Whiskey, can't reply. The reason LaWS is a Navy-only thing is that it requires a ship's power plant to produce the massive amount of energy and cooling required to fire the thing once. It's also only deployed on a single ship and is used more for surveillance than as a weapon. It isn't possible to make it portable enough to shoot down $500 drones on the battlefield. Much easier to just jam their sensors instead.
Because of the energy required. Energy weapons require enough power to light up a small town each time they're fired. That's not going to change until they find a way around the laws of thermodynamics.
Well, the LaWS' power comes from its capacitors, which are large enough to need their own vehicle if we made a mobile version for ground battle, but they could be charged from any sort of powerplant. A couple diesel generators on a truck would be fine, you'd just have a very long charge time between shots, which is why it remains a prototype. It can't really take out multiple targets without sustained power and cooling, hence the naval vessel.
If it were a chemical laser instead of fiber welding lasers, they'd be able to skip the power issue, though they'd need to refuel the laser frequently. But even if you could only get a couple dozen shots before needing to refuel and if it cost a million dollars, it would pay for itself the first time it saved a tank from a kamikaze drone.
The US has mounted at least two successfully tested (and much more powerful) anti-missile lasers mounted aboard aircraft back in 2009 or so, both discontinued for their high costs and having ranges of about six miles, not because they couldn't be powered or cooled on a mobile platform. They were chemical lasers, with enough chemical fuel to power the laser for twenty sustained firings. They were also meant for taking out ballistic missiles, so the range was the real deal breaker. But an anti-drone system would need far less range to be useful and could be far less powerful, obviously. The full-scale airplane laser was about 15,000 pounds, so a scaled down version should be small enough to fit a wheeled vehicle, not counting the extra fuel of course. Add in the radar, and you're probably talking three vehicles per laser system, which isn't that terrible really.
My real point though was that all this stuff is very old now (
the NAVY was releasing video of LaWS in action in 2014). Whatever laser tech we have today must be significantly better, simply because we've been steadily researching this stuff and drones have been an obvious developing threat long before Syria and Ukraine. I seriously doubt we don't already have something relatively mobile that can take out a civilian-grade drone swarm, but who knows when we'd ever admit it existed. Part of the issue with the aircraft-mounted lasers was people pointing out that regardless of their costs and lack of extreme range, they'd be remarkably useful assassination weapons, especially if nobody knew they existed. Obama shut them down shortly after their successful operation tests.
