Navy Official Outlines Vision for Lasers on Every Ship
The U.S. Navy's Chief of Naval Operations is advancing a plan to develop and deploy directed energy weapons, aiming for lasers on every vessel within five years.
U.S. Navy Admiral Daryl Caudle, Chief of Naval Operations, has articulated a forward-looking strategy to equip every ship in the fleet with high-energy laser weapons within the next five years. This initiative aims to enhance naval defense capabilities and fundamentally alter the economics and endurance of naval combat.
The Navy is pursuing a dual-track approach for directed energy weapons. One track focuses on deploying functional directed energy capabilities onto existing ships using containerized systems. This method accelerates integration, shortens timelines, and allows for operational experimentation and training.
Concurrently, the Navy is designing future vessels to inherently support higher-power systems, including adequate electrical generation, energy storage, and cooling infrastructure. The objective is to transition from hundreds of kilowatts to megawatt-class capabilities, ensuring reliable and maintainable weapons are available for fleet operations.
Admiral Caudle views directed energy weapons not as a replacement for traditional kinetic weapons, but as a crucial component of layered defense. These systems address the "magazine depth" problem by reducing the reliance on finite, expensive defensive interceptors. This allows for the preservation of the Navy's most capable kinetic weapons for threats that demand them, thereby enhancing combat endurance and lethality.
Having studied megawatt-class laser potential previously, Caudle encourages diverse technological paths from industry through open competition. The focus is on achieving sufficient power on target, good beam quality, and reliability in challenging maritime environments. The Navy intends to set demanding operational requirements, creating a compelling business case for industry to solve the associated technical challenges.