2025 has pushed counter‑drone technology out of the laboratory and into realistic operational slices. Field demonstrations last year and early this year show something important: it is now possible to neutralize small and medium unmanned aerial threats in ways that materially change the economics of air defence. That does not mean we have a silver bullet. It means the cost calculus has finally moved in favor of defenders under specific conditions, and that operational tradeoffs are the new limiting factor.

Directed energy weapons moved from concept to repeatable demonstration. A prototype Stryker fitted with BlueHalo’s LOCUST laser and associated sensors completed recent Army‑sponsored trials that produced near‑perfect engagement results against Group 1 and Group 2 targets during live‑fire events. Industry partners reported consistent kills across multiple shots in those trials, and the service is now experimenting with mounting similar systems on lighter platforms as a practical approach to protecting dismounted forces and small convoys.

Why does that matter for cost? The economic case against missiles has been obvious for years: expend a million‑dollar interceptor to stop a few‑hundred‑dollar quadcopter and you lose on pure accounting terms. Analysts have argued that simple cost‑exchange headlines are blunt but useful indicators of strategic risk, and they have pushed militaries toward solutions with drastically lower marginal cost per engagement. Lasers promise near‑zero marginal costs per shot when the technical problems are solved, and the recent demonstrations are the first credible steps toward that promise.

But the hands‑on reality is messier. Lasers in trials kill small UAS reliably in clear conditions at tactically useful ranges. In real operational settings those kills require power, clear atmospherics, steady tracking, and integration with a sensor stack that reliably discriminates targets from clutter. The recent Stryker demonstrations deliberately staged favorable conditions and a constrained target set, which is exactly what you want when you mature a new effect. The next challenge is sustained operations in dust, fog, rain, RF‑contested environments, and against adversaries that adapt—either by changing materials, flight profile, or massing low‑cost attritable swarms.

Cost improvement is not coming from lasers alone. The industry and services are converging on multi‑layer, attritable architectures where low‑cost shooters and electronic measures absorb the bulk of engagements while higher‑cost assets are reserved for the few high‑value targets. Lockheed Martin and partners have demonstrated integrated stacks that combine radar, tracking software, short‑range interceptors, and laser effectors to choose the cheapest viable defeat for each contact. The software and integrator role matters as much as the weapon itself: pick the wrong shooter and you blow your cost advantage on a single engagement.

So where are the financial wins? When a laser or a cheap kinetic—on the order of thousands to low tens of thousands of dollars—can be used instead of a multi‑hundred‑thousand‑dollar interceptor, the defender keeps production and sustainment costs manageable and can field many more nodes. That scalability is the real economic proof: you can protect many more targets at acceptable lifetime cost. But do not confuse improved marginal costs with inexpensive program acquisition. Developing, integrating, ruggedizing, and fielding a vehicle‑mounted laser or a robust EW stack is expensive up front. Logistics, power generation, and training create recurring costs that only fade once production volumes and unit learn rates climb.

Practical watchers should also remember adaptation. Adversaries will seek to exploit weather windows, saturate sensors, or increase target complexity to force defenders back to expensive interceptors. That is why cheap interceptors, nets, electronic warfare, high‑power microwaves and lasers are all being piloted in parallel: sustainability is a system property, not a single‑system metric. The sector’s latest demonstrations prove feasibility and a pathway to favorable economics, but they do not prove unconditional strategic dominance.

My recommendation for operators and planners is straightforward: budget for layered C‑UAS with an explicit cost metric tied to expected threat mix and engagement tempo. Insist that new effectors demonstrate not just single‑event kill probability but power consumption, dwell time under realistic atmospherics, time‑between‑shots when mounted on likely platforms, and logistics footprints. If you only buy a headline metric you will still lose the economics war. If you buy a layered architecture that privileges the cheapest viable defeat, you will find the cost problem solved for most realistic scenarios.

In short: in 2025 the economics of drone defence are no longer theoretical. They are operationally credible in constrained settings. The fight going forward will be about scaling, integration, and who adapts faster—not whether the concept works at all.