Another Dead End for Airborne Lasers: Air Force Scraps Effort to Mount Directed-Energy Weapon on Fighter Jet

After years in development, the U.S. military's latest attempt at an airborne laser weapon to protect troops on the ground from incoming ballistic missiles appears to be headed for the scrapyard.

Initiated in 2016, the Self-Protect High-Energy Laser Demonstrator, or SHiELD, was envisioned as a laser weapon mounted on fighter jets such as the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II that would neutralize incoming air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles, as well as ballistic missiles potentially targeting U.S. forces abroad, according to a 2023 Congressional Research Service report.

The Air Force had planned on the SHiELD system taking flight for airborne testing aboard an F-15 Eagle some time in fiscal 2024. The service had already reported a successful ground-based shootdown of test missiles and taken receipt of the laser weapon system and pod subsystem in recent years. But any plans to complete the weapon and put it into operation now appear to have been abandoned, according to service officials.

"The SHiELD program has concluded, and there are no plans for further testing and evaluation," Dr. Ted Ortiz, SHiELD program manager at the Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate, told Military.com in an email. "The Air Force has not installed a laser pod on a fighter jet test bed."

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