By Aaron Westman, Senior Director of Business Development at AV
A $50,000 drone can destroy a $30 million aircraft.
A $2 million missile can destroy a $50,000 drone.
If that sounds like a losing proposition, it’s because it is.
Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have fundamentally altered the economics of conflict. We have all seen the videos — small, inexpensive aircraft delivering outsized battlefield effects. Nowhere has this been more visible than in Ukraine, where production numbers and lethality statistics are staggering.
While much attention is focused on drone technology, the equally critical and often overlooked counterpart is counter-unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS), systems that allow us to defend against aerial threats. The ongoing cat-and-mouse game between drones and the defense systems designed to defeat them is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Dedicated C-UAS formations are being developed and adopted around the world. Advanced sensors and effectors are being deployed not just by militaries, but by law enforcement agencies, critical infrastructure operators, and even professional sports venues.
The importance of C-UAS is understood. Its implications are not.
At its core, the C-UAS challenge is not just technological. It is also economic.
Drones live in the world of software—iterative, mass-produced, and scaled across global supply chains capable of producing hundreds of thousands, even millions, of units per year. Air defense lives in the world of atoms. Every interceptor must be built, shipped, stored, and sustained. Each one is a discrete, exhaustible object. Once fired, it disappears from inventory, and replacing it takes time, money, and industrial capacity that cannot surge at the speed of software.
This creates a structural imbalance in cost and scale. A single defended site facing sustained drone pressure can consume thousands of interceptors in a matter of months, turning defense into a contest of industrial endurance rather than tactical skill. When each engagement carries a five or six-figure price tag, the defender risks spending more to defeat the threat than the attacker spends to create it.
In this environment, the defining metric of effectiveness is no longer whether a system can intercept a drone, but whether it can do so affordably, repeatedly, and at the scale the threat demands.
In essence, C-UAS is no longer defined by whether you can stop a drone, but whether you can afford to stop them all.
Why Cost Parity Is Not Enough
Conventional wisdom holds that if we can simply make interceptors cheaper, the problem goes away. It does not.
Even if an interceptor achieves nominal cost parity with a one-way attack drone, the defender still faces the burden of manufacturing, storing, and distributing large quantities of physical munitions. The attacker retains initiative. The defender retains logistical burden.
What the C-UAS fight demands is not just cost reduction. It demands a fundamentally different scaling model — one that can keep pace with, or outpace, the industrial production of drones.
That is where directed energy enters the conversation.
A Different Model: Electricity Instead of Inventory
Laser Directed Energy Weapons (LDEWs) invert the economics of C-UAS.
A missile is consumed when fired. A laser recharges.
Instead of throwing hardware at hardware, a laser delivers concentrated energy onto the target. The marginal cost per engagement is measured in electricity — typically about a kilowatt-hour or $0.18 worth of electricity per shot, roughly comparable to the amount required to operate a household refrigerator for a day.
A laser system does not need a warehouse of interceptors. It does not require constant munitions resupply convoys. It is limited primarily by power availability and thermal management, not by missile inventory.
In practical terms, this means that a C-UAS unit equipped with an effective LDEW can defend against large volumes of small UAS threats without the exponential logistics burden associated with kinetic interceptors.
This is not science fiction. It is not a cinematic “death ray.” A modern LDEW functions more like a long-range precision welder, applying concentrated energy to structurally or functionally disable a drone. The physics are straightforward. The engineering challenge has been shrinking the system, lowering the cost, and making it rugged enough for real-world use.
Thanks to advances in commercial fiber lasers, optics, and power electronics, that tipping point has arrived.
Demonstrated Scale
Over the past four years, our team at AV has conducted more than 66 test, demonstration, live-fire, and operational exercises with our LOCUST family of C-UAS laser systems. Across those events — including preparations and supporting trials — we estimate that our systems have safely defeated over 1,000 small UAS targets.
These were not simulations. They were real unmanned aircraft, real sensors, real power systems, and real environmental conditions.
What is noteworthy is not simply that lasers work. It is that they can operate repeatedly without the inventory constraints that define kinetic systems. Even with only a limited number of prototypes built to date, the cumulative number of engagements would have required substantial missile expenditure had traditional interceptors been used.
That difference scales.
Not a Silver Bullet — But a Necessary One
No single system will solve every aspect of the C-UAS problem. RF-based systems will continue to play an important role against nuisance or commercially derived drones. Gun-based systems will retain utility at very close ranges or in specific environments. Kinetic interceptors remain essential against certain classes of threats.
But when confronting high-volume, low-cost robotic systems, it is difficult to envision a more suitable hard-kill effector than an affordable, producible LDEW.
The question is not whether lasers can defeat drones. They can, they do.
The real question is whether we are willing to align our defensive strategy with the economics of the threat.
In the C-UAS fight, cost structure is destiny.
Yesterday, AV Announced a $30 million investment in its New Mexico campus, which is where the LOCUST system is manufactured.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aaron Westman is an engineer and leader specializing in counter-UAS and directed energy systems. He has played a key role advancing mobile laser weapon integration and operational deployment, supporting a variety of cross-domain capabilities that improve precision engagement and layered air defense.
JOIN THE AV MISSION
AV isn’t for everyone. We hire the curious, the relentless, the mission-obsessed. The best of the best.
We don’t just build defense technology—we redefine what’s possible. As the premier autonomous systems company in the U.S., AV delivers breakthrough capabilities across air, land, sea, space, and cyber. From AI-powered drones and loitering munitions to integrated autonomy and space resilience, our technologies shape the future of warfare and protect those who serve.
Founded by legendary innovator Dr. Paul B. MacCready, Jr., AV has spent over 50 years pushing the boundaries of what unmanned systems can do. Our heritage includes seven platforms in the Smithsonian—but we’re not building history, we’re building what’s next.
If you’re ready to build technology that matters—with speed, scale, and purpose—there’s no better place to do it than AV.
