US Army Buys Its First Production Laser Weapon in $464.8 Million AeroVironment Deal
The U.S. Army has placed its first production order for a high-energy laser weapon, awarding AeroVironment an agreement worth up to $464.8 million for its LOCUST X3 system under the service’s Enduring-High Energy Laser programme. The award, announced by the company on 2 September, ends more than a decade in which American directed-energy work never quite escaped the prototype stage.
The agreement was issued by the Army’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Fires as an Other Transaction Agreement, a contracting vehicle designed to move faster than conventional procurement rules allow. It covers what the company describes as dozens of LOCUST X3 systems delivered over the next several years, along with sustainment support and operator training.
From demonstrator to production line
What distinguishes this award is not its size but its category. The Army has fielded laser prototypes before — the DE M-SHORAD Stryker vehicles sent to U.S. Central Command, the palletised P-HEL system, and AeroVironment’s own AMP-HEL demonstrators — but each of those arrived as a limited batch of test articles rather than an item of record. E-HEL is the first time the service has committed to buying a directed-energy weapon as a production programme with a multiyear fielding plan attached.
“E-HEL is not a future capability, it is a production-ready system,” said John Garrity, the company’s vice president for directed energy systems. Chief executive Wahid Nawabi called the award “a defining moment not only for AV, but for the future of modern defense.”
The timing followed closely on a live demonstration. In late August, an Army laser engaged and brought down three drones during trials near the southern border, a scenario chosen to mirror the low-altitude, small-target problem the service expects to face both at home and abroad.
What LOCUST X3 does
LOCUST X3 is a 30-kilowatt-class system built around a beam director that AeroVironment has been refining across successive prototypes. It is sized against Group 1 through Group 3 unmanned aircraft — a band that runs from hand-launched quadcopters weighing a few kilograms up to aircraft of roughly 600 kilograms, the class that includes most of the fixed-wing attack drones now in widespread use.
The system is designed to ride on the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, with palletised and Infantry Squad Vehicle configurations offered as alternatives. That mounting flexibility matters more than it sounds: air-defence lasers have historically been tied to heavy chassis with generous power margins, which limited where commanders could put them. A JLTV-mounted system can move with the formations it is protecting.
AeroVironment announced a $30 million expansion of its Albuquerque directed-energy facility in March, an investment that now looks like preparation for exactly this award.
The cost-per-shot argument
The case for lasers has always rested on arithmetic. An interceptor missile fired at a $20,000 quadcopter costs orders of magnitude more than the target it destroys, and magazines run dry. A laser drawing on vehicle-generated electrical power has, in principle, an effectively unlimited magazine and a marginal cost per engagement measured in the cost of fuel.
That argument has been made for years without producing a production contract, and the reasons are well documented. Atmospheric conditions — dust, humidity, fog, thermal blooming over hot ground — degrade beam quality in exactly the environments where air defence is most needed. Dwell time on target is not instantaneous, which constrains how many threats a single aperture can service in a saturation attack. Thermal management and power conditioning have historically been the limiting engineering problems rather than the laser source itself.
None of those constraints have been repealed. What has changed is the threat density. The drone attacks that have characterised fighting in Ukraine, the Red Sea and across the Middle East have made the economics of missile-only defence untenable at scale, and have pushed tolerance for an imperfect but cheap layer considerably higher than it was five years ago.
Where this fits
E-HEL is explicitly a layer, not a replacement. The Army’s counter-UAS architecture pairs guns, electronic warfare, interceptors and now lasers, with each addressing threats the others handle poorly. Directed energy is being positioned for the cheap, numerous, close-in end of that spectrum — the targets that would otherwise consume expensive interceptors.
Read alongside the Pentagon’s parallel work on low-cost kinetic interceptors, the pattern is consistent: after two decades in which air defence grew steadily more capable and steadily more expensive per engagement, the effort has turned to driving that cost back down.
For allied ground forces facing the same drone problem — including European and Middle Eastern armies now building counter-UAS layers from scratch — an American production programme that survives first contact with fielding will matter well beyond the U.S. Army. The prototypes proved the physics. Production will test whether the logistics, the maintenance burden and the availability rates hold up in units that have to keep these systems running without a contractor field service representative standing nearby.
Sources
- AeroVironment press release, “AV’s LOCUST Selected for Nearly $500 million Army Counter-UAS Contract for Enduring-High Energy Laser (E-HEL) Program,” 2 September 2026
- Breaking Defense, “Army awards first-ever laser production contract to AV, with $465M value,” 2 September 2026
- Defense News, “US Army launches laser production with $465M contract award,” 3 September 2026
- DefenseScoop, “Army awards AeroVironment nearly $500M contract for laser weapons,” 2 September 2026
