You’ve probably seen the clip by now: a small drone flying along minding its business, then a glow on its tail, then a tumble. AV’s LOCUST laser has had its TV moment already, a 60 Minutes segment the company still brings up in press releases, and footage like that has been coming out of American test ranges for decades. The lasers themselves never made it out. The Pentagon has been burning targets with beams since the 1980s, and it hadn’t once ordered a laser weapon the way it orders trucks.<\/p>\n
That changed on September 2.<\/p>\n
The US Army awarded AeroVironment, the company behind the Switchblade drones, a $464.8 million agreement to deliver dozens of LOCUST X3 laser weapon systems under its Enduring-High Energy Laser program, or E-HEL. AV calls it the first production contract<\/a> for a high energy laser weapon in US history, and the Army makes the same claim about itself.<\/p>\n The US military has bought laser weapons before, just never like this. It bought them the way you’d commission a painting: one or two at a time, hand-built, as prototypes and demonstrators. AV demonstrated LOCUST aboard the USS George H.W. Bush. The Army put prototype lasers on Strykers and sent them to the Middle East, and the soldier feedback wasn’t kind, according to Defense News<\/a>. And a year ago, in September 2025, AV delivered the first two prototypes of a system called AMP-HEL, which the company says soldiers are using right now.<\/p>\n A production contract’s a different beast. It commits a factory to a rate, and it drags along everything a real fielding needs: training, spare parts, support, a schedule somebody has to keep. Nobody in the US had ever signed one for a high energy laser until now, through roughly four decades of trying.<\/p>\n The paperwork is an Other Transaction Agreement, a fast-track contract format, issued by the Army office that runs its fires portfolio, air defense included. “This award marks a defining moment not only for AV,” CEO Wahid Nawabi said in the announcement, and for once I’m inclined to let a CEO keep his superlative.<\/p>\n The X3 is a 30-kilowatt laser. If you’ve read about the 300 and 500-kilowatt systems in the pipeline, that might sound like the budget option. It isn’t, for this job. A laser weapon doesn’t explode anything. It parks a spot of concentrated heat on one point of the target and holds it there until something fails: a wing spar softens, a battery cooks off, a sensor burns out. The power you need depends on what you’re breaking and how long you can hold the beam on it.<\/p>\n The X3’s assigned diet is Group 1 through Group 3 drones, which in plain terms means everything from hobby-sized quadcopters up to machines around the size of the Army’s old Shadow scout drone, well short of a Reaper, as Stars and Stripes<\/a> lays out. Most of that class is plastic, foam and thin aluminum, and none of it’s fast. Thirty kilowatts held on a plastic airframe for a few seconds does the job. A hardened, supersonic cruise missile’s a different problem, and that’s what the 500-kilowatt monster Lockheed is building for Golden Dome<\/a> is meant to solve.<\/p>\n On paper the X3 scales from 20 to 35-plus kilowatts, third generation of the family, with an AI aiming package called AV_Halo Pinpoint whose whole job is keeping the beam parked on one square inch of a drone that’s actively maneuvering. Holding that aim is, frankly, harder than making the light. The Army’s version rides on the back of a JLTV, the Humvee’s replacement, there’s a palletized version for anywhere with power, and AV says it’s studying a fit for the smaller Infantry Squad Vehicle.<\/p>\n So why’s the Army finally buying? You already know the arithmetic from Ukraine and the Red Sea. Stars and Stripes puts a Shahed-type attack drone at about $35,000, and the Patriot and THAAD interceptors America’s thrown at that class of threat at $4 million to $12 million per missile. A laser burns electricity instead of a magazine. As long as the truck has fuel, you have ammunition.<\/p>\n Jammers used to handle the cheap stuff, until fiber-optic drones showed up trailing a hair-thin cable and carrying no radio link to jam. The Army’s answer has been to reach for tools that physically break the drone. A 30mm cannon turret bolted to a truck<\/a> is one of them. We’ve also covered the gentler end of the light spectrum, an American dazzler that blinds a drone’s cameras<\/a> without breaking anything. The X3 does the opposite job. It burns through.<\/p>\nSo what does a production contract actually change?<\/h2>\n
Why 30 kilowatts is enough for a drone<\/h2>\n
From two trucks to a line in Albuquerque<\/h2>\n