In June, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico. This stretch of desert had been a proving ground for barely a week when, in 1945, Manhattan Project scientists detonated the first atomic bomb at its Trinity Site, releasing the destructive energy of nuclear fission. Nearly 81 years later White Sands hosted a different experiment in concentrating electromagnetic energy: a demonstration of lasers and high-power microwave weapons designed to take down drones.
When operators fired a U.S. Army prototype based on Epirus’s Leonidas system at a swarm of 12 drones, all of them dropped from the sky. Invisible microwaves had disrupted the electronics that kept them aloft. Hegseth himself took control of another system, called LOCUST, and used its high-energy laser to defeat a drone.
Directed-energy weapons have long been more promise than combat reality, with technologists dreaming big yet fielding few systems. Cheap drones might have given them a practical use.
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Drones can gather intelligence on troop movements and strike those troops. But traditional U.S. defenses do not always match the threat. Drones are now inexpensive and ubiquitous; the missiles used to take them out are often much costlier and limited in supply. A defense can work while losing the economic and logistical contest. “The protectors—which are built to hunt lions or elephants—are getting kicked in the butt by the mice,” says Andy Lowery, CEO of Epirus. “Mice are coming in, and so what we do is we defend against mice.” He hopes Epirus’s microwaves can provide that defense—a mousetrap, he calls it.
The Pentagon knows it needs a solution to the mouse problem. Drones are central to the wars in Ukraine and across the Middle East. They’re also a stateside threat: anyone can buy them online and send them toward a military base or large gathering. “Small unmanned systems are a defining threat for our time,” says Army Lt. Col. Adam Scher, quoting General Matthew Ross. “They are prolific, they’re evolving quickly and they’re no longer confined to combat.”
The aircraft dotting the sky simply stopped and fell nearly in unison, like dancers dropping on cue.
In August 2025 the Defense Department established Joint Interagency Task Force 401, a unit dedicated to counterdrone innovation. Scher is its strategic communications adviser. Directed energy—lasers that burn through drones’ hardware and microwaves that essentially fry them—is part of the unit’s strategy.
Task Force 401 has selected five U.S. bases, in Arizona, Texas, Washington State, North Dakota and Missouri, for a directed-energy pilot. According to Scher, the program will let operators give feedback on the systems’ performance and help to shape future doctrine and training. It will also help the military coordinate with the Federal Aviation Administration when using lasers and microwaves in domestic skies. Scher says the task force is working hard to get directed-energy systems into the field “rapidly.”
In February, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) used LOCUST near Fort Bliss in Texas against what officials believed was a threatening drone. The object might have been a Mylar party balloon. Because the firing had not been coordinated with the FAA, the agency closed the airspace around El Paso International Airport. Two weeks later the U.S. military used a laser near Fort Hancock in Texas to shoot down another object it deemed threatening. The drone belonged to CBP.
The next month the Pentagon and FAA tested LOCUST together at White Sands to evaluate how it could operate around civilian aircraft. Leonardo DRS, a defense contractor, has also integrated LOCUST into a Stryker armored-vehicle prototype, combining the laser with systems that can track and identify drones.
The army’s interest in directed-energy systems isn’t new, says Philip Perconti, Leonardo DRS’s senior vice president and chief technology officer. He would know: he was previously deputy assistant secretary of the army for research and technology and the army’s chief scientist. But that interest hasn’t necessarily translated into operations.
“When you want to build exquisite optical systems with high-energy, high-end laser power, it’s not so simple,” Perconti says. Lasers have historically been princess-and-the-pea instruments, precise and particular about their operating conditions. Engineers have had to ruggedize them without disrupting the optics and power systems that make them work, then mount them on, say, tanks instead of keeping them in the laboratory.
Getting a laser onto a tank does not mean it can hit the right things, especially when those things are drones. “These are small, fast-moving targets that can be coming at you, or they can be moving laterally to you,” Perconti says. “They’re very hard to detect.” The LOCUST-equipped Stryker uses radar to detect and track drones. An infrared system then identifies the aircraft. “Only then is the laser engaged to bring the thing down,” he says.
That is a gory process. “You’re literally cutting into the target, so you have to hold the laser on the target for some period of time to allow it to either melt the plastic or cut through the metal,” Perconti says. “People don’t realize you can do that with light, but then you go out in the sun and you get a sunburn.” Leonardo DRS is working to put that burn on systems that are more mobile and better able to engage multiple drones in quick succession.
Taking on several drones at once is Epirus’s specialty. Unlike a laser, a microwave weapon can spread its effects across a wider patch of sky. In August 2025, Epirus says, its Leonidas system defeated a swarm of 49 drones with a single pulse. The aircraft dotting the sky simply stopped and fell nearly in unison, like dancers dropping on cue.
The idea for Leonidas grew out of Lowery’s time at Raytheon. There he noticed what he calls a “fratricide effect” from shipboard radars the company built. “You get within two or three kilometers of shore, and you start knocking out different electronics—you know, radio stations, television stations, even cellular towers,” Lowery says. “And so you have to drop the power.” Nobody wants the U.S. Navy knocking their sitcom off the air mid–laugh track. He wondered why engineers were not studying how to weaponize that interference. When he left to start Epirus, the company team decided to do so itself.
Leonidas creates microwave pulses that last milliseconds—a long time in directed-energy terms. “We’ve never been overflown; nothing has ever gotten away,” Lowery says of the company’s tests. Some drones have come within about a football field of Leonidas before the system disabled them. Like Leonardo DRS, Epirus plans to make its weapons more mobile.
Neither lasers nor microwaves will defend a base or battlefield alone. Drones require a layered defense, an onion of options—kinetic and directed energy, long range and close-in, things that melt, burn or scramble electronics.
The U.S. is not only a drone counterer. It’s also a drone operator, so it will have to protect its aircraft against systems like those that companies such as Epirus and Leonardo DRS are building. Drones require counterdrone weapons, which invite counter-counterdrone weapons. At White Sands, the cycle is hard to miss.