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The Navy has disclosed that the
Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS
Preble successfully test-fired its High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance
(HELIOS) system to take out an aerial target drone in Fiscal Year 2024. It was the latest major demonstration of the surface fleet’s shipboard laser ambitions, even as other U.S. military laser efforts have faced
a reality check in recent years.
Preble’s drone zapping was “to verify and validate the functionality, performance and capability” of HELIOS, and this latest step toward moving shipboard lasers into a fully operational state was revealed in the Pentagon’s annual
Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOTE) report that was released Friday night.
Little else was disclosed in the DOTE report regarding where and when
Preble, a Flight IIA
Arleigh Burke subvariant, fired its laser. The warship
shifted homeports from San Diego to Japan in September, just a few days before the end of FY24.
TWZ has reached out to the Navy for more information on the test and where HELIOS currently stands, and this report will be updated when that information comes in.
Either way, it’s a capability that Navy brass has been
increasingly clamoring for, especially in the past year, as Navy warships shoot down an at-times daily barrage of drones and missiles fired by
Iran-backed Houthi rebels over the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Those battles and other global flashpoints
have raised continued concerns about the Navy draining its finite missile stocks, as the pacing threat of China looms on the horizon.
TWZ has reported on several aspects of the Navy’s battle against the Houthis, including
a tally of ordnance expended during more than 400 engagements against
the Houthi arsenal of aerial drones, anti-ship cruise missiles, and anti-ship ballistic missiles.
.
“When I was in Bahrain as [the Destroyer Squadron 50 commanding officer] 10 years ago, the afloat staging base
USS Ponce had a laser on it,” Naval Surface Forces Commander Vice Adm. Brendan McLane told reporters in early 2024, before the Surface Navy Association conference. “We’re 10 years down the road, and we still don’t have something we can field?”
Indeed, the 60-kilowatt HELIOS and other long-promised directed-energy weapons have been a long time coming for the surface fleet. As
TWZ previously reported, it was first spotted aboard
Preble in 2022.
Its debut predates the Houthi fight, but is the type of system that would seem primed to help, at least to a limited degree, ease missile expenditures during similar operations.
TWZ’s past reporting on HELIOS points to why it would be so useful for taking out drone attacks and disabling or destroying
small boats. both manned and unmanned, with nefarious intent.
It can also
serve as a “dazzler” to blind or confuse optical seekers on incoming missiles and drones. The dazzler can limit an opponent’s general situational awareness by denying their sensors the ability to surveil the ship. HELIOS also sports its own optical sensors, which can serve a secondary intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) role.
On
Preble, HELIOS sits on the warship’s main forward pedestal that hosted the
Mk 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapons System (CIWS) on earlier
Arleigh Burke class destroyer variants. Flight IIA destroyers
currently have only one CIWS installed above the hangar bay. Outside of the handful of destroyers
modified to the ‘Rota configuration,’ which feature SeaRAM and Phalanx, Flight I
Arleigh Burkes feature two CIWS, front and rear.
Lockheed Martin received its first contract from the Navy for work on HELIOS in 2018, but the system builds on
a much longer history of directed energy research and
development at the company.
The system is particularly powerful when paired with
the Aegis Combat System. Rich Calabrese, director of Surface Navy Mission Systems for Lockheed Martin, expounded on HELIOS and Aegis during a broader interview
with The War Zone in 2021:
“We’re continuously upgrading the multi-source integration infusion capability of the Aegis weapon system and looking to bring in new weapons and sensors and do coordinate hard kill and soft kill. Directed energy weapons
We’re really already integrating the HELIOS Laser Weapon System with the Aegis Weapon System CSL [Common Source Library] in our lab here in New Jersey. In fact, we’ve …
The guy who’s now managing the laser program … He let me know the other day that we recently fired a laser here under the control of the Aegis Weapon System computer program. So, we’re building in the capability to do that weapon coordination and to do the hard kill, soft kill coordination in an automated fashion working with the HELIOS Weapon System.”
