A 100-kilowatt laser can be targeted at drones, rockets, artillery, and mortars, a power level that is a full order of magnitude smaller than that which would be required to defend ballistic-range missiles, but right in the zone that NATO has typically found difficult to defend effectively.
That is not the air menace that NATO designed its best interceptors to overcome. The exigency is provided by low, slow, small aircraft, which are often expendable, autonomous in some cases, and usually launched with minimal infrastructure, and deployed in groups in an effort to saturate defenses. The awkward maneuver is economical as well as tactical: the airplane of the attacker is cheap to lose, and the retaliation of the defender has traditionally been expensive to shoot and shallow in magazine capacity.
This imbalance is supported by commercially based drone ecosystems. One set of data covering 2024 and 2025 shows that DJI, Autel, and DIY builds contributed to 94.70% of detections in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and DIY builds are increasing at a very steep rate on a yearly basis. The concentration assists defenders to filter detection and training, however, it also highlights ease: broadly dispersed parts and expertise render scale simple to an attacker. Concurrently, it is becoming difficult to detect. According to the same one, more than 80 percent of the detections came through RF systems and the evolution of RF-silent tactics is pushing air defenders more to more radar, electro-optical, thermal, and acoustic fusion and better command-and-control against any. A single tiny paragraph alters the frame: intercept is no longer the entire mission.
The rethink of the air-defense position of NATO here is based upon the so-called “cost-curve penalty,” the case in which a defender incurs a thousand and one times more than an attacker incurs in response to a threat. Directed energy is being sought after as it alters the definition of a “shot.” Congressional Research Service overview defines directed energy weapons, which DOD defines as involving the use of concentrated electromagnetic energy (as opposed to kinetic energy) to “incapacitate, damage, disable or destroy” equipment, and points out that the high-energy lasers can provide reduced logistical demands and reduced cost-per-shot when sufficient electrical power is available. Meanwhile, high-powered microwave (HPM) systems are appreciated with respect to area effects, and the same report indicates that HPM could be more useful in response to swarms of unmanned aircraft systems since the beam can be used to affect the electronics within a cone, as opposed to a point.
These benefits come at the cost of engineering trade-offs that influence NATO procurement decisions. Lasers are line of sight weapons, performance is affected by atmospheric absorption, scattering and turbulence, the CRS report outlines that rain and fog may prevent lasers being an all weather solution and thermal blooming and targeting one at a time nature of lasers can limit throughput in saturation attacks. By comparison, the microwaves are more diffusive in their energy distribution – further diminishing their range – and must be handled carefully to prevent unwanted interaction with friendly electronics. The argument is not that one effector takes the place of missiles; it is that NATO requires layered defenses at the cheapest and most numerous threats where the most common threat can be met by a defense that can shoot frequently, that can be replenished, and that as threat increases becomes more expensive the defense becomes more expensive.
According to industry offerings and field experimentation, there is evidence of that layering. In the CRS report, containerized and vehicle-mounted counter-UAS demonstrators (including THOR by the Air Force, which is a short-range air base defense system and tested against several targets), and Army programs that combine high-energy lasers with microwaves to secure fixed locations are described. A report in the New York Times on directed-energy adoption is independent, and reports that lasers are being considered as a viable solution to swarms of drones when still limited to a few kilometers of range; it also quotes David C. Stoudt saying that now is the time to move higher-power systems into practical operation.
To NATO, the rethink is structural; air defense must be turned into a networked airspace-defense stack that can identify small targets at reliable ranges, classify them in a small amount of time, and allocate the appropriate effector, whether missile, gun, laser, or microwave, depending on the range, environment, and the magazine of the defender. Inexpensive drone swarms did not simply introduce a new type of target, but required the alliance to rethink the economics, sensors, and engagement process of air defense, fundamentally.
