On October 5 the Pentagon picked the four directed-energy systems that will defend US military bases against drones for the next year: three lasers — from AeroVironment, Kord and Boeing — and a high-power microwave, Epirus’ Leonidas. The selection feeds the pilot run by Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF 401), the Army-led counter-drone task force, which Congress ordered in the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.
Which systems make the counter-drone pilot
AeroVironment brings its Palletized High-Energy Laser, the roll-on, roll-off version of the LOCUST that downed drones from the flight deck of USS George H.W. Bush in October 2025. The Army committed to the company in September with a $464.8 million production contract for the 30-kilowatt LOCUST X3. Kord, a KBR subsidiary, offers Firefly as a palletized, mobile laser.
Boeing said in October 2024 that its 5-kilowatt system had downed nearly 500 drones in demonstrations — swarms among them — including Group 3 aircraft weighing up to 1,320 pounds (600 kilograms) at the Red Sands exercise in Saudi Arabia.
The fourth pick is the only microwave and the only one designed to disable an entire swarm with a single pulse. Epirus says that at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, in August 2025, its Leonidas disabled all 61 drones it faced and finished with a 49-drone swarm knocked out in one pulse. The Army has bought the system twice, with a $66.1 million contract in 2022 and $43.5 million in 2025.
From the per-shot price to a base list that does not add up
The pilot exists to measure what directed energy costs a base to own and run: the October 5 release lists requirements, costs and best practices as the data it will collect. JIATF 401 director Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross has already questioned the number the industry sells these weapons on.
That number is the price of one shot, which AeroVironment puts at $3 for LOCUST. Ross told reporters in August that the math leaves out the hardware. Describing a hypothetical $6 million system that fires once a year, he said: “you can’t tell me that that shot only costs 8 cents.”
Which bases get the weapons is less settled than it looks. In May the task force named five installations: Fort Huachuca (Arizona), Fort Bliss (Texas), Naval Base Kitsap (Washington), Grand Forks Air Force Base (North Dakota) and Whiteman Air Force Base (Missouri), where the weapons would run for 365 days. In August, task force officials confirmed all five to DefenseScoop, but Defense News reports that, that month, Ross named four: Grand Forks, Whiteman, Joint Base Lewis-McChord (Washington) and, he believed, Fort Bliss. The October release names no installations, and JIATF 401 did not tell Defense News whether all five remain. In December there will be a shoot-off at Dugway Proving Ground (Utah) to test more lasers and microwaves; Ross has said systems that perform there can go straight to a purchase order.
The FAA safety finding covers one laser, not the microwave
On April 10 the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that a joint assessment had found “a high-energy laser counter-drone system” posed no undue risk to passenger aircraft. AeroVironment later specified that laser was its LOCUST. The October 5 release cites no FAA assessment for Kord, Boeing or Epirus.
The Army fielded that LOCUST as AMP-HEL and, during the March 7 test at White Sands, the system shut itself off automatically when a commercial aircraft bound for Albuquerque entered its tracking angle. In February, a laser near Fort Bliss fired at what turned out to be party balloons and the FAA closed El Paso’s airspace; two weeks later the same program shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone because the agency had not told the Pentagon it was flying.
A microwave raises a different question from a laser, because its pulse covers an area. Epirus calls that pulse low-collateral and says Leonidas picked one of two drones flying side by side at Camp Atterbury, then dropped another inside a software-defined safe zone. Neither the FAA nor JIATF 401 has published how far the pulse reaches or how those zones will be drawn on a US base.
What this pilot changes
The program is not a firm purchase but a one-year test that must answer three questions: what it costs, whether the system is reliable in service, and whether it can coexist with civilian airspace. That is the knot. Phase 3 of the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program buys attack drones at industrial scale; this pilot buys time to check whether defending a base with directed energy is worth it. DroneXL rates including a microwave as the right call, because a base cannot fight a swarm one beam at a time, but warns that the paperwork does not fully back the pitch: the FAA assessed a single system and AeroVironment says it was its own, so, in its reading, the other three — the microwave first — need their own public assessment before they switch on at a base with civilian neighbors. The counter-drone business is moving in the private lane as well: Echodyne’s round and the Fortem acquisition show that detection is today the most mature leg of the market.
