After More Than A Decade Of Careful Research And Development, The U.S. Army's Laser Weapons Program Has Announced Its Collapse!

After several years of careful research and development, the U.S. military had high hopes of airborne laser weapons project - aimed at protecting ground troops from the threat of ballistic missiles SHiELD (meaning "Divine Shield", self-protecting high-energy laser demonstrator) project, seems to be facing the fate of being abandoned. abandoned.
According to a report released by the Congressional Research Service in 2023, since its inception in 2016, the SHiELD program has been designed to place laser weapons on advanced fighters, such as the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II, in order to intercept incoming air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles, as well as ballistic missiles that could be used against U.S. forces overseas.
However, despite the fact that the U.S. Air Force had originally planned to put the SHiELD laser weapon system through aerial testing on the F-15 Eagle in fiscal year 2024, and has reported successful ground-based shoot-downs of test missiles in recent years, as well as taking delivery of the laser weapon system and pod subsystems, plans to put the weapon system into operational use have now fallen through, according to military officials.
Dr. Ted Ortiz, Shield Program Manager for the Directed Energy Council at the Air Force Research Laboratory, confirmed to Military.com in an email, "The SHiELD program has ended and there are no plans for further testing and evaluation." He further noted, "The Air Force has not yet installed laser pods on fighter test stands."
It's worth noting that SHiELD is not the only airborne laser weapon program that the U.S. Air Force has recently abandoned. In March of this year, Air Force Special Operations Command revealed that it had decided to abandon plans to install an airborne high-energy laser (AHEL) system on the AC-130J Phantom helicopter gunship due to "technical challenges," even though "significant end-to-end, high-power operations" were achieved during ground testing. system (AHEL) on the AC-130J Phantom helicopter gunship.
Nonetheless, U.S. Air Force officials remain optimistic about the potential of airborne laser weapons on the future battlefield.Dr. Ted Ortiz stated, "Through the SHiELD program and related efforts, the Air Force Research Laboratory has made significant strides in the readiness of airborne high-energy laser technology, and we will continue to evolve airborne high-energy laser weapon technology to meet today's and future operational requirements."
News of the SHiELD program's termination comes at a critical time for the U.S. Department of Defense as it seeks to strengthen the air defense capabilities of its forces overseas, amid the growing threat of adversary missile attacks. Since Iran's largest-ever ballistic missile attack on U.S. forces overseas in January 2020, U.S. troops have been subjected to a steady stream of drone and missile strikes by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, resulting in a large number of servicemembers suffering from traumatic brain injuries.
In the face of this situation, the Pentagon is increasingly focusing on directed-energy weapons such as lasers and high-powered microwaves, which are inexpensive to fire in a single shot and have an almost unlimited magazine capacity, and are expected to provide an efficient, low-cost alternative to the existing costly air-defense systems. To that end, the U.S. Army has deployed land-based laser weapons overseas to counter incoming drones and has invested heavily in the development of more powerful systems to counter fast-moving cruise missiles. Some statistics show that the U.S. Pentagon spends up to about $1 billion a year on at least 31 directed energy programs.
Deploying airborne laser weapons for missile defense has been a goal pursued by the U.S. military since the early 2000s when the U.S. Air Force successfully shot down a ballistic missile using the Boeing 747-based YAL-1 airborne laser test bed. In the 2019 Missile Defense Review, the Pentagon states that "the development of scalable, efficient, and compact high-energy laser technology has the potential to provide a cost-effective capability to destroy early ballistic boost missiles in the future." In addition, laser weapons mounted on drones are seen as an effective means of countering ballistic missiles in the arsenals of Russia and China.
However, developing effective and reliable airborne laser weapons has proven challenging compared to ground vehicles and warships, as former Pentagon research and engineering chief Mike Griffin detailed in 2020, according to foreign media outlet Breaking Defense.
The energy/power challenge is the first thing faced when exploring airborne laser weapons. Lasers require massive amounts of energy to produce a destructive beam, and to provide such energy on a relatively small tactical aircraft is certainly a major engineering challenge.