Britain Plans to Install New ‘Dragonfire’ Laser Weapon on Problematic Type 45 Destroyers By 2027

The British Royal Navy plans to integrate the DragonFire high-energy laser weapons on its Type 45 destroyers by 2027, which would make the service the first in Europe with a shipborne laser weapon in active service. British defence leaders have revealed that early trials have shown the new weapons system can track and burn through small targets at tactically relevant ranges, and that work on integration is expected to accelerate once shipboard power and cooling modifications are finalised. The DragonFire is a 50-kilowatt-class high-energy laser weapons system that operates in the short-wave infrared spectrum, and uses a coherent beam-combining technique: that combines outputs from multiple fibre-laser modules into a single high-intensity beam. This allows it to achieve particularly high power density and beam quality.

China and the United States are currently leading the world in laser weapons development, with Chinese air defence lasers having recently begun to be exported to Russia and used on the frontlines in the Ukrainian theatre for defence against drone attacks. The much lower cost of firing laser beams compared to surface-to-air missiles is considered to make them an optimal solution to swarm attacks by low cost unmanned aircraft. Such weapons are not expected to be a game changer in naval warfare, however, with their limited ranges compared to cruise missiles restricting their potential offensive uses in modern engagements between major powers.

The suitability of the Type 45 class to integrate the DragonFire has been bought to question, with the ships built as an integrated and closed systems that lack modularity, making them far from straightforward to make improvements to. The Type 45 is arguably been the most problematic post-Cold War destroyer program pursued by any country in the world, with the fleet having been prone to breakdowns, and having notoriously low availability rates at times as low as 17 percent. The ship’s record raises the significant possibility that the integration of the Dragonfire will suffer from major delays. The weapon’s integration will nevertheless provide operational experience with laser weapons which could be informative as the British defence sector continues work developing the much delayed Type 83 class destroyer.