MBDA UK (Stevenage, UK) has been awarded a £316 million ($414 million) contract by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) to deliver a laser directed energy weapon (LDEW) for Royal Navy (RN) warships.
The 29-month contract covers the delivery of a DragonFire Minimum Deployable Capability (MDC) to provide an initial two Type 45 air warfare destroyers with an additional layer of defense against unmanned aircraft system (UAS) threats. A first ship integration is planned before the end of 2027.
MBDA, leading an industry team also including Leonardo and QinetiQ, has previously built and tested a 50 kW-class DragonFire sovereign LDEW capability demonstrator to prove critical technologies at a weapon system level. This testbed system, housed in a 40-ft. ISO container, has completed several tracking and firing trials on MoD ranges since late 2021.
Under the MDC contract, the MBDA-led team will deliver two DragonFire systems for installation on Type 45 destroyers. According to MBDA, this initial “productionized” instantiation will offer increased capability compared with the demonstrator system, while at the same time affording reductions in size and weight (being packaged for a 20-ft. ISO footprint).
The DragonFire MDC will be integrated with the Type 45 combat system, and will utilize existing ship power and cooling capacity. The RN is currently planning to retrofit DragonFire to four Type 45 destroyers, with MBDA expecting a follow-on order for the additional two systems in due course.
The accelerated introduction of the DragonFire MDC into RN service comes as a response to the proliferation of low-cost uncrewed systems and one-way effectors. Expending guided missiles to counter such threats represents a poor cost-return-per-kill, hence the interest in exploiting LDEW systems as a much more cost-efficiency means to deliver lethal effects against so-called “drone” threats.
Two further trials of the DragonFire demonstrator have been conducted at the MoD Hebrides range during the course of 2025. The first of these, performed over a six-week period running from March to May, involved extensive tracking and firing trials against small Class 1 UASs. Further trials, completed during October, tested the DragonFire LDEW demonstrator against larger drone targets.
A key discriminating feature of DragonFire is the use of coherent beam combining technology. Matured by QinetiQ in conjunction with the MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, coherent beam combining offers improved beam quality and higher accuracy in contrast to non-coherent techniques. – R. Scott
