DragonFire laser to be fitted to Royal Navy ships after acing drone-zapping trials

Costs a tenner a shot instead of £1M per anti-aircraft missile

Britain's Royal Navy ships will be fitted with the DragonFire laser weapon by 2027 – five years earlier than planned – following recent successful trials involving fast-moving drones.

The Ministry of Defence says it has signed a £316 million ($413 million) contract with weapons developer MBDA UK to deliver the DragonFire systems to the Royal Navy from 2027. This should make it the first high-power laser to enter service with any European nation.

It will initially be fitted to Type 45 destroyers, the Navy's air defense ships, rather than the Type 26 frigates, as previously planned. This is likely because the latter are still being built, with the first-in-class HMS Glasgow scheduled to enter service in 2028.

According to the MoD, DragonFire was able to shoot down high-speed drones during its most recent trials at a test site in the Hebrides, which in this case means targets capable of flying up to 650 km/h (about 404 miles per hour).

DragonFire laser system at the MBDA facility in Stevenage. Crown copyright

This was a UK first for above-the-horizon tracking, targeting, and destroying such drones with a laser weapon, it said – although the British Army announced at the end of last year that it had successfully destroyed flying drones using a high-energy laser mounted on an armored vehicle.

Lasers, or Laser Directed Energy Weapons (LDEW) as military nomenclature has it, are seen as a solution to the threat from relatively low-cost drone aircraft. These can be fitted with explosives and used against ships, as Yemen's Houthis in the Red Sea have demonstrated over the past couple of years.

Ships such as the Type 45 destroyer have been used to protect shipping in the Red Sea, but its anti-aircraft missiles cost over £1 million ($1.3 million) apiece, plus the Type 45 only carries 48 of them at a time. Both the Royal Navy and US Navy have also used their ships' medium guns to down drones.

The fear among military chiefs is that an enemy could overwhelm a ship by sending drones against it until it runs out of ammunition. A laser weapon can continue firing for as long as the ship has sufficient electrical power, and costs just £10 ($13) per shot, according to the MoD.

"This high-power laser will see our Royal Navy at the leading edge of innovation in NATO, delivering a cutting-edge capability to help defend the UK and our allies in this new era of threat," claimed the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, Luke Pollard MP.

Like most modern military projects, DragonFire has taken some time to make it into service. The contract to build a laser demonstrator was signed back in 2016, and a public demonstration was planned for 2019.

However, the first trials against static targets were made public in 2022, since when development has continued. This is relatively speedy compared with the Type 26 frigates, which are the end result of a program that started in 1998 – meaning the ship will have taken 30 years to reach service.

DragonFire itself is turret mounted to allow the laser and its targeting systems to be trained onto incoming threats. The laser is reported to use 50 kW of power, but the MoD previously said it would have the ability to scale this up in future.

It uses Coherent Beam Combining (CBC) technology to merge multiple beams into a single high-power beam, and is claimed to be able to hit a target the size of a £1 coin (similar diameter to a US quarter) from a kilometer (about half a mile) away, while taking down drones at a distance of more than three miles. ®