The Navy this week announced a $17 million contract was awarded to a California contractor for a program to build a new laser gun called SONGBOW.
The high-powered laser is being sought as a ship-based weapon powerful enough to destroy fast-moving targets — both missiles and drones — with enough power to fire multiple times. Other aerial threats, such as hypersonic missiles, also will be targets.
Two functions of the systems will be remote sensing and target illumination for tracking, and a second module to fire and sustain a powerful target-destroying beam.
The weapon will be integrated into Aegis battle-management-equipped warships currently armed with SM-6 missiles.
Japan’s navy already has a 100-kilowatt laser gun on one of its warships that completed sea trials in March.
The Navy wants the new weapon to reduce reliance on expensive anti-missile interceptors that each can cost $1 million or more.
A single laser bolt is estimated to cost between $1 and $10, sharply reducing defense costs.
Pulsed fiber lasers produce short, high-intensity bursts of light through strands of glass fibers. The technology has been used in industrial cutting tools and military targeting systems.
The SONGBOW will use “wavefront control” — optical engineering that allows the laser beam to remain sharp and focused as it is fired from the gun to the target
The Naval Research Laboratory is leading the programs and in June 2025 announced a $30 million contract to develop the 400-kilowatt laser weapon that will combine several 50-kilowatt beam systems into a unified high-precision directed energy stream.
The latest contract extended the time for development from an original target date of January 2027 to January 2028. The extra time is reportedly needed to help engineers solve one of the most difficult naval defense problems: neutralizing a swarm of attack drones without draining the warship’s stockpile of defensive missiles.
SONGBOW will be the Navy’s most advanced laser gun after the service ran into problems with a lower-power 30-kilowatt AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System that was taken out of service in 2017.
Work on the weapon is being done by Coherent Aerospace & Defense, which won the $30 million contract, and Attalon that was awarded the $17 million contract. Both are located in California.
“SONGBOW is focused on advancing the technologies that will enable the next generation of directed energy systems,” said Matt Straup, Attalon’s vice president of directed energy and advanced lasers.
The Navy’s urgency behind getting SONGBOW up and running is based on the use of dozens of interceptor missiles in 2023 in the Red Sea in countering missile attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and then the hundreds of interceptors used in the Persian Gulf during the Iran conflict.
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