Pentagon formalizes Palantir's Maven AI as a core military system with multi-year funding
Autonomous mobile drone swarm killer created in trilateral US defense company collab
The Pentagon now appears to believe advances in solid-state lasers, thermal management, beam control, and modular power systems may finally make operational deployment feasible.
Yet cruise missile interception remains an exceptionally difficult engineering challenge. Unlike slower drones, cruise missiles fly fast, often skim terrain, and can maneuver unpredictably. Destroying them requires maintaining precise beam focus on a rapidly moving target long enough to inflict catastrophic structural or thermal damage.
Atmospheric interference further complicates matters. Moisture, dust, turbulence, and thermal distortion can scatter or weaken laser beams over distance, reducing effectiveness even at extremely high power levels.
The Pentagon is pursuing a containerized design — most likely an attempt to address the long-standing problem of deployment flexibility. Rather than permanently integrating massive laser systems into specialized ships or vehicles, containerized architectures could theoretically allow rapid deployment across multiple platforms with fewer structural modifications.
For now, the JLWS remains a development effort rather than a fully operational weapon. However, with the scale of funding, the integration into the Golden Dome initiative, and the Pentagon’s growing emphasis on directed-energy systems, we are very likely to see a fully functional system soon.
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Etiido Uko is an engineer and technical writer with over nine years of experience in documentation and reporting. He is deeply passionate about all things gadgets, technology, and engineering. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-22/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Etiido Uko Social Links Navigation News Contributor Etiido Uko is an engineer and technical writer with over nine years of experience in documentation and reporting. He is deeply passionate about all things gadgets, technology, and engineering.
cptjcup Directed energy systems will only be viable for missile/ Group 3+ UAS area defense once they're able to scale them beyond 1mW. Even at 300kW, that beam is going to need 2-5 seconds on target for a hard kill, and that's if they're able to maintain the exact aim point. If the missile/UAV evades even a little, then it greatly extends the time required for a kill. Once these systems reach 1mW, then and only then will they be capable of near instantaneous kill. But I guess that's why it's scalable 300kW+. Cause 300kW needs clear line of sight and multiple seconds, per kill. That's not really swarm killing material, as much as they love painting directed energy systems as swarm killers. They're just not there yet. Hopefully they can scale them up pretty fast with enough investment. Reply
razor512 Usually for laser based weapons like that, they use multiple laser systems, thus it will not be a single 300kW laser, instead it may be 5-10+ of those systems on a ship or base, each working together. Reply
helper800 cptjcup said: Directed energy systems will only be viable for missile/ Group 3+ UAS area defense once they're able to scale them beyond 1mW. Even at 300kW, that beam is going to need 2-5 seconds on target for a hard kill, and that's if they're able to maintain the exact aim point. If the missile/UAV evades even a little, then it greatly extends the time required for a kill. Once these systems reach 1mW, then and only then will they be capable of near instantaneous kill. But I guess that's why it's scalable 300kW+. Cause 300kW needs clear line of sight and multiple seconds, per kill. That's not really swarm killing material, as much as they love painting directed energy systems as swarm killers. They're just not there yet. Hopefully they can scale them up pretty fast with enough investment. I would say that even 1 MW lasers would not be instant, but more like 2ish seconds and that is controlling for all atmospheric conditions, focusing, targeting, speed of the cruise missile. All of this also completely disregards countermeasures a cruise missile could have like heat shielding ablative plating, highly reflective high-heat dissipation panels, and spinning on its axis to force the laser to heat up a much larger area. With such countermeasures it would take many tens of MW from a laser to destroy them within a usable time frame with the above perfect conditions. We are a long way before something like this can work on fast missiles… Reply
HyperMatrix Key point: cruise missile. Not ballistic missile. These systems will mostly be good for slow moving cheapo drones. Reply
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