US Army Awards Lockheed Martin Contract for Containerized 500 kW Laser Weapon

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U.S. Department of War Awards Lockheed Martin Contract for 500 kW Containerized Laser Weapon

The U.S. Department of War awarded Lockheed Martin a contract under the Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS) program on July 9, 2026, to build a containerized 500-kilowatt laser weapon. The system is designed to intercept cruise missiles and drone swarms before they reach American forces or the homeland.

Contract Details

The combined JLWS agreements with Lockheed Martin and nLight Defense carry an initial value of $86 million and a program ceiling of $847 million if all options are exercised. The structure, known as an Other Transaction Authority agreement, allows the Pentagon to bypass slower traditional defense contracting steps to field prototypes more quickly.

Lockheed Martin will develop the system through its collaboration with Scaled Directed Energy, one of six Critical Technology Areas designated under the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering.

Strategic Context

Cheap, mass-produced drones have swarmed battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East. Traditional air defense, which fires missiles costing hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece at targets that sometimes cost a few thousand dollars to build, represents a losing financial trade. A laser weapon fires at the speed of light, never runs out of ammunition as long as it has power, and costs only a few dollars per shot once operational. This combination is driving the Department of War to move directed energy weapons from testing labs into actual units.

Industry Response

“We are honored to field this operational-tactical prototype – the highest-power laser ever packaged in a transportable container,” said Paul Lemmo, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Sensors, Effectors, and Mission Systems.

Lemmo’s team is drawing on more than 15 years of laser weapons work at Lockheed Martin. The central engineering challenge has been that high-energy lasers need enormous amounts of power and cooling, and fitting that into a battlefield-transportable package has been the industry’s primary obstacle. Lockheed Martin says its approach to lowering the size, weight, and power requirements of its systems enables it to build containerized weapons on a compressed timeline rather than waiting years for a purpose-built platform.

Development Phases

According to reporting on Pentagon budget documents by Defense News, the JLWS effort will unfold in stages:

• Initial prototypes will start at around 150 kW, a power level suited to shooting down individual drones and smaller threats.
• Scaled systems will move into the 300 to 500 kW range, which the Department considers necessary for reliable cruise missile defense. Missiles fly faster, lower, and with hardened bodies that require far more sustained energy to destroy than a drone’s exposed frame.
• Lockheed Martin’s 500 kW integrated system will draw on a laser source developed under the Department’s High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative, a separate research effort aimed at pushing laser output past the megawatt threshold.

Modular Design

Both the scalable and integrated systems are being built in containerized form, meaning they can be shipped like standard cargo and bolted onto ground vehicles or ships rather than requiring a dedicated hull or chassis. This modularity is intended to allow the military to move a laser weapon to whichever combatant command needs it most without a lengthy integration process.

Existing Programs

Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor on two systems that JLWS is meant to build on:

• The Navy’s 60 kW High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS), currently installed aboard the USS Preble, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer (505 ft, roughly 154 m).
• The Army’s 300 kW Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) prototype.

These two programs have spent years working through the thermal management and beam control problems that any high-power laser weapon must solve before it can reliably track and destroy a fast-moving target.

Additional Reporting

The newsletter Laser Wars reported that Lockheed Martin and nLight participated in a directed energy demonstration for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Under Secretary Emil Michael at Wh