance problems under actual operational conditions, according to feedback the Army has since acknowledged. It was also locked to one specific vehicle platform, which limited where and how commanders could actually use it. That history is the backdrop against which this week's news matters: the Army just awarded AeroVironment a $464.8 million contract to put a different laser system into full production, the first time any branch of the U.S. military has issued a production contract for a directed-energy weapon in its history.

The new system, called LOCUST X3, is built to sidestep the previous program's biggest structural limitation. Rather than being welded to a single vehicle type, it's platform-agnostic, meaning it can be mounted on the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle rather than requiring a Stryker specifically, giving field commanders considerably more flexibility in where they actually deploy it. It fires a 30-kilowatt beam, powerful enough to bring down small drones, and its "magazine" isn't a supply of missiles that runs out, it recharges directly off the vehicle's own power supply. That's the entire pitch in one sentence: unlimited shots as long as the engine's running, against a class of threat, cheap, small drones, that has spent the last several years making expensive missile-based air defense look increasingly unaffordable to use against it.

The contract structure itself is worth noting: it's an Other Transaction Agreement issued by the Army's Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Fires office, a mechanism the Pentagon increasingly favors specifically because it moves faster than traditional procurement. AeroVironment will deliver "dozens" of units over the next several years, a deliberately vague number that reflects an initial production run rather than a mass-fielding commitment. The company says LOCUST already passed testing at White Sands Missile Range, demonstrating it can safely engage drone targets, testing that presumably included the kind of reliability scrutiny the earlier Stryker-based system evidently didn't survive as well.

There's a genuine business story sitting alongside the military one. AeroVironment's stock has lost more than 42 percent of its value this year, and this contract is explicitly meant to diversify the company beyond its historical core business in small drones into directed-energy systems, a sector analysts project could generate $80 to $100 million in annual revenue over this contract's five-year performance period. That's a real but modest number against the company's stated ambition to nearly triple its directed-energy revenue to roughly $800 million by fiscal year 2030, meaning this contract, however historic as a Pentagon first, is being treated by AeroVironment's own investors as a down payment rather than a destination.

Whatever comes next depends entirely on whether LOCUST actually holds up better in the field than its Stryker-mounted predecessor did. Four decades of laser-weapon research and development have produced plenty of promising prototypes and comparatively few systems that survived sustained operational use, and Gen. Christopher LaNeve's own statement, that this program will let Army formations "defeat unmanned systems and dominate from the outset," is the kind of confident framing every predecessor program also arrived with. The actual test won't be the White Sands data or the contract's dollar figure, it'll be whether soldiers using LOCUST in real conditions have a materially better story to tell than the ones who used the system it's replacing.