Are lasers next?

Lasers have always promised a particular sort of military elegance: a weapon that strikes at the speed of light, carries no explosive warhead, and, at least in theory, turns electrical power into tactical effect with minimal logistics. In an age of cheap drones, loitering munitions, and mass raids designed to exhaust missile stocks, that promise feels newly practical. Yet the prospects for lasers to shoot down drones and other aircraft are neither fantasy nor panacea. It is a class of weapons with a narrow set of strengths, a long list of engineering compromises, and a future that will almost certainly be as a complement to missiles and guns rather than as their replacement.

What a laser actually does to an aircraft

A laser does not “hit” like a bullet. It deposits energy as heat. If that heat arrives faster than the target can conduct it away, spread it through structure, or dissipate it through airflow, something fails. For small drones, this can mean:

• A motor winding overheats and seizes.

• A propeller hub softens and fractures.

• A battery is driven into thermal runaway.

• A flight control board, sensor, or wiring loom is cooked.

For larger aircraft, the same mechanism still applies but the thresholds are very different. A small quadcopter has little mass, little redundancy, and little tolerance for damaged control surfaces or electronics. A fast jet has metal structure, redundant systems, and high-speed airflow that carries heat away. The laser therefore shifts from being a “kill” mechanism to a “mission kill” mechanism: damaging a sensor turret, blinding an electro-optical ball, degrading a radar radome, or forcing a pilot to abort through local damage that cannot be ignored.

This distinction matters. Much of the real promise of lasers is against drones and slow, fragile threats, with diminishing returns as targets become faster, more robust and more distant.

The physics that makes lasers both attractive and difficult

The attraction is straightforward.

• Low cost per shot, once you have the system. Electricity is cheaper than interceptors.

• Deep magazine, limited mainly by power generation and cooling rather than by stored rounds.

• Very short engagement timelines. There is no ballistic arc or missile fly-out time.

• Scalable effects, from dazzling a sensor to burning through a component.

The difficulty is equally straightforward.

A laser must keep a tight beam on a small point on a moving target for long enough to do useful damage. That “long enough” is the dwell time. If the beam wanders off the critical point, or if the atmosphere scatters and distorts the beam, the energy spreads and the effect weakens. In practice, laser warfare is less about producing a bright beam than about precision tracking, stabilisation and atmospheric management.

Three constraints dominate.

1. Atmospheric losses and turbulence

   
   

   Dust, smoke, fog, rain, and heat shimmer all interfere. Even in clear air, turbulence bends and blurs the beam. The practical engagement range of a laser is therefore not just a function of power but of weather and local battlefield conditions.

   
   

2. Line of sight

   
   

   A laser cannot arc over hills or buildings. In cluttered terrain, the defender must place laser systems to see the approach lanes, which in turn makes them easier to locate and target.

   
   

3. Thermal management

   
   

   High-power lasers are not perfectly efficient. A substantial fraction of input energy becomes waste heat, which must be removed. This is why real systems are as much radiator and chiller as they are “weapon”.

Why drones are the sweet spot

Drones are, in a sense, the perfect target.

• They are often small, slow, and predictable in their terminal approach.

• Many rely upon exposed rotors, plastic airframes and consumer-grade electronics.

• They are cheap enough to be used in large numbers, which makes expensive interceptors an unattractive answer.

Lasers exploit the asymmetry. If a defender can spend the equivalent of a few litres of fuel and some wear on a generator to destroy a drone that would otherwise demand a missile, the economics begin to tilt. This is especially true for the defensive task that most exhausts modern air defences: the repeated engagement of small, low-flying objects that appear with little warning and in large quantities.

However drones also reveal the laser’s limits. Drone raids are often accompanied by deliberate obscurants, flight profiles that exploit terrain masking, and sheer numbers intended to saturate tracking. A laser can usually engage one target at a time. It may defeat many targets over time, but a dense swarm compresses time, which is the one resource a laser cannot conjure.

The technological ingredients that decide whether she works

The “laser” is only the visible emblem. The decisive technologies sit around it.

Tracking and fire control

A defensive laser must detect, classify, track, and aim with extreme steadiness. That means integrated radar or passive sensors, fast computing, and a very stable turret. Against small drones, the fire-control challenge can be more difficult than the laser physics, particularly when the air is full of birds, debris, decoys, and civilian objects.

Beam quality and adaptive optics

To keep energy concentrated, the system must maintain beam quality as the atmosphere shifts. Adaptive optics, which measure distortion and adjust mirrors in real time, can greatly improve performance, but they add complexity and cost.

Power generation and storage

Mobile lasers are constrained by what a vehicle can generate and cool. Fixed-site lasers can be more powerful, but they are also more predictable and thus more targetable. Hybrid solutions, using batteries or capacitors to provide burst power, are improving the practicality of short, intense engagements.

Integration with layered air defence

Lasers are best when they are one layer amongst several:

• Lasers for close, cheap, frequent engagements against small drones.

• Guns for very close threats and when visibility is poor.

• Missiles and interceptor drones for longer ranges, high-value targets and high-speed aircraft.

The prospect is therefore less “lasers will replace air defence” and more “lasers will take the exhausting part of air defence off the shoulders of missiles”.

The problem of weather, smoke, and the modern battlefield

A laser is an optical weapon. The modern battlefield is not a clean laboratory. Smoke from burning vehicles, dust from artillery impacts, mist in river valleys, and even deliberate smoke screens all degrade performance. In urban combat, line of sight is repeatedly broken and regained, forcing short engagement windows.

This does not make lasers useless. It makes them situational. In dry, clear conditions they can be remarkably effective. In heavy rain or thick smoke they may be reduced to a sensor-dazzling tool at best, or a weapon that must be held in reserve for the moments when the air clears.

Countermeasures and the inevitable duel of adaptation

As lasers become more common, targets will adapt, but not always in ways that defeat the concept.

Hardening and reflective coatings

Simple reflectivity is not a magic shield. Real surfaces heat, coatings degrade, and a defender can aim at vulnerable points. But hardening can raise dwell time, which is valuable when the attacker is trying to cross a defended zone quickly.

Spinning, tumbling, and manoeuvre

If a drone can keep the laser from dwelling on one spot, it can survive longer. Yet manoeuvre costs energy and may reduce the drone’s ability to reach her target. Moreover, small drones cannot manoeuvre indefinitely without exposing themselves to other defences.

Obscurants

Smoke, aerosols, and deliberate fogging are more serious. They do not have to block the laser completely, only to reduce the energy density enough to prevent rapid damage. The contest then becomes logistical: can the attacker bring obscurants to the point of engagement in sufficient quantity, and can the defender reposition or wait for the air to clear?

Saturation

The most reliable countermeasure is still numbers. If the attacker can present more targets simultaneously than the defender can track and engage, some will leak through. Lasers improve the defender’s economics, but they do not abolish the geometry of time.

Prospects against other aircraft

For helicopters, slow aircraft, and some cruise missiles, lasers may offer useful engagement options at close to medium ranges, especially for point defence of critical sites. Their attraction is again economic and logistical.

Against fast jets at significant ranges, lasers face harsher realities:

• Targets are further away, so atmospheric distortion is worse.

• Closing speeds reduce dwell time.

• Aircraft structure and redundancy reduce the chance of catastrophic failure.

The more realistic prospect is incremental: degrading sensors, damaging exposed pods, or forcing evasive manoeuvres that break an attack run. In other words lasers may become a means of shaping the air battle rather than of replacing traditional air-to-air or surface-to-air kills.

The likely future: defensive infrastructure, not a science-fiction beam wall

The strongest near-term role for lasers is defensive.

• Protection of airfields, ammunition depots, power infrastructure, and command posts against drones and loitering munitions.

• Escort defence for high-value ground formations, particularly where resupply of missiles is difficult.

• Maritime point defence, where ships can carry more power generation and cooling than most ground vehicles and where line of sight over the sea is often favourable.

Over time, improvements in power density, cooling, and beam control will expand the envelope. Yet even as the technology matures, the battlefield will continue to do what it always does: introduce smoke, dust, deception, and mass. The sensible expectation is therefore a layered world in which lasers take their place as one of the most economical answers to the drone problem, whilst missiles and guns remain indispensable for the wider air threat.

Lasers will not end air defence. They will make it cheaper to keep doing it, day after day, raid after raid, in the exhausting attritional conditions that drones have brought back to modern war. That, in practice, is the revolution.