Think about: China deploys a whole lot of hundreds of autonomous drones within the air, on the ocean, and below the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm towards navy installations on Taiwan and close by US bases, and over the course of some hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US Pacific pressure earlier than it could actually even start to battle again. 

Perhaps it seems like a brand new Michael Bay film, however it’s the state of affairs that retains the chief know-how officer of the US Military up at evening.

“I’m hesitant to say it out loud so I don’t manifest it,” says Alex Miller, a longtime Military intelligence official who grew to become the CTO to the Military’s chief of employees in 2023.

Even when World Battle III doesn’t get away within the South China Sea, each US navy set up world wide is susceptible to the identical techniques—as are the militaries of each different nation world wide. The proliferation of low-cost drones means nearly any group with the wherewithal to assemble and launch a swarm might wreak havoc, no costly jets or huge missile installations required. 

Whereas the US has precision missiles that may shoot these drones down, they don’t all the time succeed: A drone assault killed three US troopers and injured dozens extra at a base within the Jordanian desert final 12 months. And every American missile prices orders of magnitude greater than its targets, which limits their provide; countering thousand-dollar drones with missiles that price a whole lot of hundreds, and even thousands and thousands, of {dollars} per shot can solely work for thus lengthy, even with a protection finances that might attain a trillion {dollars} subsequent 12 months.

The US armed forces at the moment are looking for an answer—and so they need it quick. Each department of the service and a bunch of protection tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse. There are drones that slam into different drones like battering rams; drones that shoot out nets to ensnare quadcopter propellers; precision-guided Gatling weapons that merely shoot drones out of the sky; digital approaches, like GPS jammers and direct hacking instruments; and lasers that soften holes clear by a goal’s facet.

Once I went to go to the HQ of this 185-person startup in Torrance, California, earlier this 12 months, I acquired a behind-the-scenes have a look at its huge microwave, referred to as Leonidas, which the US Military is already betting on as a cutting-edge anti-drone weapon. The Military awarded Epirus a $66 million contract in early 2023, topped that up with one other $17 million final fall, and is presently deploying a handful of the techniques for testing with US troops within the Center East and the Pacific. (The Military gained’t get into specifics on the situation of the weapons within the Center East however revealed a report of a live-fire take a look at within the Philippines in early Could.) 

Up shut, the Leonidas that Epirus constructed for the Military appears like a two-foot-thick slab of steel the dimensions of a storage door caught on a swivel mount. Pop the again cowl, and you’ll see that the slab is full of dozens of particular person microwave amplifier models in a grid. Every is in regards to the measurement of a safe-deposit field and constructed round a chip fabricated from gallium nitride, a semiconductor that may survive a lot greater voltages and temperatures than the everyday silicon. 

Leonidas sits on high of a trailer {that a} standard-issue Military truck can tow, and when it’s powered on, the corporate’s software program tells the grid of amps and antennas to form the electromagnetic waves they’re blasting out with a phased array, exactly overlapping the microwave alerts to mould the vitality right into a centered beam. As a substitute of needing to bodily level a gun or parabolic dish at every of a thousand incoming drones, the Leonidas can flick between them on the velocity of software program.

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After all, this isn’t magic—there are sensible limits on how a lot injury one array can do, and at what vary—however the complete impact might be described as an electromagnetic pulse emitter, a demise ray for electronics, or a pressure area that might arrange a protecting barrier round navy installations and drop drones the way in which a bug zapper fizzles a mob of mosquitoes.

I walked by the nonclassified sections of the Leonidas manufacturing facility flooring, the place a cluster of engineers engaged on weaponeering—the navy time period for determining precisely how a lot of a weapon, be it excessive explosive or microwave beam, is critical to attain a desired impact—ran exams in a warren of smaller anechoic rooms. Inside, they shot particular person microwave models at a broad vary of business and navy drones, biking by waveforms and energy ranges to attempt to discover the sign that might fry each with most effectivity. 

On a dwell video feed from inside one among these foam-padded rooms, I watched a quadcopter drone spin its propellers after which, as soon as the microwave emitter turned on, immediately cease brief—first the propeller on the entrance left after which the remainder. A drone hit with a Leonidas beam doesn’t explode—it simply falls.

In contrast with the blast of a missile or the sizzle of a laser, it doesn’t appear to be a lot. But it surely might pressure enemies to give you costlier methods of attacking that scale back the benefit of the drone swarm, and it might get across the inherent limitations of purely digital or strictly bodily protection techniques. It might save lives.

Epirus CEO Andy Lowery, a tall man with sparkplug vitality and a rapid-fire southern Illinois twang, doesn’t shrink back from speaking huge about his product. As he instructed me throughout my go to, Leonidas is meant to steer a final stand, just like the Spartan from whom the microwave takes its title—on this case, in opposition to hordes of unmanned aerial automobiles, or UAVs. Whereas the precise vary of the Leonidas system is stored secret, Lowery says the Military is searching for an answer that may reliably cease drones inside just a few kilometers. He instructed me, “They want our system to be the proprietor of that last layer—to get any squeakers, any leakers, something like that.”

Now that they’ve instructed the world they “invented a pressure area,” Lowery added, the main focus is on manufacturing at scale—earlier than the drone swarms actually begin to descend or a nation with a significant navy decides to launch a brand new conflict. Earlier than, in different phrases, Miller’s nightmare state of affairs turns into actuality. 

Why zap?

Miller remembers effectively when the hazard of small weaponized drones first appeared on his radar. Stories of Islamic State fighters strapping grenades to the underside of business DJI Phantom quadcopters first emerged in late 2016 in the course of the Battle of Mosul. “I went, ‘Oh, that is going to be dangerous,’ as a result of mainly it’s an airborne IED at that time,” he says.

He’s tracked the hazard because it’s constructed steadily since then, with advances in machine imaginative and prescient, AI coordination software program, and suicide drone techniques solely accelerating. 

Then the conflict in Ukraine confirmed the world that low-cost know-how has basically modified how warfare occurs. We now have watched in high-definition video how an inexpensive, off-the-shelf drone modified to hold a small bomb will be piloted instantly right into a faraway truck, tank, or group of troops to devastating impact. And bigger suicide drones, also referred to as “loitering munitions,” will be produced for simply tens of hundreds of {dollars} and launched in huge salvos to hit delicate targets or overwhelm extra superior navy defenses by sheer numbers. 

Because of this, Miller, together with massive swaths of the Pentagon and DC coverage circles, believes that the present US arsenal for defending in opposition to these weapons is simply too costly and the instruments in too brief provide to really match the menace.

Simply have a look at Yemen, a poor nation the place the Houthi navy group has been below fixed assault for the previous decade. Armed with this new low-tech arsenal, previously 18 months the insurgent group has been in a position to bomb cargo ships and successfully disrupt international delivery within the Purple Sea—a part of an effort to use stress on Israel to cease its conflict in Gaza. The Houthis have additionally used missiles, suicide drones, and even drone boats to launch highly effective assaults on US Navy ships despatched to cease them.

Probably the most profitable protection tech agency promoting anti-drone weapons to the US navy proper now’s Anduril, the corporate began by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR headset, and a crew of cofounders from Oculus and protection information large Palantir. In simply the previous few months, the Marines have chosen Anduril for counter-drone contracts that might be price practically $850 million over the following decade, and the corporate has been working with Particular Operations Command since 2022 on a counter-drone contract that might be price practically a billion {dollars} over an analogous time-frame. It’s unclear from the contracts what, precisely, Anduril is promoting to every group, however its weapons embody digital warfare jammers, jet-powered drone bombs, and propeller-driven Anvil drones designed to easily smash into enemy drones.

On this arsenal, the most cost effective solution to cease a swarm of drones is digital warfare: jamming the GPS or radio alerts used to pilot the machines. However the intense drone battles in Ukraine have superior the artwork of jamming and counter-jamming near the purpose of stalemate. Because of this, a new cutting-edge is rising: unjammable drones that function autonomously by utilizing onboard processors to navigate by way of inside maps and laptop imaginative and prescient, and even drones related with 20-kilometer-long filaments of fiber-optic cable for tethered management.

However unjammable doesn’t imply unzappable. As a substitute of utilizing the scrambling technique of a jammer, which employs an antenna to dam the drone’s connection to a pilot or distant steering system, the Leonidas microwave beam hits a drone physique broadside. The vitality finds its method into one thing electrical, whether or not the central flight controller or a tiny wire controlling a flap on a wing, to short-circuit no matter’s out there. (The corporate additionally says that this focused hit of vitality permits birds and different wildlife to proceed to transfer safely.)

Tyler Miller, a senior techniques engineer on Epirus’s weaponeering workforce, instructed me that they by no means know precisely which a part of the goal drone goes to go down first, however they’ve reliably seen the microwave sign get in someplace to overload a circuit. “Based mostly on the geometry and the way in which the wires are laid out,” he mentioned, a type of wires goes to be the perfect path in. “Typically if we rotate the drone 90 levels, you might have a distinct motor go down first,” he added.

The workforce has even tried wrapping goal drones in copper tape, which might theoretically present shielding, solely to seek out that the microwave nonetheless finds a method in by transferring propeller shafts or antennas that want to stay uncovered for the drone to fly. 

Leonidas additionally has an edge with regards to downing a mass of drones without delay. Bodily hitting a drone out of the sky or lighting it up with a laser will be efficient in conditions the place digital warfare fails, however anti-drone drones can solely take out one by one, and lasers want to exactly goal and shoot. Epirus’s microwaves can injury every little thing in a roughly 60-degree arc from the Leonidas emitter concurrently and carry on zapping and zapping; directed vitality techniques like this one by no means run out of ammo.

As for price, every Military Leonidas unit presently runs within the “low eight figures,” Lowery instructed me. Protection contract pricing will be opaque, however Epirus delivered 4 models for its $66 million preliminary contract, giving a back-of-napkin worth round $16.5 million every. For comparability, Stinger missiles from Raytheon, which troopers shoot at enemy plane or drones from a shoulder-mounted launcher, price a whole lot of hundreds of {dollars} a pop, that means the Leonidas might begin costing much less (and preserve capturing) after it downs the primary wave of a swarm.

Raytheon’s radar, reversed

Epirus is a part of a brand new wave of venture-capital-backed protection firms attempting to alter the way in which weapons are created—and the way in which the Pentagon buys them. The biggest protection firms, companies like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, usually develop new weapons in response to analysis grants and cost-plus contracts, wherein the US Division of Protection ensures a sure revenue margin to companies constructing merchandise that match their laundry listing of technical specs. These applications have stored the navy equipped with cutting-edge weapons for many years, however the outcomes could also be beautiful items of navy equipment delivered years late and billions of {dollars} over finances.

Fairly than constructing to minutely detailed specs, the brand new crop of navy contractors goal to supply merchandise on a fast time-frame to unravel an issue after which fine-tune them as they pitch to the navy. The mannequin, pioneered by Palantir and SpaceX, has since propelled firms like Anduril, Defend AI, and dozens of different smaller startups into the enterprise of conflict as enterprise capital piles tens of billions of {dollars} into protection.

Like Anduril, Epirus has direct Palantir roots; it was cofounded by Joe Lonsdale, who additionally cofounded Palantir, and John Tenet, Lonsdale’s colleague on the time at his enterprise fund, 8VC. (Tenet, the son of former CIA director George Tenet, might have impressed the corporate’s title—the elder Tenet’s mother and father have been born within the Epirus area within the northwest of Greece. However the firm extra typically says it’s a reference to the pseudo-mythological Epirus Bow from the 2011 fantasy motion film Immortals, which by no means runs out of arrows.) 

Whereas Epirus is doing enterprise within the new mode, its roots are within the previous—particularly in Raytheon, a pioneer within the area of microwave know-how. Cofounded by MIT professor Vannevar Bush in 1922, it manufactured vacuum tubes, like these present in previous radios. However the firm grew to become synonymous with digital protection throughout World Battle II, when Bush spun up a lab to develop early microwave radar know-how invented by the British right into a workable product, and Raytheon then started mass-producing microwave tubes—often called magnetrons—for the US conflict effort. By the tip of the conflict in 1945, Raytheon was making 80% of the magnetrons powering Allied radar the world over.

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Massive tubes remained one of the best ways to emit high-power microwaves for greater than half a century, handily outperforming silicon-based solid-state amplifiers. They’re nonetheless round—the microwave in your kitchen counter runs on a vacuum tube magnetron. However tubes have downsides: They’re sizzling, they’re huge, and so they require repairs. (In reality, the opposite microwave drone zapper presently within the Pentagon pipeline, the Tactical Excessive-power Operational Responder, or THOR, nonetheless depends on a bodily vacuum tube. It’s reported to be efficient at downing drones in exams however takes up a complete delivery container and wishes a dish antenna to zap its targets.)

By the 2000s, new strategies of constructing solid-state amplifiers out of supplies like gallium nitride began to mature and have been in a position to deal with extra energy than silicon with out melting or shorting out. The US Navy spent a whole lot of thousands and thousands of {dollars} on cutting-edge microwave contracts, one for a undertaking at Raytheon referred to as Subsequent Era Jammer—geared particularly towards designing a brand new solution to make high-powered microwaves that work at extraordinarily lengthy distances.

Lowery, the Epirus CEO, started his profession engaged on nuclear reactors on Navy plane carriers earlier than he grew to become the chief engineer for Subsequent Era Jammer at Raytheon in 2010. There, he and his workforce labored on a system that relied on most of the similar fundamentals that now energy the Leonidas—utilizing the identical kind of amplifier materials and antenna setup to fry the electronics of a small goal at a lot nearer vary fairly than disrupting the radar of a goal a whole lot of miles away. 

The similarity will not be a coincidence: Two engineers from Subsequent Era Jammer helped launch Epirus in 2018. Lowery—who by then was working on the augmented-reality startup RealWear, which makes industrial sensible glasses—joined Epirus in 2021 to run product growth and was requested to take the highest spot as CEO in 2023, as Leonidas grew to become a totally fashioned machine. A lot of the founding workforce has since departed for different tasks, however Raytheon nonetheless runs by the corporate’s collective CV: ex-Raytheon radar engineer Matt Markel began in January as the brand new CTO, and Epirus’s chief engineer for protection, its VP of engineering, its VP of operations, and numerous staff all have Raytheon roots as effectively.

Markel tells me that the Epirus method of working wouldn’t have flown at one of many huge protection contractors: “They by no means would have tried spinning off the know-how into a brand new software with out a contract lined up.” The Epirus engineers noticed the use case, raised cash to start out constructing Leonidas, and already had prototypes within the works earlier than any navy department began awarding cash to work on the undertaking.

Ready for the beginning gun

On the wall of Lowery’s workplace are two mementos from testing days at an Military proving floor: a trophy wing from a bigger drone, signed by the entire testing workforce, and a framed photograph documenting the Leonidas’s carnage—a stack of dozens of inoperative drones piled up in a heap. 

Regardless of what appears to have been a formidable take a look at present, it’s nonetheless unattainable from the skin to find out whether or not Epirus’s tech is able to absolutely ship if the swarms descend. 

The Military wouldn’t remark particularly on the efficacy of any new weapons in testing or early deployment, together with the Leonidas system. A spokesperson for the Military’s Speedy Capabilities and Important Applied sciences Workplace, or RCCTO, which is the subsection chargeable for contracting with Epirus to this point, would solely say in a press release that it’s “dedicated to growing and fielding revolutionary Directed Vitality options to handle evolving threats.” 

However numerous high-ranking officers look like giving Epirus a public vote of confidence. The three-star common who runs RCCTO and oversaw the Leonidas testing final summer time instructed Breaking Protection that “the system truly labored very effectively,” even when there was work to be accomplished on “how the weapon system suits into the bigger kill chain.”

And when former secretary of the Military Christine Wormuth, then the service’s highest-ranking civilian, gave a parting interview this previous January, she talked about Epirus in all however title, citing “one firm” that’s “utilizing high-powered microwaves to mainly be capable to kill swarms of drones.” She referred to as that type of functionality “important for the Military.” 

The Military isn’t the one department within the microwave weapon. On Epirus’s manufacturing facility flooring once I visited, alongside the large beige Leonidases commissioned by the Military, engineers have been constructing a smaller expeditionary model for the Marines, painted inexperienced, which it delivered in late April. Movies present that when it put a few of its microwave emitters on a dock and examined them out for the Navy final summer time, the microwaves left their targets lifeless within the water—efficiently frying the circuits of outboard motors like those propelling Houthi drone boats. 

Epirus can be presently engaged on a good smaller model of the Leonidas that may mount on high of the Military’s Stryker fight automobiles, and it’s testing out attaching a single microwave unit to a small airborne drone, which might work as a extremely centered zapper to disable vehicles, information facilities, or single enemy drones. 

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Whereas neither the Military nor the Navy has but to announce a contract to start out shopping for Epirus’s techniques at scale, the corporate and its buyers are actively getting ready for the large orders to start out rolling in. It raised $250 million in a funding spherical in early March to get able to make as many Leonidases as attainable within the coming years, including to the greater than $300 million it’s raised since opening its doorways in 2018.

“If you happen to invent a pressure area that works,” Lowery boasts, “you actually get lots of consideration.”

The duty for Epirus now, assuming that its most important prospects pull the set off and begin shopping for extra Leonidases, is ramping up manufacturing whereas advancing the tech in its techniques. Then there are the extra prosaic issues of staffing, meeting, and testing at scale. For future generations, Lowery instructed me, the aim is refining the antenna design and integrating higher-powered microwave amplifiers to push the output into the tens of kilowatts, permitting for elevated vary and efficacy. 

Whereas this might be made more durable by Trump’s international commerce conflict, Lowery says he’s not fearful about their provide chain; whereas China produces 98% of the world’s gallium, based on the US Geological Survey, and has choked off exports to the US, Epirus’s chip provider makes use of recycled gallium from Japan. 

The opposite outdoors problem could also be that Epirus isn’t the one firm constructing a drone zapper. Considered one of China’s state-owned protection firms has been working by itself anti-drone high-powered microwave weapon referred to as the Hurricane, which it displayed at a significant navy present in late 2024. 

It might be an indication that anti-electronics pressure fields will turn out to be frequent among the many world’s militaries—and in that case, the way forward for conflict is unlikely to return to the established order ante, and it would zag in a distinct course but once more. However navy planners imagine it’s essential for the US to not be left behind. So if it really works as promised, Epirus might very effectively change the way in which that conflict will play out within the coming decade. 

Whereas Miller, the Military CTO, can’t communicate on to Epirus or any particular system, he’ll say that he believes anti-drone measures are going to need to turn out to be ubiquitous for US troopers. “Counter-UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] sadly goes to be like counter-IED,” he says. “It’s going to be each soldier’s job to consider UAS threats the identical method it was to consider IEDs.” 

And, he provides, it’s his job and his colleagues’ to be sure that tech so efficient it really works like “virtually magic” is within the arms of the common rifleman. To that finish, Lowery instructed me, Epirus is designing the Leonidas management system to work merely for troops, permitting them to establish a cluster of targets and begin zapping with only a click on of a button—however solely in depth use within the area can show that out.

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Within the not-too-distant future, Lowery says, this might imply establishing alongside the US-Mexico border. However the grandest imaginative and prescient for Epirus’s tech that he says he’s heard is for a city-scale Leonidas alongside the traces of a ballistic missile protection radar system referred to as PAVE PAWS, which takes up a complete 105-foot-tall constructing and may detect distant nuclear missile launches. The US arrange 4 within the Nineteen Eighties, and Taiwan presently has one up on a mountain south of Taipei. Fill a similar-size constructing stuffed with microwave emitters, and the beam might attain out “10 or 15 miles,” Lowery instructed me, with one sitting sentinel over Taipei within the north and one other over Kaohsiung within the south of Taiwan.

Riffing in Greek mythological mode, Lowery mentioned of drones, “I name all these mischief makers. Whether or not they’re doing medication or weapons throughout the border or they’re flying over Langley [or] they’re spying on F-35s, they’re all like Icarus. You bear in mind Icarus, together with his wax wings? Flying throughout—‘No one’s going to the touch me, no person’s going to ever damage me.’”

“We constructed one hell of a wax-wing melter.” 

Sam Dean is a reporter specializing in enterprise, tech, and protection. He’s writing a e book in regards to the latest historical past of Silicon Valley returning to work with the Pentagon for Viking Press and overlaying the protection tech trade for numerous publications. Beforehand, he was a enterprise reporter on the Los Angeles Instances.

This piece has been up to date to make clear that Alex Miller is a civilian intelligence official.