Fill the Magazine, Fund the Beam
The Navy needs proven capabilities and speculative tech—and the ability to navigate between resupply and revolution.
DARYL WIELAND is Senior Director of Partnerships at Palantir and an Adjunct Professor of Finance at George Mason University.
The Proximity Fuze Moment
In the summer of 1942, the U.S. Navy had a problem it couldn’t shoot its way out of.
Japanese dive bombers were closing on U.S. ships at speeds that made conventional anti-aircraft gunnery ineffective. Hit rates were dismal.
Meanwhile, scientists at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins were racing to field a technology that would change everything: the Variable Time (VT) proximity fuze. A tiny radar set crammed inside a shell casing, capable of detonating automatically when it sensed it was close enough to kill. It would raise the effectiveness of anti-aircraft fire by an order of magnitude.
But the proximity fuze wasn’t ready. Not in 1942. Not in useful quantities until late 1943. Not in mass production until 1944. Therefore, the Navy had to expand production of existing ammunition and fund the maturation of the proximity fuze at the same time.
The Bureau of Ordnance cranked the existing industrial base to maximum output while simultaneously pouring resources into maturing the fuze, scaling its production, and solving the manufacturing challenges that stood between prototype and deployment.
The proximity fuze didn’t save the fleet by itself. The decision to keep building while simultaneously investing in the future saved the fleet.
We are in our own version of a proximity fuze moment right now as the United States seeks cost-effective ways to counter the asymmetric threat posed by drones. Meeting the moment requires resupplying current capabilities while maturing next-gen technology.
Facing Reality
Surface-to-air missile interceptors are our proven and combat-tested tech. Workhorses like the PAC-3 and Standard Missile family underwrite deterrence today—but they are expensive and scarce.
Directed energy (DE) is our proximity fuze. High-energy lasers that can defeat cruise missile or drone salvos at a cost-per-shot measured in single digits have the potential to change the shape of naval warfare. Crucially, this technology could also free up precious space on ships currently devoted to defensive capabilities.
No one has made the case more forcefully than Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle. In his May 14 posture statement to the House Armed Services Committee, Caudle laid down a marker: “The current paradigm, which forces a trade-off between defensive interceptors and offensive strike weapons within the limited space of the Vertical Launching System (VLS), is unsustainable.” Every VLS cell loaded with a defensive missile is a cell that can’t carry a Tomahawk or a long-range offensive strike weapon. The ultimate solution, Caudle believes, requires DE weapons because “…they offer a solution that increases the potential kill rate at a lower cost per engagement compared to traditional kinetic projectile munitions and missile interceptors, thereby increasing overall combat endurance.”
That is exactly the right diagnosis. But embedded in Caudle’s testimony is an uncomfortable truth that must be addressed: the laser fleet is not here yet, and the ships that can host it haven’t been built.
The Navy’s most modern surface combatants, the Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, simply cannot support the power demands of laser weapons at scale as their generators are already fully committed to the AN/SPY-6 radar. Caudle’s vision of a true laser-armed fleet is anchored in the Navy’s proposed nuclear-powered battleship and future surface combatants, platforms designed from the keel up with the power and cooling capacity for high-energy weapons. Battleship procurement isn’t planned until 2028, with delivery projected for the 2030s.
In this scenario, the worst thing we could do is the thing Washington is most naturally inclined to do: treat this as an either/or choice. Cut missile procurement to fund DE R&D or starve the DE portfolio because “lasers have been ten years away for thirty years.” Both instincts are wrong. Both get people killed. Rather, we need to fill the magazine and fund the beam.
Efficient Defense Enables Offense
If the proximity fuze analogy feels outdated, consider the data that just came back from the Middle East.
The Presidential Unit Citation that was recently awarded to the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group tells the story in cold numbers. Nine surface combatants fired 207 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles at Iranian targets between late February and May. Assuming all were Arleigh Burke destroyers with 96 VLS cells apiece, that’s a potential combined ceiling of roughly 864 cells with those 207 Tomahawks representing roughly one offensive strike weapon for every four cells. The strike group spent the rest of its magazine “protecting vital sea lines of communication while under persistent threat from enemy missiles and one-way attack drones,” i.e. shooting down incoming fire.
This is Caudle’s unsustainable paradigm in action: the destroyers that prosecuted one of the most significant U.S. naval combat operations since World War II went into the fight with roughly three-quarters of their magazine committed to defense against an adversary not named China. When a single carrier strike group burns through 207 Tomahawks and even more interceptors in two months of regional operations against a middleweight power, the arithmetic for a Western Pacific contingency becomes terrifying to compute.
Crossing the Chasm
The traditional approach is not sufficient. We need a different tack. In Crossing the Chasm, author Geoffrey Moore describes the lethal gap between early adopters who embrace a disruptive technology on faith and the pragmatic majority who won’t touch it until it’s proven, integrated, and supported at scale. Most technologies die in that gap, not because the science is wrong, but because the institution loses patience, funding, or both while waiting for the customers to arrive.
DE is squarely in the chasm. The lab demos work, the generals nod approvingly at industry days. But the fleet commander and the brigade S3 will not plan around a weapon that can’t operate in rain, can’t sustain engagement tempo, and can’t be maintained by the maintenance crew at a forward operating base.
Caudle’s testimony reveals a Navy trying to manage the chasm rather than wish it away. His posture statement describes three DE tracks running in parallel. The first is near-term and modest: containerized, lower-power systems like the 30 kW LOCUST (which completed a successful live-fire test from the USS George H.W. Bush in October 2025) and the 60 kW HELIOS, deployable against the expanding drone threat. The second is transformational and distant: megawatt-class systems embedded in a nuclear-powered battleship a decade away.
The third attempts to thread the needle. The Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS), a collaboration between the Army and Navy, is designed as a containerized system aiming for 150 kW with potential to scale to 300 kW, specifically for cruise missile defense. Combined R&D investment is mapped at $676 million through fiscal year 2031. The Pentagon’s FY2027 budget request contains $452 million in proposed R&D spending for DE weapons in support of Golden Dome alone, more than triple the $142 million enacted under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The exact relationship between this Golden Dome DE funding and the Army/Navy JLWS efforts remains unclear. If JLWS delivers, it represents a containerized laser powerful enough to engage the missile threats at the heart of Caudle’s VLS argument without a keel-up redesign.
The Pentagon wants to showcase battle-ready laser weapons by 2028, which creates a useful forcing function but also a credibility risk if engineering challenges (e.g., atmospheric effects, thermal management, forward maintainability) remain unsolved.
Caudle’s Containerized Capability Campaign (C³) is the institutional vehicle for this bridge by decoupling payloads from platforms so the Navy can deliver combat power, as he puts it, “at the speed of relevance, not the speed of platform-centric acquisition.”
The right instinct. But crossing the chasm requires the kind of sustained investment in manufacturing readiness, thermal engineering, and operational test that Washington historically is terrible at funding. The discipline required is to keep feeding the chasm-crossing effort while simultaneously building the conventional capability that keeps you alive during the crossing.
This Is Where BOND Matters
The Business Operators for National Defense (BOND) program, over a hundred elite private-sector executives embedded in the acquisition process, exists precisely for this kind of problem. The defense acquisition system was not built to run parallel investment strategies across different technology readiness levels. It was built to manage sequential programs on glacial timelines. Private-sector expertise is needed to thread the needle.
BOND operators understand portfolio management. Apple didn’t stop shipping iPhones while it developed Vision Pro. Ford didn’t shut down the F-150 line while it stood up the Lightning. The private sector manages this tension every quarter, and that muscle memory is exactly the institutional antibody the acquisition system needs.
Three priorities demand attention. First, demand signals for the missile industrial base. The solid rocket motor bottleneck is real. Multi-year contracts and second-source qualification efforts must signal to industry: we are buying at scale for the next decade. Private capital follows demand signals. The defense industrial base will invest in new production lines when they see contract commitments that justify the capex. Not before.
Second, software-enabled production visibility. Munitions Command Centers are the connective tissue between strategy and production. When a COCOM expends a salvo of Tomahawks, as nine destroyers just did, that expenditure cascades through the system: depleting theater magazines, drawing down global inventory, creating demand on a production line already at 80% capacity with a 24-month backlog. Today, no one sees that cascade in real time.
Third, a protected DE maturation pathway across all three tracks. The JLWS bridge deserves particular protection: its R&D pathway through FY2031 is exactly the kind of chasm-crossing investment that gets raided in POM fights. The CAPE and the Comptroller need budget structures that insulate DE maturation funding from the inevitable cycle where near-term readiness accounts cannibalize S&T. This is portfolio management: protecting the seed corn while harvesting the current crop.
The Lesson of 1942
The Navy solved the anti-aircraft problem in 1942 because it had the institutional discipline to pursue revolutionary technology without sacrificing the conventional capabilities it needed to survive long enough for that revolution to arrive.
Caudle’s testimony shows a CNO who understands both halves of this equation, who can articulate the transformational promise of DE while acknowledging that the fleet he commands today isn’t ready for it yet. The next step is institutional follow-through: build the missiles, fill the magazines, surge the industrial base. This must happen simultaneously, not sequentially, and not “after we solve the missile problem.” The DE capabilities we need to fight the drone and missile threat must mature across all three tracks with the patience and rigor the chasm demands.
1942 didn’t wait for the fuze. 2027 can’t wait for the beam.
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