If the United States ends up launching strikes against Iran, the most critical battlefield may not be the skies over Tehran or the Strait of Hormuz. It may be the quieter, harsher math of air defense: How many drones, rockets, and missiles can the U.S. afford to intercept?
That calculation now hangs over the escalating U.S.-Iran standoff, as American forces shift into position and officials signal that military action remains a possibility if diplomacy breaks down.
According to The Washington Post, citing unnamed senior sources, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine has warned civilian leaders that the consequences of a sustained campaign against Iran could extend far beyond the initial strikes.
Among his concerns is how quickly such a conflict could drain U.S. air-defense stockpiles—and what that depletion might mean if the United States were forced to confront a larger, more demanding fight in the Indo-Pacific.
In other words, even a “regional” war can become a strategic tax, paid in interceptors that are expensive, finite, and slow to replace—and that might be desperately needed later in a crisis with China.
The current Iran quagmire underscores why, for decades, the Pentagon has been sprinting—sometimes awkwardly—towards fielding operational directed-energy air defenses.
Directed-energy weapons—whetherhigh-energy lasers or high-power microwaves—promise a different kind of defensive capability. One measured less in how many interceptors you can physically load and more in how much power you can produce and how effectively you can shed heat between shots.
In theory, that shifts the air-defense equation away from finite missile inventories and toward endurance—an advantage that looks increasingly attractive as modern air defense proves both indispensable and relentlessly consumptive.
Whether that promise can be fully realized in the field, however, remains an open question.
The stockpile problem: the “cost-per-kill” trap
Modern air defense is both brutally effective and costly. Patriot, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), SM-3, SM-6, and other interceptors can be the right answer against cruise missiles and ballistic threats. However, they’re also expensive and not quickly replenished.
In modern warfare, air defense has become a numbers game, and saturation is the strategy. A defender can do everything right—radar, tracking, fire control—and still lose if they simply run out of shots.
This is a grimly familiar lesson from Ukraine, the Red Sea, and from the broader rise of cheap, mass-produced drones that can force million-dollar interceptors to chase bargain-basement targets.
In July 2025, The Guardian reported the U.S. had “about 25%” of the Patriot interceptors required for the Pentagon’s war plans, after stockpiles were drawn down in part by transfers to Ukraine. The shortfall, officials said, was serious enough to raise concerns that it could begin to jeopardize potential U.S. operations.
The China factor is what turns this from a budgeting headache and surplus shortage into a strategic vulnerability. In September 2025, Reuters reported the Pentagon was urging defense contractors to “double or quadruple” production rates for a set of critical weapons due to concerns about low stockpiles in a potential conflict with China.
In other words, the Pentagon is already planning around the idea that a major fight would consume munitions at a pace the industrial base still struggles to match.
That mismatch is one reason Patriot production has become a harbinger for the larger problem. In January, Reuters reported Lockheed Martin said it will “increase the annual production capacity for its PAC-3 missile interceptors to 2,000 units a year from about 600 previously.”
Even that kind of surge, impressive on paper, masks the deeper point. You can’t scale missile production like flipping a switch. You need long-lead components, specialized suppliers, trained labor, testing capacity, and predictable funding.
Now layer in the current standoff with Iran. Washington has been posturing for the possibility of sustained combat operations. Meanwhile, Iran is reportedly shopping for new capabilities—potentially including Chinese supersonic anti-ship missiles and other systems that could complicate U.S. operations in the region.
Every additional air-defense deployment meant to protect U.S. forces, ships, and partners in the Middle East comes with a quieter cost. It pulls interceptors from a finite stockpile. And because those missiles are expensive and slow to replace, each fresh battery shipped overseas becomes another withdrawal from inventories planners worry they may need for a different—and potentially far larger—fight elsewhere.
This kinetic reality is exactly why directed energy has risen from futuristic promise to urgent priority for the Pentagon in recent years.
Why directed-energy keeps coming back
Directed-energy weapons (DEWs) aren’t a single technology. For air defense and area denial, the field generally breaks into two main approaches: high-energy lasers (HEL) and high-power microwave (HPM) systems.
Lasers deliver energy at the speed of light, but their kill mechanism is usually thermal. A sufficiently powerful laser beam held on a target can burn through an airframe, blind sensors, ignite fuel, or trigger a failure that can take down incoming threats.
Microwaves, by contrast, are more like an electromagnetic “flash” that can disrupt or damage electronics. Against swarms of small drones—especially those dependent on relatively fragile components—HPM can be attractive because it may affect multiple targets in an area, rather than “one beam, one target” at a time.
The pitch for DEWs is seductive. They carry a deep “magazine” with low cost per shot, and fewer logistics. If the “ammo” is electricity, then the limiting factor becomes power generation, thermal management, and system reliability—not the size of a missile stockpile.
A 2023 GAO report to Congress described the cost to fire a directed energy weapon at “about $1-$10 per engagement,” compared to defensive missiles that can cost millions per shot.
However, the reality surrounding DEWs is more complicated.
Lasers require line of sight. They can be degraded by rain, fog, dust, smoke, sea spray, and atmospheric turbulence. They also need stable tracking. Hitting a maneuvering drone is one thing, while dwelling long enough on a fast, hardened, spinning cruise missile body is another.
Additionally, you can’t fire a high-energy laser repeatedly without managing heat, and you can’t manage heat without size, weight, and energy tradeoffs that can be brutal on vehicles and ships.
High-power microwave systems carry their own complications. HPM’s effectiveness can depend on the range, the target’s shielding, and the exposure geometry. They can also cause collateral damage to nearby friendly electronics and military systems.
This consequential list of pros and cons helps explain why the Pentagon’s directed-energy push has been both aggressive and, at times, frustratingly slow.
U.S. systems are inching toward being “operational”
The U.S. Army’s most visible move toward operational directed-energy air defense has been the Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) system, built on a Stryker.
As The Debrief previously reported, in 2024, the Army began deploying prototype DE M-SHORAD to the Middle East, framing the effort as a live test of whether a laser-equipped vehicle could help protect forces against the drone threat.
A report by the DoD’s Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) underscored both the urgency and the messiness of that approach.
The Army deployed four DE M-SHORAD prototype vehicles OCONUS in February 2024. Yet, the deployment prevented planned scientific and technical testing from beginning as intended. Noted by the DOT&E, the limited data collected during short field testing would not be adequate to support an early assessment of operational effectiveness, lethality, suitability, and survivability.
The same DOT&E report provides a telling snapshot of the tradeoffs. DE M-SHORAD’s primary weapon is described as a 50-kilowatt laser, powered by batteries that are recharged by onboard diesel generators. Put simply, to get the “infinite magazine,” you still have to haul the power plant.
Moreover, the initial feedback on the DE M-SHORAD’s performance during field testing wasn’t positive.
“What we’re finding is where the challenges are with directed energy at different power levels,” former Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Doug Bush, testified to Congress. “That [50-kilowatt] power level is proving challenging to incorporate into a vehicle that has to move around constantly — the heat dissipation, the amount of electronics, kind of the wear and tear of a vehicle in a tactical environment versus a fixed site.”
Nevertheless, the Army is still planning to scale up and integrate directed energy into a layered air defense architecture, rather than treating it as a novelty platform.
In Army budget materials for FY2026, the service describes pursuing the Indirect Fire Protection Capability High Energy Laser (IFPC HEL) and IFPC High Power Microwave (IFPC HPM) as complementary non-kinetic effectors for missions including counter-UAS and denial of manned aircraft threats.
As recently reported by The Debrief, a breakdown in communication between the FAA and DoD over testing of the Army’s prototype LOCUST counter-drone laser system caused the brief shutdown of the entire airspace over El Paso, Texas.
The U.S. Navy has similarly been experimenting with various DEW systems.
One of the most closely watched Navy efforts is HELIOS, a Lockheed Martin-built laser system integrated on a destroyer. Just recently, The War Zone reported that Lockheed’s CEO said a HELIOS-equipped destroyer “successfully neutralized four drone threats,” framing directed energy as a way of “saving U.S. and allied air defense missiles for more advanced threats.”
However, the phrase “more advanced threats” is telling. It suggests the Navy isn’t betting that lasers will replace standard missile defenses. Rather, laser-DEW systems can take on drones, small boats, and other lower-cost threats that can bleed a ship’s vertical launch cells dry before the real fight starts.
The Air Force’s counter-drone microwave work, meanwhile, has been a recurring feature of The Debrief’s directed-energy coverage. THOR—an AFRL-developed counter-swarm electromagnetic system- has been described as a “system [that] provides non-kinetic defeat of multiple targets. It operates from a wall plug and uses energy to disable drones.”
That “wall plug” line is doing a lot of work, rhetorically. It’s the DEW dream to replace pallets of missiles with something closer to a generator and a power bill. But the same phrase also hints at the catch. A weapon that “runs from a wall plug” still has to survive the realities of war. It needs clean power in harsh conditions, reliable cooling under sustained firing, and sensors and software that can track fast, cluttered targets without breaking down.
And even when all of that works, directed energy doesn’t erase the basic constraints of range, line of sight, weather, and the simple fact that some threats are built to take punishment—or arrive so fast that there’s little time to dwell a beam long enough to matter.
directed-energy tradeoffs that still make missiles essential
For all the promise, directed energy is not a magic shield. The most advanced DEW systems being tested by the U.S. have proven to be little more effective than existing last-line-of-defense weapons, such as the Phalanx CIWS.
Critically, directed energy still hasn’t proven it can reliably solve the hardest parts of the threat spectrum at scale. Ballistic missiles, certain cruise missiles, and coordinated salvos compress timelines and push physics in ways a laser’s dwell time—or a microwave’s effective range and effects—can’t automatically overcome.
For the foreseeable future, the more realistic role for DEW is as one layer in a broader, mixed air-defense stack: electronic warfare and jamming in some cases, guns and cheaper interceptors in others, lasers and microwaves to thin out drones and low-end threats, and high-end missiles reserved for what you can’t afford to miss.
That layered logic is exactly why the Iran-stockpile-China triangle matters. The U.S. can’t assume conflicts will arrive neatly, one at a time. A Middle East contingency can overlap with Indo-Pacific demands, and air defense is one of the fastest ways to burn through expensive munitions that are slow to replace.
Directed energy, at minimum, is an attempt to tilt the cost-exchange ratio back toward the defender by adding shots without emptying magazines. In theory, lasers offer “deeper magazines” and lower marginal costs because many systems are electrically powered—meaning the cost per shot can approach the cost of the electricity required to fire it, assuming the platform can generate enough power and shed enough heat to keep the weapon running.
And despite the known limitations, the Pentagon’s appetite hasn’t cooled. Public budget documents and oversight reporting indicate the U.S. has spent roughly $5.6 billion on unclassified directed-energy programs over the last five years.
Ultimately, the most honest way to describe America’s directed-energy push is also the most sobering. The Pentagon isn’t betting that lasers will make missiles obsolete. It’s betting that future wars will be too large, too drone-saturated, and too expensive to defend with missiles alone.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com