Seven months ago a counter-drone laser fired near Fort Bliss and the Federal Aviation Administration shut the sky over El Paso. On Monday 5 October the Pentagon answered that embarrassment with a shopping list: three high-energy lasers and one high-powered microwave, picked to defend American military bases from drones on American soil.

The four systems are the first selections for the counter-drone directed energy pilot run by Joint Interagency Task Force 401, the Army-led organisation that has coordinated US counter-drone work since August 2025. They come from AeroVironment, Epirus, Kord Technologies and Boeing. Congress ordered the programme in the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.

And the selection is only the opening round. In December, JIATF 401 holds a directed-energy shoot-off at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where its director has said the systems that perform well could walk away with a purchase order on the spot.

Four weapons, two ways to kill a drone

The list splits neatly into two physics problems. A high-energy laser holds a beam on one drone until it burns through something that matters. A high-powered microwave floods an area with energy that overwhelms electronics, so it can take out several drones in a single pulse, at the cost of a wider footprint that worries anyone with sensitive equipment nearby.

AeroVironment’s entry is its LOCUST laser packed onto a self-contained pallet that rolls on and off a truck or a ship. The company says a palletised LOCUST tracked and defeated target drones from the flight deck of the carrier USS George H.W. Bush in October 2025. In September the Army gave AeroVironment a production contract worth roughly $465 million for its 30-kilowatt LOCUST X3.

Boeing’s Compact Laser Weapon System sits at the other end of the power scale, in 2-kilowatt and 5-kilowatt versions. Lower power means a longer dwell on target, but a smaller, easier system. Boeing says a 5 kW unit downed Group 3 drones, a class weighing up to about 1,320 pounds, at the Red Sands exercise in Saudi Arabia in September 2024, and that the system has defeated nearly 500 drones at ranges from about 200 metres to 2.5 kilometres.

Kord Technologies, a KBR subsidiary, markets Firefly as a palletised, mobile laser that scales up from 5 kilowatts. Reports differ on the ceiling, with Air & Space Forces Magazine citing 30 kW and Defense News 40 kW. Kord officials told reporters at an August demonstration in Alabama that a truck-mounted version typically needs a few seconds on target to bring down a small drone.

The odd one out is Epirus’ Leonidas, the only microwave on the list. It is the basis of the Army’s prototype high-power microwave for its Indirect Fire Protection Capability programme. Epirus says a Leonidas disabled all 61 target drones across five scenarios at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, in 2025, including a 49-drone swarm in one burst.

Epirus’ own footage of Leonidas bringing down a 49-drone swarm: the one-to-many effect that makes a microwave different from a laser.

Why the Pentagon wants soldiers, not engineers, at the controls

Nobody at JIATF 401 is trying to prove that lasers can kill drones. That argument is over. The question is whether a base can live with one for a year.

Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, the task force director, said in August that the pilot will put the weapons on installations with service members running and maintaining them, the jobs usually left to contractor field representatives, for a 365-day period. What he wants back is data: power demands, repair tempo, tactics, and what each system really costs to own.

Ross has been openly sceptical of the cheapest-shot-in-history pitch that follows lasers everywhere. A laser shot costs pennies in electricity, but the system behind it does not. As he put it to reporters in August, if a system costs $6 million and fires once a year, you cannot claim that shot cost 8 cents. The pilot exists to put a real number next to a laser kill and compare it with a missile or a gun.

The El Paso problem

Firing a laser at a drone over a desert range is easy. Firing one at a drone near a city with an airport is a different discipline, and that is why the FAA appears in almost every line of the announcement.

In February the FAA briefly closed the airspace over El Paso after a counter-drone laser was used near Fort Bliss without coordination with the agency. The weapon in question was operated by Customs and Border Protection and, according to later reporting, was on loan from the Army. In March, defence and FAA officials held a live-fire demonstration at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and on 10 April the FAA said the laser systems tested, with proper safety controls, do not pose undue risk to passenger aircraft.

Two of the five host installations, Fort Bliss and Fort Huachuca, are tied to the southern border mission, where the Army’s Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser has already been used against drones believed to be linked to drug cartels. The other three are a Navy submarine base at Kitsap, the RQ-4 Global Hawk base at Grand Forks and Whiteman, home of the Espíritu B-2. The release does not say which weapon goes where, how many will be fielded or what the directed energy pilot will cost.

December at Dugway

The shoot-off was first floated in August, when Ross told DefenseScoop that JIATF 401 wanted to open the door to new entrants, including younger companies offering something closer to a commercial laser with a sturdier supply chain. The task force first pointed to Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, then moved the event to Dugway in Utah.

Air & Space Forces Magazine reports that the four selected systems will take part in the shoot-off. The Pentagon release itself puts the emphasis on what else turns up: the department and the task force will keep evaluating further lasers and microwaves, and the December event is where they will be tested. Either way, the directed energy pilot is now the main route by which a counter-drone laser or microwave gets onto a US base.

It also sits inside a far bigger spending push. On 29 September the Army said JIATF 401 had awarded ten contracts worth up to $4.15 billion combined for sensors, optical sights and gun-based systems under Domestic Shield, the effort to protect priority Defense Department sites inside the United States.

The LOCUST laser weapon system in its original BlueHalo presentation, before AeroVironment acquired the company.

For years the directed-energy story has been told in demonstrations: a drone, a beam, a puff of smoke. The directed energy pilot is the Pentagon admitting that the hard part was never the beam. It is the generator, the spare parts, the airspace and the soldier on night shift at Grand Forks who has to keep the thing running.

Sources: Pentagon release on the JIATF 401 directed energy pilot, 5 October 2026, as reported by Air & Space Forces Magazine (Matthew Cox, 8 October 2026), Breaking Defense (Carley Welch, 5 October 2026), Defense News (Michael Scanlon, 6 October 2026), Inside Unmanned Systems, Interesting Engineering and The Defense Post (7 October 2026); DefenseScoop, 21 August 2026 (updated 24 August); AeroVironment release, 21 April 2026; Boeing feature on CLWS at Red Sands, 11 October 2024; U.S. Army release on IFPC-HPM at Balikatan 2025; Epirus video releases.