For more than a decade, Lockheed Martin (LMT +2.30%) has been building laser guns for the U.S. military.
Lockheed has put gigantic lasers on airborne Boeing 747s. Experimented with lasers on smaller fighter jets. Helped the Army develop lasers to defend against drones.
And now, Earth's biggest defense company wants to build the biggest laser gun in the whole wide world.
NYSE: LMT
Key Data Points
10 kilowatts, 25, 60 -- hike!
Over the years, the Pentagon has succeeded in getting defense contractors like Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Boeing to demo a whole series of laser cannons, rated for power throughput measured in the double digits. But what Lockheed wants to do now is hike these numbers by an order of magnitude.
In a press release late last month, Lockheed described how it will build a new 500 kW-class laser for the Defense Department's High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative (HELSI), building on the success of a 300 kW laser that it developed and tested last year. Presumably for national security reasons, Lockheed hasn't released a lot of information on the project. Luckily for investors, we do know how much this contract is worth to the company: about $221 million for development alone.
HELSI is most often described as a laser weapon transportable by military truck, for use primarily for air defense against such targets as drones and unguided missile weapons like mortars and shells. The prototype is thus fairly large right now, and probably suitable mainly for land-based services such as the Army.
Development of a laser powerful enough to shoot down enemy aircraft and guided missiles may still be some ways off. But Lockheed says it is continuing to work to optimize the weapon's efficiency, size, weight, and volume -- which could permit these weapons to be deployed on naval warships and, eventually, on airplanes as well.
And success may not be very far off. A 2019 report by New Mexico's Galaxy Advanced Engineering suggests that a laser "in the megawatt range" -- 1,000 kW -- would be required to put sufficient power (about 5000 joules per square centimeter) on target to shoot down an airplane. Less powerful lasers, however, might be able to disable specific thin-skinned targets such as an airplane's "sensors, optics, and related devices."
Why lasers?
Now, an investor -- or a taxpayer -- may wonder why the U.S. Pentagon is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in researching laser weapons at all. The answer may surprise you. More than just the "shock and awe" effect of possessing such a weapon when no one else does, military lasers offer surprisingly compelling economics to the warfighter.
In particular, the Pentagon likes laser weapons' potential to offer "deep magazines, low cost per engagement ... and ... [reduced] logistics requirements." Translated into English, that simply means that -- once developed -- laser weapons will be cheap to operate and will significantly simplify the logistics of arming military forces for a fight.
Consider: In 2013, then-Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder described the 30 kW AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System (LAWS) -- built by Kratos Defense & Security (KTOS +3.26%) and field-tested by the U.S. Navy in 2014 -- as costing "about one dollar to shoot." Even if you assume that a 500 kW HELSI laser costs proportionately more to operate than a 30 kW LAWS, that still works out to a cost per shot of less than $17.
Compared to the cost of, say, a Raytheon Sea Sparrow anti-aircraft missile -- $1.8 million -- that's a heck of a bargain for a Defense Department constantly striving to stay within its budget.
Nor does cost per shot offer the only cost savings from fielding laser weapons. When the Pentagon speaks of "deep magazines" and "reducing logistics requirements," it means that a laser cannon, once built and provided with an energy source (such as the engine of a truck, plane, or ship), never runs out of ammunition. It never needs to be restocked. It never needs factories to build bullets for it, trucks to transport those bullets to port, or resupply ships to move those bullets across the ocean to the end user.
All of these savings add up, and argue forcefully for why the Pentagon wants laser weapons.
What it means to investors
What's more, once the Pentagon gets what it wants, it will seek to arm "all six military branches" -- that's Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Space Force -- with high-powered laser weapon systems of the sort Lockheed is working to build. While it may be hard to precisely quantify this market opportunity, it sure sounds big to me.
And laser weapons may start arriving sooner than you think. While gigawatt-class military lasers lie still in the future, the US Army plans to deploy as many as four of Lockheed's 300 kW-class prototypes in tactical military vehicles by 2024, according to Interesting Engineering magazine.
Long story short, the laser guns are already on their way. And Lockheed Martin is leading the race to build them.
