The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) – along with its Defence industry partners MBDA, Leonardo and Qinetiq – is publishing ‘never seen before’ declassified footage of the DragonFire Laser Directed Energy Weapon (LDEW) system, in action over the skies of the Hebrides.

The DragonFire Laser Directed Energy Weapon (LDEW) system has proven itself in testing and has the very real potential for it to transform the UK’s Defence capability.

Demonstrating the potential of LDEW, DragonFire can provide a credible sovereign UK capability to meet the UK defence needs.

Here’s the footage.

LDEW offers a number of significant benefits, including reduced logistic, cost burden and collateral damage in operations.

“The ecosystem of science and technology required to develop DragonFire would not be possible without the world-leading expertise of MBDA, QinetiQ, and Leonardo, and the ‘best of UK industry’ partnership they have created. Through the UK DragonFire programme, Dstl, MBDA, QinetiQ, and Leonardo are providing a significant step change in UK’s capability in High Energy Laser Weapon Systems. The programme has developed and matured the key technologies needed.

It should not be underestimated the challenges that need to be overcome to be able to put many kW’s of energy onto a target with millimetric precision, over distances measure in kilometres. The expertise in the UK, distributed across government, industry and academia, has helped achieve this.”

The MOD say that DragonFire is demonstrating the ‘art of the possible’ and focus is now increasingly on how to use the technology, rather than just its development, with the goal of understanding how LDEW can be used both safely and effectively.

George Allison
George Allison
George has a degree in Cyber Security from Glasgow Caledonian University and has a keen interest in naval and cyber security matters and has appeared on national radio and television to discuss current events. George is on Twitter at @geoallison
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48 COMMENTS

        • If you read some of his other posts he has a theme of been anti UK. The 😃 emoji is more of laughing at the UK than anything else. This is for Jim incase he can’t pronounce facetious шутливый

        • Joking apart we do have really, really good tech and people.

          Just need a little bit more money that isn’t spent at Gucci Weapons PLC but at Art of the Possible Weapons PLC…..I’d see Sea Ceptor and this as parts of the latter.

          • Absolutely, whether framed as the perfect is the enemy of the good, or as a feasible, 80% sol’n is infinitely preferable to an infeasible 100% sol’n. USAF had an expression that something could be “good enough” for government work, (especially as our principal intent was to create piles of rubble in enemy territory). 😉🤔

          • LDEW systems?!? Virtually guaranteed to be deployed in overall GBAD system architecture, maritime environment, and eventually, in aerospace systems/realm. Space deployment will depend upon future treaty negotiations w/ rival powers.

    • You clearly have not much more than half a brain cell to see what’s in front of your nose.. Read and Learn.

  2. focus is now increasingly on how to use the technology, rather than just its development, with the goal of understanding how LDEW can be used both safely and effectively.

    Seems a very odd statement, if you didn’t have a use then why develop it in the first place. Or is this just a euphemism for ‘we don’t have enough money to complete the development so will now go slow until we do’.

    Build it, prove it and market as a defence product to our allies. How many more times will we let these opportunities just sail by.

    Here’s what will actually happen, we’ll join a EU DEW program give away our tech and then end up with a % of build.

    • I think you may find that ship of EU cooperation has sailed, but so what we have dozens of cooperative agreements with various EU members.
      I think the day has gone when we can just go it alone, that went when we essentially cancelled “U.K Defence Stand alone Industry PLC” in the 1990’s and 00s. But the Western world is evolving into various clusters of countries who work well together.

      This has so much cross over potential with GCAP that we would be stupid not to speak to Japan and Italy about it. Both can bring a lot to the table and as partners we seem to be getting along quite well (compared to FCAS/SCAF/FSAC or MGCS).

      The other option would be aspirational but I think there is a possible way to incorporate DEW development in AUKUS. We all see the huge tri-lateral investment and cooperation that is going on to produce the SSNA, but that is Pillar One. No one ever looks at Pillar Two which is “Advanced Capabilities” there are 8 working groups each focusing on a separate field, I think it would be sensible to set up a ninth Pillar 2 working group to look at DEW.

      • I seem to have read last week that the EU is very keen on us joining their development program but we have said no as some apparent Brexit benefit.

        I also seem to remember us signing joint development programs with EU members in the last year to build a new cruise missile, new anti air missile, 6th Gen fighter and ABM missile capability but maybe I am wrong and we can’t cooperate with the EU anymore on defence.

      • Fearlessly predict that eventually there will be closer to eighty, rather than eight, AUKUS Pillar 2 advanced capabilities working groups. No matter how large Pillar 1 becomes, it will be dwarfed by Pillar 2. 🤔

        • The administration of Pillar 2 initiatives could prove to be daunting. There will be an extensive list of countries wishing to join, as R&D and the fielding of systems accelerates. Not certain whether “associate status” is feasible over longer term. Relatively fortunate problem to anticipate.

        • Not sure, I’m seeing Pillar 2 falling into the buzz word categories of AI and Hypersonic’s and I can’t believe the R&D budgets of Australia or the UK will make a tiny dimple in the Uber Credit Uncle Same is currently swiping round the military industrial complex.

          • You will be amazed by the amounts of capital that will appear from all quarters (especially private industry) when profit motive is demonstrably real. Know that it is PC to castigate the intentions of defence/defense contractors, but occasionally they respond positively to ‘win-win’ scenarios. The stick is only necessary if the carrot is spurned.

      • Japan is already planning to deploy lasers on its ships (not sure how closed to finished product it is mind) which appear quite similar to Dragonfire so cooperation might indeed be profitable after all we did give Sony the blue laser 👍. As there is suggestions Japan might enter into AUKUS it could make it doubly sensible with Australia then an interested party perhaps.

      • Collaboration on large projects yes but Dragonfire doesn’t need it. We can easily take it all the way alone and then benefit from selling it to others.

        The ship hasn’t sailed on EU Collaboration John Healy is actively pursuing it and has co authored papers on it. Its a key labour policy.

    • Yes just like CAMM and Meteor we let the opportunities sail by while our EU enemies buy in to the system so we can finish its development and field it at a scale we could not possibly hope to match on our own.

      Not the evil Japanese are in on the game stealing our Tempest prototype and turning it into some 6th Gen fighter program called GCAP.

      We should double down on buying US weapons since they still makes us go through some bizzare foreign authorisation act like we are Argentina or Nigeria despite us investing billions with them and sharing tech with them for decades.

      Good call 😀

      • Jim your comparing apples with oranges. Dragonfire will end up similar to Bofors or Oto Melara guns systems. Both domestic products. The only reason to go international is political. The last thing we need is Starmer and Healey bounding over to Brussels with there tungs out like some bright eyed eager to please Labradors

    • The raw power isn’t actually the critical bit….it is dispersion and how well the laser spot is focussed and how location stable it is.

      If you tried to use an industrial steel cutting laser it would be plenty powerful but not a lot of use as a weapon.

      • This months Air international has a very interesting article on Dragon fire.
        “Breathing fire”
        A few snippets from the article :
        1)    Dragonfire (DF) is the result of a £100 million joint investment by Industry and the UK MOD. That was first unveiled to the public in 2017
        2)    Low power trials started in 2018 which were used to test DF accuracy, which is achieved by use of a electro optical camera and a second low power laser
        3)    Its energy demands are met by a joint UK-US developed flywheel energy storage system (FESS) developed by the Willians Formula 1 team. Which stores rotational energy when the clutch is disengaged and transfers that energy back when engaged.
        4)    DF is precise enough to hit a 50p piece from 1 Kilometre
        5)    They are looking at fitting such a weapon on Tempest (funny enough to be fitted at the rear)

        • Makes sense, it would be useful a last ditch defensive weapon on Tempest against incoming missiles I suspect. Would only have to affect the munition enough to degrade its accuracy/lethality.

          • It’s fiction that mirrors reflect high-energy laser beams. Unless the mirror is optically perfect (generally only found in a laboratory, not something you can put in a real-world target) sufficient energy from a high-energy laser (and 50 kW is high enough) is not reflected that the mirror coating on the point of impact is instantly destroyed. So all the mirror does is give you a nice surface that helps your active sensors detect that target.

            There are ways to harden missiles and so on against lasers, but they aren’t quite as simple (one problem is that your missile seeker, aircraft radar, etc. is often on the front nose cone, and so isn’t as easy to harden as other stuff…)

    • Long been said it’s scallable, upping the power in stages is always the sensible approach, it’s what the Americans have done and indeed their first proposed naval permanent implementation was a similar power though ideally it needs to be upscalled to 250+ to be truly flexibly effective.Though no doubt it will always be a variable based on beam focus and overall power as to the total effective power thats required, beyond target variables of course.

  6. Sea drones appear a game changer. It was clearly too much for the Russians. These £4 billion Carriers are obsolete if they cannot deal with multiple attacks simultaneously. A last fleet or swamp of drones should be detectable but beyond Russia it seems

  7. Navy lookout have knocked out a video on this on YT
    DragonFire – UK Laser Directed Energy Weapon shoots down a drone

    • If the opposition has sensor-equipped missiles loitering about that within the laser’s only-to-the-horizon range and hasn’t spotted a bloody great ship, then something’s wrong. You should have spotted the missiles, and they should have spotted your destroyer…

  10. A comment made by those attacking innocent international shipping in the Red Sea after the Royal Navy had destroyed several of the terrorist drones, was that their drones cost a fraction of the cost of the missiles used to destroy them. Well, the eventual repetitive cost of the laser weapon is the cost of electricity. Eventually, once the Laser weapon is perfected, the cost to destroy the terrorist’s drones will be minimal.

    • That low-cost magazine is a big advantage. Mind you, even now, if you compare percentages of GDP, it could be that the Houthis are spending a greater fraction of Yemen’s resources on drones and missiles than the West is spending on costly counter-missiles….

      Of course, cheaply zapping missiles in a limited conflict is nice, but the critical advantage of lasers is that in a “hot war” you don’t run out of missiles when you’re in the middle of the ocean and re-supply requires sailing back to port, thus taking your billion dollar destroyer out of action after 1-2 engagements because it has no air defense left….

      • It seems imperative to me, that all naval vessels protecting international shipping in the red sea should now be fitted with the DragonFire laser system.

        • If it’s fully functional and has the range to engage drones of the sort being used, and the maintenance time required is not crippling sure. Mind you, the opposition are using some simple ballistic missiles as well, and I imagine it can’t stop them.

          The question I have is how useful it would be for area defense as well as point defense. If you have to remain in close escort (unlike a longer range area-defense SAM) there might be not be enough escorts.

          Off-topic thought: I wonder if ships could be fitted with something like this on a modular basis? (Probably doesn’t require any sort of deck piercing system, but the power requirement may be high.)

  11. It had to come! Whereas the use of lasers in a vacuum space would be so much easier, atmospheric conditions, and not just air, require the right frequency of photonic energy, and the dissipation problems give rise to scattering and reduced final power. There is a reasoning to first release a high energy microwave beam to ionise the target path, in affect to make a transparent/translucent conduit to the target and them fire the photonic laser. It’s only conjecture but interesting. Bearing in mind, microwave energy is raw power and within a certain GHz range unrestricted, even more coherent photonic energy could be produced due to ionised electron shell jumping. Well, only a theory.

  12. Given that Germany has disclosed our MOD secret involvement in Ukraine to Russia I think we should go it alone and then sell the units to America Australia etc with an in built self destruct if anyone tries to take it apart. We gave away swing wing tech, Hovercraft, VTOL etc for nil return. Its about time we get a return on investment.

    • Sounds somewhat Trumpy (everything is a zero sum game). In theory, the defense of allies benefits everyone. But yes, the UK does have a bit of a bad habit of developing highly innovative tech and then letting someone else monetize. But Germany’s issue was more due to bad judgement of one person, not policy, and I think we all know that the UK has had his share of security failures stretching back for many years, just as most other countries have.

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