The market for weapons that can shoot down small drones, used by the likes of Hezbollah and Daesh, should rise from almost nothing to “several billion dollars” over the next five years. Raytheon is pushing hard to lock in as much of this market as it can, building both High Energy Laser (HEL) and High Powered Microwave (HPM) weapons that can find, fix and kill or disable the increasingly cheap and capable drones.
Evan Hunt, the company’s senior manager for HEL, offered that market estimate when I asked him his estimate for the market over the next five years. Considering there is roughly a quarter of a billion in the 2019 Pentagon budget request for Air Force directed energy work, that’s a mighty steep curve.
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