The future arrived on December 28, 2025 as the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) announced that Iron Beam became the first high-energy tactical laser weapon to be fully integrated and cleared for operations in a national defense array. And it's not alone.
When the invention of the laser by Theodore Maiman at the Hughes Research Laboratories was made public on July 7, 1960, the press immediately saw the military possibilities, with the Los Angeles Herald proclaiming "LA Man Discovers Science-Fiction Death Ray."
In the months and years that followed, popular media would often talk about the destructive potential of lasers with the Associated Press publishing an article that proclaimed that a satellite armed with a laser could control the Earth. Concepts of laser weapons were common while thrillers like 1964's Goldfinger cemented the concept of the laser weapon in the public's mind.
However, reality was very, very far behind. For years the laser was infamous as the solution in search of a problem and although lasers could be spectacular, they were hardly weapons-grade in the 1960s. Just look at the fact that the power of the laser then was measured in Gillettes. That is, how many razor blades a laser beam could cut through at one time.
Even as the laser found applications in science and technology, giving rise to miracle surgery and revolutionary communications, lasers mainly found military applications as targeting systems and range finders. The only real laser weapon that saw service during the 20th century was a low-power laser used by the Royal Navy during the 1982 Falklands War to temporarily dazzle and distract enemy pilots.
Not that this was due to lack of trying. Both the US and the Soviet Union had ambitious programs to develop laser weapons. The Americans even modified a Boeing 747 to carry a huge experimental and alarmingly dangerous chemical laser designed to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles that was more of a menace to the crew than the missiles.
In the past two decades the development of a new generation of lasers began to change all this. The basic problem was three fold. First, figure out how to make a laser with enough power to be practical. Second, learn how to seek targets. Third, how to adjust the beam to compensate for atmospheric effects.
The breakthrough was the development of solid-state lasers that use bundles of glass fibers doped with exotic elements like ytterbium, erbium, and thulium along with aluminum, germanium, and phosphorus. These curled up bundles allowed for very long, efficient lasers to be stuffed into very small volumes and new technologies allowed multiple lasers to be combined into a single, far more powerful beam.
At the business end, new targeting systems were developed to identify and lock onto targets quickly. Along with this came systems that used things like reference lasers to analyze the air between the weapon and target so the deadly beam could be altered to compensate for any distortion.
The result of all this is that in recent years new laser weapons were beginning to show up and these weren't just coming from the usual suspects like the United States nor were these mere concepts that might one day lead to practical systems. They were popping up in Russia, China, South Korea, France, Britain, Turkey, Japan, Germany, India, and, most notably Israel.
Israel's Iron Beam began life in 1996 as a joint US/Israel project. Originally conceived as a chemical deuterium fluoride laser, it swapped over to solid-state, electrically-powered, ytterbium-doped lasers when it moved to Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. In 2024, recent conflicts resulted in the system being fast tracked for combat duty to intercept hostile drones and missiles and now it has been officially integrated into Israel's armed forces as the innermost layer of the air defenses tasked with intercepting short-range threats, including rockets and mortars.
As far as laser weapons are concerned, this is a major milestone. While other systems have been deployed with various militaries and have even been tested in combat, this is the first time that a laser weapon has been formally added to a country's armed forces as a fully integrated system.
The reason why this has taken so long is that there's a big difference between developing a functional, practical laser weapon and making one that's fully operational. Modern weapon systems act as one component in a much larger – often global – network. They also have to be compatible with a very complex logistical supply and maintenance line. Not to mention that there has to be an actual production line for the weapon instead of it being a series of one-offs.
That's why online assertions that this or that experimental weapon should be rushed to the front lines immediately because this or that cause me to rub my eyes.
For a laser weapon to be fully operational, it needs to be rugged enough to handle being knocked about like any other piece of equipment. Systems under development are designed (oddly enough) for development. They include things like manual overrides to shut the laser down if it runs into problems like unexpected software reboots or cooling systems suddenly having troubles with dust. They also need safety buffers to make sure the system doesn't accidentally harm anything as it's watched by the monitoring safety team– a requirement that combat systems don't have.
In addition, test units work alone while operational ones must integrate with command and control systems that can decide in milliseconds whether to fire on a suspected target. Add to this, operational units must be built to military specifications, withstand nasty environments and inadequate storage conditions – all while maintaining reliability. If something does go wrong, a field technician has to be able to bang it back into shape. That means having standard spares available and maintenance procedures drawn up and tested.
Finally, the targets are different for development lasers and combat lasers. The targets used for development are scripted or semi-controlled, so the engineers can lock down all the variables and concentrate on only one problem at a time. On the other hand, combat lasers have to handle live saturation attacks that are the complete opposite of controlled.
What all this boils down to is that even a laser weapon that's already shooting down hostile drones is streets away from one that's officially part of the armory.
Currently, there are about 17 tactical lasers that are operational, combat-cleared, field tested, or under development. With the advantages of a weapon that can engage targets at the speed of light, has an infinite ammo magazine, and costs the famous "dollar-a-shot" to operate, there's a lot of incentive to bring these online.
It's an incentive that's so great that the Royal Navy has pushed its schedule forward to field its Dragonfire laser to 2027 and others are likely also to see the fast track in the near future. In the short term, these systems will be used to counter drones as well as rockets, mortars, and other close-in aerial threats.
However, that's only the short term.
As to the long term? That is anyone's guess. If these tactical lasers fulfill their promise, they could be the biggest change to the battlefield since gunpowder went from fireworks to guns. That started up as popguns on sticks and ended with ballistic missiles that could reach any spot on Earth in minutes.
Where a class of weapons that started out as glorified pointers will go makes the phrase Death Star jump easily to mind.
