At a breakfast with defense reporters this week, US Marine Corps Lt. General Robert Walsh, the commanding general of the Corps' Combat Development Command, said that directed energy weapons are "where we want to go." That includes eventually mounting lasers on the F-35B fighter—and virtually everything else in the Marine Corps' inventory.

"As soon as we could miniaturize them, we would put them on F-35s, Cobra [attack helicopters]… any of those kind of attack aircraft," Walsh said, according to a report from National Defense. But given how much difficulty Defense Department researchers have had reducing the size and power required for directed energy weapons, that day is still a long way off—and the objective right now is to get a system that could be flown on a C-130.

The advantage of directed energy weapons, from the Marine Corps' perspective, is that they don't require ammunition (other than their energy source) and could be used defensively against missiles and even other aircraft at a much lower cost per shot than the $300,000 to $400,000 AIM-120 missiles carried by the F-35—or even the 25 millimeter rounds of its GAU-22/A cannon.

The Air Force is also eager to use laser weapons aboard its aircraft and is continuing funding (in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) of development of the HELLADS 150-kilowatt airborne laser system by General Atomics. The Marine Corps could conceivably piggy-back on the Air Force's work in bringing a high-energy laser to the F-35B, as the F-35A (the Air Force's version of the Joint Strike Fighter) is one of the intended beneficiaries of the research.

On the ground, the Marine Corps is working with the Office of Naval Research on the Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-the-Move (GBAD) program, a ground-vehicle mounted high-energy laser system connected to air defense radar systems. GBAD is currently intended largely for defense against uncrewed reconnaissance aircraft (drones)—so far, OND has tested a 10-kilowatt laser with the system, and "the intent is to move to a 30-kilowatt laser," Walsh said. That would put the system on par with the Laser Weapon System (LaWS) currently deployed aboard the USS Ponce, which has successfully been tested against small surface craft and drones.