Defense News reported on Tuesday 28 April that the US Army and US Navy have committed $675.93 million through FY2031 to the Joint Laser Weapon System (a containerised directed-energy programme, JLWS), a 150-kilowatt containerised laser scalable to 300-500 kilowatts, designed against cruise missiles rather than Group 1-3 drones1. The Navy carries $79.84 million in FY2027 plus $243.3 million through FY2031; the Army adds $337.8 million from FY2028 to FY2031, with no FY2027 funding. Navy contract awards are planned for Q4 2026 ($31.7 million for beam control) and March 2027 ($30 million for the containerised system). Defense News identifies Lockheed Martin as the likely prime, given its lead on the predecessor High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Surveillance (HELIOS) and Indirect Fire Protection Capability High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) programmes.
Group 1-3 drones are quadcopters, fixed-wing tactical UAS, and small loitering munitions in the kilogram-to-tens-of-kilograms class. Cruise missiles are an order of magnitude larger and faster, which is why JLWS sits above the EHEL drone-specific competition that slipped from Q2 to Q4 FY26 and above the LOCUST X3 $5-per-engagement laser benchmark. The directed-energy bench is now layered: LOCUST X3 against Group 1-3 drones, EHEL against larger UAS, JLWS against cruise missiles. AeroVironment, Epirus and Lockheed each sit in different layers of the same architecture.
The Navy's FY2027 spend frontloads beam-control and integration awards to set the technical baseline; the Army's FY2028-onwards spend then funds platform integration once the Navy variant is validated. That sequencing reduces overall programme risk by keeping Army funds out of FY2027 entirely, and it gives congressional appropriators an obvious place to defer if the FY2027 markup pares back the broader directed-energy portfolio. Lockheed's likely prime status reflects its HELIOS and IFPC-HEL technical lead rather than a sole-source decision; the formal contract competition is still ahead.
A $5-per-engagement Group 1-3 laser, a Group 4-5 EHEL system, and a $676 million cruise-missile JLWS together form a directed-energy stack that, in principle, can engage every UAS class without expending kinetic interceptors. Whether that economic model holds depends on the unit cost of beam-control and power-generation systems at production scale, which neither AeroVironment nor Lockheed has yet disclosed at programme-of-record volumes.
