The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has confirmed the award of a contract worth £30 million ($36 million) for a laser-directed energy weapon (LDEW) to a British industrial consortium named Dragonfire and led by MBDA. The project will assess innovative LDEW technologies and approaches, culminating in a demonstration of a point defense system from incoming fire  in 2019. If the demo is successful, the first laser weapons would come into service in the mid-2020s, the MoD says.
The consortium includes BAE Systems, Leonardo, Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group, and Qinetiq. These companies, and smaller British enterprises such as one named Arke, “have international reputations in this area” according to the MoD. The money is coming from an £800 million Defence Innovation Fund that “aims to encourage imagination, ingenuity and entrepreneurship,” the MoD added.

“This is a significant demonstration program aimed at maturing our understanding of what is still an immature technology,” said Peter Cooper from the MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). “It draws on innovative research into high-power lasers so as to understand the potential of the technology to provide a more effective response to the emerging threats that could be faced by UK armed forces,” he continued. The contract will assess how the system can pick up and track targets at various ranges and in varied weather conditions over land and water, to allow precision use.

UK Dragonfire consortium leader MBDA has also claimed leadership in this field for its German subsidiary. More than three years ago, it described the coupling together of four commercially available 10kW-industrial lasers to achieve a 40kW weapon that can intercept and destroy incoming rockets, artillery and mortars. Last October, MBDA Deutschland tested the beam guidance and tracking system of its high-energy laser effector against a simulated airborne target at a military range on Germany’s North Sea coast.

In the U.S., there have been various directed energy demonstration projects, some of them classified.