On a bright Hawaiian morning in May 2020, a small drone buzzed over the Pacific, likely unaware it was about to become a tiny piece of history. Off the coast near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, the USS Portland—a U.S. Navy amphibious ship—shot that drone out of the sky. But it did so without a single conventional round, without a missile, without loud gunfire. Instead, an invisible beam of concentrated light did the job. That beam came from the Solid State Laser – Technology Maturation Laser Weapons System Demonstrator, a mouthful of a name that the Navy shortens to the LWSD Mark 2 MOD 0. It was an at-sea test, a milestone, and a reminder that directed energy weapons have left the realm of science fiction and entered the world of naval engineering. Moments like this are why many defense watchers pay close attention to the directed energy ecosystem, a community of military planners, scientists, and contractors who spend their days trying to turn light into a weapon. It is also why the newsletter Pulse exists: to make sense of the steady stream of developments, from laser tests to new prototypes to the occasional policy drama. But as with any emerging military technology, the gap between what actually happens and what gets reported can be enormous. The story of what happened with that drone is straightforward. The story of how people talk and write about it? That is where things get messy.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with a reporter from the New York Post about the state of U.S. military laser weapons. The interview touched on some genuinely interesting facts, and I did my best to be precise. I pointed out that the Navy has already installed prototype laser systems, such as the Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy, or ODIN, aboard Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. That is a real thing, documented by official military photos. I also mentioned that the military has long used Xbox-style video game controllers to operate everything from drone feed cameras to weapons systems, so the idea of a sailor gripping a familiar plastic gamepad to aim a laser is not as crazy as it sounds. And I noted that directed energy systems are at a stage where they are being tested and fielded in limited ways, but they are still maturing—these are not yet the all-powerful weapons of sci-fi movies, nor are they everywhere. These are real, incremental, fascinating steps forward. The reporter seemed engaged, and the interview wrapped. Then the article appeared. It read like a completely different story. It crammed those separate facts together into a wild mashup, suggesting that the U.S. military is currently using laser weapons to shoot down missiles in the Strait of Hormuz while operators sit there playing Xbox. That is nowhere near accurate, and for anyone who follows this field, seeing careful reporting get scrambled into something unrecognizable was deeply frustrating.
The most egregious error in that New York Post piece was not just the catchy but misleading framing. It was the claim that the U.S. Defense Department had confirmed that lasers are taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles” in the Middle East. The Pentagon has never explicitly confirmed any such thing. What actually happened was even stranger: the quote used to support that assertion came from an entirely unrelated Army press release, one that talked about the Army’s directed energy prototype, the AMP-HEL, being deployed to the southern border. That release discussed what laser weapons could potentially do in the future, not what they had already done in the Middle East. No one involved in that part of the story seems to have checked the context. The result was a classic case of sloppy reporting turned into viral misinformation. The defense journalist Spencer Ackerman took it apart in a sharp piece for Forever Wars, walking readers through exactly where the article went wrong. Still, by then the damage was done. In our era of digital media, almost everything is an aggregation telephone game. Outlets rewrite each other, repackage press releases, and compress nuance into bite-sized content designed to feed our short attention spans. It only takes a couple of clicks before “the Pentagon is still years away from reliable laser weapons” becomes “the Pentagon is shooting down missiles with Xbox controllers in the Strait of Hormuz.”
There is actually a term for this phenomenon among directed energy nerds: the “laser liar.” It describes a journalist—usually well-meaning, often genuinely interested in the topic—who gets blinded by the cultural magic of lasers. Lasers have been symbols of the future for so long, from Star Wars to Star Trek to every action movie ever made, that writing about them soberly can feel almost like a betrayal of their mystique. The laser liar doesn’t set out to deceive. They just find it hard to resist the shiny, headline-friendly version. They oversimplify, exaggerate, and mash together unrelated facts, producing a story that is far more spectacular than the truth and far less useful. Watching my own careful reporting get turned into what can only be described as hot garbage over the course of a week gave me a visceral understanding of what that concept feels like from the other side. After fifteen years working in digital media, I should have known better. I should have expected that a handful of accurate quotes about prototypes and video game controllers would become a story about a futuristic navy zapping cruise missiles out of the sky. But it still stings. As Jonathan Swift put it centuries ago, “falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” That line has never felt more relevant.
So what is the cure for a laser liar? It is not fury, and it is not cynicism. It is documentation. Every claim I made in that interview was grounded in real-world evidence. There are DVIDS photos of ODIN systems sitting on the decks of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, proving that lasers are physically present on Navy warships. There are public comments from people like Emil Michael, shared by journalists at defense forums, talking openly about the promise and the limitations of directed energy. There is a long, well-documented history of the U.S. military falling in love with video game controllers, from the Xbox 360 controllers used on submarine periscopes to the PlayStation controllers used by drone pilots. Each one of those facts is verifiable. Each one is a small piece of a larger story that is already remarkable enough without embellishment. The truth about directed energy weapons is not that they are unstoppable god-beams. It is that they are real, they are improving, and they are being integrated into military systems step by step. Some systems dazzle enemy sensors. Others burn drones out of the sky. Still others are little more than experiments. That complexity is what makes the field so interesting, and it is exactly the nuance that gets lost when the story becomes a lazy meme about laser guns and gamepads.
That is why Laser Wars exists. It is a project built on the simple idea that the best way to fight misinformation is to tell the story straight, one confirmed fact at a time. No hype, no doom, no pretending lasers are magic. Just careful reporting, public records, and a respect for the difference between what a weapon might do one day and what it actually does today. The New York Post article was a low point, but it was also a reminder that the truth, however slow, does eventually catch up. It limps along, sometimes painfully, through official documents, through context, through the stubborn work of people who refuse to let a good story stand in the way of a true one. And when it arrives, it will be here, in these pages, with all its complications intact. The laser weapons coming to the battlefield do not need anyone to exaggerate them. They are already fascinating. They are already changing how wars are fought. They deserve better than sensational headlines and sloppy reporting. They deserve the same thing every serious subject deserves: attention without distortion. So the next time you see a wild claim about the military and its lasers, take a breath. Check the source. Ask whether the evidence is actually there. And remember that behind every flashy story about futuristic weapons, there are real scientists, real sailors, and real tests happening off the coast of Hawaii—quietly, painstakingly, and far more interesting than the myths that follow them.