Why the Army's Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense System Can't Quite Zap What It's Aimed At

Shooting down a drone with a laser sounds satisfying. Point, click, vaporize. No expensive missile, no reload time, no $180,000 Stinger flying after a $400 quadcopter. The Army has wanted this capability for years, and the DE M-SHORAD program (Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense, because the Pentagon loves an acronym that requires its own pronunciation guide) is supposed to deliver it. A 50-kilowatt laser mounted on a Stryker vehicle, built to fry small drones before they fry soldiers.

Photo by Art Guzman on Pexels.

Simple enough idea. The execution has been something else.

The program started with real momentum. Kord Technologies and Dynetics won early contracts, Boeing eventually got involved, and by 2022 the Army had awarded a $326 million deal to Northrop Grumman to build four prototype systems. Field testing was supposed to begin in earnest by late 2023. The Army was talking about fielding operational systems to Europe-based units in 2024, specifically to counter the exact kind of cheap drone swarms that Ukraine had spent two years demonstrating were a genuine battlefield problem.

That timeline slipped. Then it slipped again.

Part of the issue is physics. A 50-kilowatt laser can absolutely destroy a small drone under the right conditions: clear air, stable platform, target moving at a predictable speed. Add humidity, dust, smoke, or the thermal blooming that happens when a high-powered beam heats the air in front of it, and effective range drops significantly. The Army's own testing has shown the system struggles to maintain beam quality at the distances where you actually need it to matter. You want to kill a drone at 1,000 meters. The laser wants to work best at 500.

Then there's the Stryker itself. Mounting a 50-kilowatt laser on an eight-wheeled infantry carrier sounds clever until you realize that the power generation and thermal management systems needed to run that laser are enormous. The current configuration requires a separate generator trailer, which somewhat undercuts the whole "maneuver" part of Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense. A vehicle that needs to tow its own power supply isn't exactly sprinting to the front lines.

Soldiers who've worked with the prototypes have noted the cooling system is loud. Not "runs in the background" loud. "You will hear this vehicle from a distance" loud. That's a meaningful problem for a system designed to operate near troops who are trying not to be found.

graph TD
    A[Target Drone Detected] --> B{Weather Conditions?}
    B -->|Clear| C(Beam Engages at Full Range)
    B -->|Humid / Dusty / Smoke| D[Beam Degrades]
    C --> E{Platform Stable?}
    D --> F[Reduced Effective Range]
    E -->|Vehicle Moving| G[Targeting Jitter]
    E -->|Vehicle Stationary| H(Successful Engagement)
    G --> F

None of this means the program is doomed. Directed energy air defense is genuinely worth pursuing. Missiles cost money; photons (mostly) don't. A system that can engage dozens of targets on a single fuel load changes the math on drone defense in ways that even a very good Stinger battery cannot. The Army knows this. Congress knows this. The question is whether the current approach gets there.

The $326 million Northrop contract covered four prototypes. Four. At roughly $80 million per vehicle before integration costs, the "cheap kills" argument starts to look a little shakier. Proponents will correctly note that the per-shot cost of the laser itself is negligible compared to a missile. That's true. But the upfront cost of fielding these systems at scale, training crews, maintaining the hardware, and solving the power generation problem doesn't show up in the per-engagement math.

Compare that to what Ukraine's forces are doing with commercial EW jammers and adapted anti-drone guns costing tens of thousands of dollars. Effective? Often yes. Elegant? No. But they're in the field right now, and DE M-SHORAD is still largely in the test range.

The Army has pushed the operational fielding date to 2025, then acknowledged that even 2025 was optimistic depending on test outcomes. As of early 2026, the program is in a kind of bureaucratic limbo where nobody wants to call it a failure and nobody wants to commit to a firm delivery date. That's a familiar place for defense programs to end up.

Here's what's worth watching: whether the Army decides to descope to a lower-power system (30 kilowatts instead of 50) that can actually run off the Stryker's existing power generation, or whether it holds out for the full-capability version that requires more vehicle integration work. Both paths have costs. One of them probably actually ships.

Until then, the most expensive laser pointer the Army has ever built is sitting in a test range somewhere, burning holes in target drones when the weather cooperates, and waiting for someone to solve the trailer problem.