Iran War Gives Pentagon Reason to Speed Directed Energy Weapon Deployment
Image— Navy photo-illustration on Nationaldefensemagazine.org
Original source: Nationaldefensemagazine.org, March 10, 2026
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HONOLULU — The Defense Department has a pressing need to counter mass strikes by adversaries in a more cost-effective manner, and fielding directed energy systems at scale in the near future is key to overcoming this challenge, officials said March 9.
This is not the first time Pentagon officials have insisted that high-energy lasers and other directed energy weapons are coming soon. The technology has been in development for decades — and some systems have reached the field — but they have not been deployed at scale. The current war in Iran is giving officials a renewed sense of purpose.
As the current conflict is showing, “we need to be able to deal with mass, and we need to be able to defeat mass that’s coming at us,” James Mazol, deputy undersecretary of war for research and engineering, said during a panel at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Pacific Operational Science and Technology Conference.
U.S. forces in the Iran war, for example, have used hundreds of Patriot PAC-3 missiles in the first days of the conflict, which can cost U.S. forces about $3.7 million each, and more for the export versions used by Gulf allies to thwart drone and missile attacks. A laser shot can cost about $3.50, according to figures provided by the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. Iran’s Shahed drones can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000, widely reported figures state.
Michael Dodd, assistant secretary of war for critical technologies and acting deputy director of the Defense Innovation Unit, said his team is focused on fielding and deploying technology in 36 months or less, and one particular capability the department wants to field in that timeframe is scaled directed energy, one of the Defense Department’s six critical technology areas.
The department is looking for both high-energy lasers and high-power microwave systems, Dodd said during the panel. Directed energy can reduce the cost per shot, as warfighters don’t have to use exquisite interceptors to counter an adversary’s non-exquisite systems, he noted.
Other critical technology areas the department wants to address within the next 36 months include battlefield information dominance and contested logistics, he said.
“If anybody can meet these, I do have my checkbook,” Dodd told the primarily industry audience.
For battlefield information dominance, the department is looking at “all things [electromagnetic] spectrum, quantum, electronic warfare,” he said. “I want to understand all those capabilities.”
As for contested logistics, Dodd said he is “interested in all things autonomy and how do we service our warfighters in austere environments, forward-deployed, and reduce our supply chain risk?”
Dodd noted the areas he requested help with are broad, but “one of the things we often struggle with is understanding the true performer capability that exists,” he said. “How do we look at and potentially aggregate those capabilities of a number of performers and reduce risk, strip out redundancies, give them access to capital and help those companies … scale and work with our large primes” to ensure those capabilities actually get delivered?
As the department designs sprints to get after its critical technology areas, one goal is to develop a “true mapping of the capability that exists” and how it can take that “upstream” to meet the needs of the services, combatant commands, resource officers and portfolio acquisition executives.
Joseph Jewell, assistant secretary of war for science and technology, said one of his priorities is “reinvigorating the defense innovation ecosystem, to include making it easier for those innovation engines that are not necessarily the department or the primes, but our small businesses, research institutions, universities … that are appropriately positioned and vetted to participate in the defense ecosystem” — including potentially doing classified work.
The Defense Department needs to improve information sharing and collaboration with those entities and provide resources through initiatives like the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs “to ensure that we push those innovations to the next level to where they actually can become viable, economic solutions that we can acquire at scale and deliver to the warfighter at a reasonable speed,” Jewell said during the panel.
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