Lasers Will Not Win Wars

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the [Red] Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Chapter 2

The relationship between technology and military strategy can be understood as a race—an international competition to develop superior arms. It is, however, either an odd kind of race or a category error. A race, be it a 100-metre dash or a marathon, makes sense if one can win. If one cannot win, what sort of race is it? As such, is the relationship between strategy and technology, in ordinary language, best understood as a race? Well, yes—but closer in kind to the race Alice encountered on the other side of the Looking-Glass. A world where things are reversed, where running helps one remain stationary. This is the world of strategy and technology, both in general and specifically here with high-energy lasers.[1] Not for the first time, lasers are being heralded as “game changing.” But in our world, Through the Looking-Glass, will they “change the game”, or do they simply help one “keep in the same place”?

High-energy lasers are not strategic game-changers. Instead, what they exemplify is the Red Queen’s race—adaptation without advantage. More profoundly, in the history of war and technology, lasers have come to represent a deeper failure to think politically about the relationship. First, I show that claims about lasers being truly “game changing” often fall prey to the technicist fallacy—the belief that tactical or technical performance translates directly into strategic effect. Second, I argue that this misdiagnosis has a concrete effect: it leads to the Red Queen’s race, escalation without resolution. Rather than winning a race, lasers will—like adaptations before them—provoke new forms of adaptation from adversaries, maintaining the treadmill of mutual adjustment. Third, I show that the recurring mistake of taking a metaphor for a mechanism stems from a deeper intellectual failure. Strategy shares much in common with biology, but it is not biology. By its nature, strategy is a political struggle, and without situating technology politically, we mistake technology for strategy and fail to see when it is time to stop running and actually time to start changing the game.

The Technicist Fallacy

From press clippings (reflecting press releases), the discourse is that higher-energy lasers will be a “game-changer.” [2] The idiom is a fitting one for our time—it captures the seepage of sports punditry into strategic theory.[3] High-powered lasers will be to strategy as Michael Jordan was to basketball.

On the one hand, high-powered lasers can be “game-changing”. Speed, precision, a huge reduction in cost per shot, unlimited ammunition—at the tactical level, the confluence of these effects can be transformative. Further still, getting to the point we are at now is no small technological marvel. In 213 BC, Archimedes’ supposed use of the Sun and mirrors, acting as a collective parabolic reflector to burn attacking Roman ships during the siege of Syracuse, has for centuries held the fascination of philosophers and scientists alike.

On the other hand, technological innovations, however brilliant, do not necessarily equate to “changing the game” strategically. Just ask Archimedes, who, despite his ingenuity in turning the sun into a weapon, could not stop the sacking of Syracuse. Few technologies, military or otherwise, reach the rarefied air of being truly “game-changing”.

Indeed, this is not the first time high-powered lasers have been heralded as “game-changing.”[4] On 23 March 1983, then–U.S. President Ronald Reagan shared his “vision of the future”: a programme “to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.”[5] Reagan was referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a comprehensive nuclear missile-defence system.

Framed as dangerously “game-changing,” it seemed closer to sci-fi than strategy. U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, alluding to the Death Star, referred to the SDI programme as a “reckless ‘Star Wars’ scheme,” giving the initiative its better-known nickname.[6] At the core of Star Wars’ multi-layered defence against ballistic missiles was the proposed use of satellites and space-based lasers.

Certainly, in 1983, much like in 213 BC, reality was distant from the vision. The SDI never progressed beyond the design and test phase and was cancelled in 1993. However, the vision of an energy-based defence system did not die with SDI. Four decades on, the vision remains driven by the same impulses that animated Reagan: a faith in technology to alter a strategic status quo— “to change the game.”

In 2025, several significant technical challenges that beset the SDI remain, yet these challenges have not prevented several states from pursuing the technology. The U.S. has remained a key presence in the development of lasers. In May 2025, President Trump declared that the US “will truly be completing the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago,” as he announced Golden Dome, an ambitious new missile-defence programme. The $175 billion initiative, echoing its predecessor, envisions lasers as one potential means of intercepting enemy missiles during their boost phase.[7] Golden Dome, like Star Wars, may never progress beyond the conceptual phase, but laser systems are already operational on individual platforms. HELIOS, a high-energy laser weapon system, is reported to have been deployed on the USS Preble (DDG-88) in 2019.[8] Additionally, LOCUST, a short-range air-defence system designed for rapid deployment and mobility, is being developed for the U.S. Army.[9]

The UK successfully tested its laser directed-energy weapon, DragonFire, in 2024.[10] A high-powered laser, nicknamed Apollo and developed by the Australian company Electro Optic Systems, it is reportedly capable of shooting down up to twenty drones per minute at a cost of less than ten cents per shot and has secured a contract with a NATO nation.[11] Ukraine has stated that the country’s laser system, Tryzub [Trident], has already been used against Russia, claiming it can take down aircraft at altitudes exceeding two kilometres.[12] Turkish weapons manufacturer Roketsan has introduced the Alka Directed Energy Weapon System, which it claims has successfully completed live-fire tests.[13] Other states – including Russia, China, India and Germany – claim to have systems already in testing or in service.[14]

Due to persistent threats from rockets and more recently drones, Israel has invested heavily in laser-interception technology. In October 2024, it earmarked $530 million to accelerate the development of its laser air-defence system, known as Iron Beam.[15] The system was set to be integrated into Israel’s battle-tested missile defence network, the Iron Dome, in 2025. Events quickly showed the dividends of that investment. In March of that year, Israel released footage showing it had used a high-powered laser system to intercept Hezbollah drones during fighting along the Lebanese border—claiming the first operational use of the technology. [16]

Like the SDI before it, Iron Beam consists of a laser gun, a command-and-control centre and a surveillance system. The beam is the diameter of a coin and can extend up to 10 km, using approximately 100 kW of power (the equivalent of the daily energy consumption of five to nine homes). Moreover, like many of the laser weapons mentioned above, it is designed to target short- to mid-range aerial threats such as rockets, mortars and drones.[17]

Laser weapons offer several comparative advantages. In Israel’s case, using Tamir interceptors fired from the Iron Dome to interdict a crude rocket—which can be launched for as little as $1,000—costs between $40,000 and $80,000 per interception. In contrast, the Iron Beam’s operational cost is estimated to be as low as $2 to $3.50 per shot.[18] Another major advantage is ammunition. Tamir interceptors, like all advanced rockets, require precision munitions manufacturing, and once fired, their stock takes time to replenish. By contrast, Iron Beam does not require ammunition.[19] In turn, this means the absence of logistical supply chains for interceptors eliminates convoys as a critical vulnerability to the system.

Of course, lasers travel at the speed of light, so the time between firing and hitting a target is essentially instantaneous. Against short-range threats that characterise modern battlefields—like drones, which may only be in the air for seconds—this can prove decisive, as no alternative missile system can match this reaction time. Moreover, this speed of engagement enables both multi-targeting and rapid retargeting against adversaries seeking to overwhelm defences through saturation attacks, such as swarms of drones or salvos of rockets, both now common on modern battlefields.

Yet, despite their comparative advantages, Iron Beam and other laser interceptors have notable significant shortcomings. First, they cannot operate effectively in low-visibility conditions such as fog, smoke, dust storms or rain, since laser beams consist of light waves. A second shortcoming is known as “blooming”: the scattering and distortion of a laser beam due to atmospheric particles or heat over distance, which weakens its power, particularly across longer ranges. As a result, Iron Beam’s estimated operational range is approximately 2 km, whereas Iron Dome has a range of up to 20 km.[20]

Lasers are still nowhere close to the totalising defence system envisioned in the 1980s, but the technology is adapting to meet evolving security challenges, and with the advent of drones on the modern battlefield, lasers may still “change the game.” That is, at least, the hope.

In terms of how far we have come from Reagan’s vision to where we are today, there is much to marvel at: cost efficiency, unlimited ammunition and unparalleled speed and precision. If strategy entailed nothing beyond engineering, the several complex and challenging limitations that today’s high-powered lasers have overcome represent an outstanding achievement. It is, and will continue to be, of significant value to science. From the technical level of science to the technical level of war, the tactical promise here is still the stuff of sci-fi. Lasers have the potential to make modern warfare look like a game of Modern Warfare. And yet, this tactical promise and scientific progress do not necessarily equate to strategic value.

The technicist fallacy names a recurring error in strategic thought, the belief that technological innovation automatically produces strategic advantage. Richard K. Betts was the first to exemplify the technicist fallacy as a “plainly wrong” yet popular idea embedded in international relations.[21] In a non-proliferation context, he defined it as the “widespread tendency to focus on the threat of proliferation as a simple function of the availability of requisite technology”—the treatment of technical instrumentation as the sole driver of the proliferation problem. [22] In short, Betts was suggesting that capability alone does not equal intent in nuclear proliferation.

The “simple yet misleading” fallacy represented a focus on necessary but not sufficient conditions in the pursuit of nuclear technology.[23] What matters strategically, of course, is who has them: “[w]eapons in the hands of a satisfied state or coalition have a strategic meaning different from weapons in the hands of a revolutionary, ‘super-rogue’, or even ‘crazy’ state…[t]his generalization holds whether the subject is knives or ICBMs.” [24] The technicist misplacement of focus “on ways to isolate weapons-related capabilities” fundamentally obscures problems that are conceptual and political in nature.[25]

Building on Betts’s fallacy of emphasis with respect to nuclear non-proliferation, Colin Gray offered an even more thorough rejection of the techno-determinist approach to the relationship between strategy and technology in one of his lesser-known books Weapons don’t Make Wars. Gray argued that the technicist fallacy – the belief that the utility and consequences of new weapons technologies could be predicted with confidence – was a mistaken belief that arose because we presume that we can foresee exactly how a new weapon will matter strategically, when in reality actual utility and consequences are always uncertain. [26]

The fallacy arises because when analysing the military world, the technicist keeps everything stationary, bar the weapons system under consideration itself. [27] By “wrenching out” technology from its social and political context and peering into a weapon system to say things about the world outside it—frozen in time—we ignore the reality of movement, in which enemies constantly adapt, doctrines evolve, and politics shift. The contextual conditions, along with the technology, are always in flux. Therefore, a weapon’s usefulness cannot be assessed in isolation by knowing its comparative and operational costs, magazine depth, speed or precision. Its value depends on strategic context—political goals, doctrine, enemy behaviour and an overall theory of how a war is fought and won. Here, technology is a dependent, not independent, variable. [28]

Of course, a reorientation away from technicist thinking is not to say that technology is unimportant to strategy. Watching Iron Beam in action renders the point obvious.[29] Technology, of course, does have an effect. But technology is the servant, and not the master, of politics. The technicist tendency is to treat laser-beam power, recharge speed or interception rates as strategically decisive—”game-changing”—overlooking the reality that each adaptation sparks a counter-adaptation in an endless race.

The Red Queen’s Hypothesis

If the technicist fallacy mistakes weapons for independent drivers of strategy, the Red Queen hypothesis takes this to its logical conclusion: even when technology works as advertised, it only accelerates an endless cycle of adaptation without resolution. The hypothesis, by way of Lewis Carroll’s famous novel, comes to us from an elegant theory in evolutionary biology.[30] It is perhaps one of the greatest ideas in that field since Charles Darwin’s natural selection, and offers a helpful way to visualise the cycle of adaptation between adversaries, with no side gaining a stable advantage.

Evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen, the progenitor of the hypothesis, suggested that for a species to maintain a particular niche in an ecosystem (and its fitness relative to other species), it must be constantly undergoing adaptive evolution. This is because the organisms with which it is coevolving are themselves undergoing adaptive evolution.[31] For example, foxes evolve to run faster, while slower rabbits are eaten and only the quicker survive; in turn, rabbits evolve sharper senses (such as larger ears to detect predators) while foxes adapt with keener hearing to track prey. Each gain by one side forces a counter-adaptation by the other, locking both into a cycle without lasting advantage.

The world of strategy is much like the complex world of biology—full of parasites, viruses, bacteria, predators, competitive species and natural disasters—all evolving together and at the same time. If any species stops evolving in response to these conditions, it is doomed. As such, a species’ victory is not measured by a desired end state, but merely by its survival.

The Red Queen’s race, as opposed to an arms race, means success at the techno-tactical level of war does not necessarily equate to strategic success. Instead, what “game-changing” technology triggers is adversary adaptation on a continuing tandem treadmill. In this sense, high-energy lasers, like Iron Beam, represent continuity over change.

An illustrative, though not exhaustive, example of adaptation representing continuity over change can be traced through the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict as such: the failure to confront Israel via conventional war in 1948 gave rise to guerrilla raids, which provoked retaliatory raids. These were followed by hijackings, leading to tighter airport security and targeted assassinations. Suicide bombings in turn prompted checkpoints and a separation barrier, which were followed by rockets, then the Iron Dome, then tunnels and “smart walls,” and more recently drones, lasers, and so on.

Again, to reemphasise, this is an example of an abstraction relevant to high-powered lasers in a setting in which they have been used “in the field, successfully intercepting scores of enemy threats.”[32] The same logic might have applied to SDI, as an attempted adaptation to mutually assured destruction, following prior Soviet and American ICBMs, ABM systems and treaties, if it had worked.

We should be grateful that the USSR’s “moribund system” could no longer sustain itself and its economy collapsed.[33] It is useful to ask ourselves the counterfactual: what would have happened if the U.S. had successfully developed the Star Wars programme and the Soviet Union had not collapsed? Would Moscow have surrendered or adapted? Was this not the criticism, at the time, levied against the programme? [34] It was a potentially ‘reckless’ and ‘irresponsible’ escalatory act—why, in 1984, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock forward to three minutes before midnight, the closest it had stood since 1953.[35]

What persists strategically through a sequence of tactical co-adaptation is not technological dominance, but conflict itself: survival and continued contest, not victory. What the Red Queen hypothesis shows us is that the tactical brilliance of high-energy lasers will not change the game but maintain strategic stasis. Running to stay in place.

Peculiar Means, Political Ends

Like all metaphors, the Red Queen’s race has its limits. Using a metaphor to represent reality can illuminate it but also confines how we understand the world around us. The Red Queen hypothesis reveals a pattern of tactical co-evolution that would otherwise be poorly understood through the less apt metaphor of a race—but strategy is not biology. Strategy goes beyond the adaptive evolution of foxes and rabbits. States choose what winning looks like, how they win, when to escalate and when to change the game. All this makes strategy an irreducibly theoretical, not technical discipline, including the technicist view of technology, which itself rests on deep-seated philosophical assumptions.[36]

The identification of a “theoretical discipline with certain parts of its technical instrumentation” is the quintessence of the technicist fallacy upon which Gray and Betts built.[37] Their instantiation of the technicist tendency was, no doubt, influenced by adjacent and wider debates on the foundations of the social sciences and humanities in the mid-twentieth century. Georges Friedmann, in Problèmes humains du machinisme industriel, was among the first to introduce the idea of the “technicist doctrine.” [38] From here, the technicist fallacy would metastasise and exert significant influence on a discipline that is seldom preoccupied with opening its black box of method: history. The debate among historians lay between those who saw history as technical instrumentation and those who regarded it as a theoretical pursuit concerned with how knowledge and society shape one another.[39] From history, it would wend its way into strategic studies, where the fallacy meant conflating technical instrumentation, weapons, for a theoretical discipline, strategy. This conflation negated the idea that methodological statements made by practitioners are always philosophical, reducing knowledge to discrete facts and discouraging theoretical reflection.

For example, in strategic studies, we might take a closer look at the allure of high-energy lasers as “game changing” precisely because, time and again, they are framed as the ultimate defensive weapon. Archimedes, after all, did not use his weapon to attack the Eternal City but to defend his own. This is another face of the technicist fallacy: the examination of a weapon for specific characteristics—offensive or defensive—that it simply does not possess.[40] Those characteristics are derived from the strategic-political context alone, rather than from any inherent properties of a weapon itself. A hammer is not inherently a tool of construction or destruction—whether it builds a house or breaks a window depends entirely on how it is used. Technical skill and knowledge must therefore be situated within broader theoretical considerations.[41] Thus, the relationship between strategy and technology must be rooted in questions of purpose, rather than in technical specifications. As the great mason of The Foundations of the Science of War cautioned, “the more mechanical become the weapons with which we fight, the less mechanical must be the spirit which controls them.” [42]

This is how strategy foundationally differs from biology: the intentionality of the strategic world (to put Fuller’s famous quote in contemporary vocabularies). In biology, the rabbit cannot choose to become faster, grow bigger ears or alter its colouring. Nor can it adapt outside its gene pool—it cannot, for example, become poisonous or develop quills. It cannot form alliances with other prey, target the predator’s supply lines or support base. Rabbits cannot bargain with foxes, signal credible deterrence or wage a proxy war via shrews. The rabbit exists in its inherited ecological niche and can only shift gradually within constraints.

All the phenotypic responses outlined above, in the strategic world, presuppose a level of higher-order reasoning, foresight and intentionality. They require an actor to step outside immediate stimulus–response, to model the opponent’s mind and reshape the very structure of a confrontation. When the relationship between strategy and technology is understood as a race, a deterministic metaphor is mistaken for an essential mechanism, and we risk losing sight of the fact that war is political, not biological or olympical. That strategy, as we understand from Clausewitz, is the connecting of peculiar means to political ends. [43]

Conclusion

Lasers could just as easily be swapped for AI, biotechnologies or quantum computing—and the argument here would still hold. They reflect the enduring search for a “silver bullet”: the belief that technology alone can “change the game”.[44] Beneath this faith lies a deeper pattern—a recurring way of imagining the relationship between technology and strategy. In many visions of future war, technology charges ahead while everything else—politics, doctrine, human will—remains frozen in time. This is the technicist fallacy: treating war as if it were changed by weapons alone and failing to understand that it is not fought by machines but by states with political objectives.

Granted, high-powered lasers are technically dazzling, but they are strategically conservative. Confusing tactical promise for strategic transformation ignores the adaptive nature of adversaries and misreads the relationship between technology and strategy. Technological advancement, however brilliant, is running in place to avoid extinction. It is merely playing the game, not changing it. The metaphor of the Red Queen’s race captures the treadmill, and the treadmill only: adapting reactively. The relationship between strategy and technology, however, must be understood reflectively.

Weapons are not arguments; their meaning is never technical alone, but political in nature. As Gray reminds us, technology is never self-interpreting—politics sets meanings. High-energy lasers must be understood on these terms. No one would deny the importance of adaptation, but avoiding extinction by a race of machines is not much of a strategy at all. Weapons still don’t make wars, and better weapons don’t win better wars. Politics does, because only politics can truly “change the game”.