California firm gets $17M to build U.S. Navy’s most powerful laser yet

The U.S. Navy has put another $17.1 million behind a laser weapon designed to burn incoming drones and missiles out of the sky before they ever reach a warship, and the contractor building it isn’t the company that started the job.

Attalon Inc., a defense technology firm based in Murrieta, California, has been awarded a $17,100,450 modification to an existing Navy contract for the SONGBOW program, an effort to build a 400-kilowatt directed-energy weapon, according to a Department of War contract announcement.

The modification, designated P00001, adds fresh funding to contract N0001425C1506 and pushes the project’s expected completion from its original January 2027 target to January 2028, giving engineers an extra year to solve one of the hardest problems in modern naval defense: how to stop a swarm of cheap enemy drones without draining a warship’s supply of expensive missiles.

SONGBOW stands for Pulsed Fiber Lasers and Directed Energy Subsystems with High Bandwidth Wavefront Control, a mouthful of a name that describes a fairly simple goal in plain terms. The Navy wants a laser powerful enough to physically destroy fast-moving threats, precise enough to track and hold a beam on a moving target, and reliable enough to fire again and again without running out of ammunition the way a missile system does. Pulsed fiber lasers generate short, high-intensity bursts of light through hair-thin strands of glass fiber, a technology prized in both industrial cutting tools and military targeting systems because it delivers a lot of energy in a tightly controlled beam. Wavefront control refers to the optical engineering that keeps that beam sharp and focused as it travels through open air, correcting for atmospheric distortion the same way adaptive optics sharpen images in advanced telescopes.

The contract calls for two parallel lines of work, one developing pulsed fiber lasers for remote sensing and illumination, essentially using laser light to detect and light up distant objects for tracking rather than to destroy them, and the other pushing toward the headline-grabbing goal of integrating a 50-kilowatt laser module with a beam-control assembly, the steering and stabilization hardware that aims the beam, to build a combined 400-kilowatt directed-energy subsystem. That output level would represent a major leap over the lasers the Navy already has at sea. The service’s existing Laser Weapon System, known as LaWS, produces roughly 30 kilowatts, while the newer HELIOS system installed aboard the destroyer USS Preble generates around 60 kilowatts and is wired directly into the ship’s Aegis Combat System. A 400-kilowatt weapon would give commanders the ability to engage faster, tougher targets at greater range, potentially slicing through drone airframes or missile bodies in seconds rather than the longer dwell times current systems require.

Work under the modification will be performed in Murrieta, California, the same Southern California city where the original SONGBOW contract was awarded. The Fiscal Year 2026 research, development, test and evaluation funds covering the $17,100,450 award have already been obligated in full, and none of that money is set to expire at the close of the current fiscal year, according to the contract notice. The Office of Naval Research, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, is managing the contract as the Navy’s science and technology arm responsible for pushing experimental weapons like directed-energy systems from laboratory concept toward fleet readiness.

What makes this announcement notable beyond the dollar figure is the contractor’s name, since the original SONGBOW award, worth roughly $30 million, went out on June 10, 2025, to Coherent Aerospace & Defense, the government and military-focused division of photonics giant Coherent Corp. Attalon has since emerged as an independent defense technology company built around that same Murrieta facility and its precision optics, laser and coatings work, appointing John Bergeron as its president and chief executive to lead the newly separated business, according to Attalon’s own announcement of its launch. The contracting activity number tying this modification to the original award, N0001425C1506, indicates continuity of the underlying program even as the corporate entity performing the work has changed hands, a detail the Navy’s brief contract notice does not explain and that leaves open questions about how the spinoff affects program timelines, staffing and technical ownership going forward.

The urgency behind SONGBOW traces back to a hard lesson the Navy has learned the expensive way. Since late 2023, American warships operating in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden have fired dozens of interceptor missiles, some costing well over a million dollars apiece, to shoot down comparatively cheap drones and missiles launched by Houthi forces in Yemen, according to Army Recognition. That math is unsustainable over a long campaign, and it is the core argument for directed-energy weapons: a laser shot is estimated to cost between one and ten dollars once the system is built, limited mainly by how much electrical power a ship’s engines can generate rather than by how many missiles are stored in its magazines. A 400-kilowatt weapon capable of reliably downing fast, maneuvering threats would let a warship keep fighting through a drone swarm that would otherwise force it to either retreat or burn through its entire missile inventory in a matter of hours.