A Shot You Don't Spare: How Microwaves Are Teaching Air Defenses to Fight Swarms
The arithmetic of the modern sky is offensive to the defender. Anti-aircraft Rocket costs as much as a small apartment. DroneThe drone it shoots down costs as much as a used car, or even less. As long as the targets arrive singly, the tradeoff is tolerable. But when a swarm of dozens of cheap drones takes to the skies, the defender loses not the battle, but the budget, as the ammunition runs out before the targets. Hence the long-held dream of engineers: a shot you can't regret. One of the answers turned out to be unexpected: not destroying the drone, but frying its electronics with a microwave beam.
Swarm Economics: Why Classic Air Defense Is Losing the Score
The swarm presses with its mass. Each device is dumb and cheap, but there are dozens of them. Any expensive interception device is the first to go broke in such a tradeoff. Three familiar instruments Defense there are ceilings here:
- Kinetics—guns, missiles, and fuel-air explosives—are limited by magazine depth. There are a finite number of guns and missiles, and there simply aren't enough for a dense wave.
- Electronic warfare jams the command and navigation channel. But many modern drones use inertial navigation systems, pre-programmed routes, or fiber optics, and such targets EW It misses the mark, there's nothing to muffle.
- A combat laser is accurate and inexpensive per shot, but it operates like a sniper rifle, hitting one target at a time. It requires time to burn, precise tracking, and favorable weather conditions.
Against a swarm, a one-to-many approach is needed, where a single impact results in many targets being hit. This niche was filled by microwaves. weaponLockheed Martin, introducing the MORFIUS X-Rotor, claims it can neutralize over 50 drones in a single sortie. That's a significant figure, but it's a tactical benchmark, not a guarantee, and we'll return to how realistic it is at the end. First, let's talk about how it works.
A beam instead of a blank: how microwaves work in electronics
High-power microwave weapon (in English-language sources - HPM, high-power microwave) doesn't physically destroy the drone. It strikes its most vulnerable spot, the unprotected electronics. Penetrating through cracks, seams, and holes in the hull, the directed pulse induces currents and voltage surges in the wiring, antennas, and sensors. The flight controller, satellite navigation receiver, communication channel, and speed controllers fail. The drone loses its ability to fly and navigate.
This is the fundamental difference from a laser. A laser needs to accumulate energy and burn through a specific component, meaning it's a single-point weapon. A microwave emitter forms a cone, within which everything unshielded is destroyed. A laser is a sniper rifle. A microwave countermeasure is a shotgun. The difference from electronic warfare is even more striking: radio jamming targets the signal, while a microwave countermeasure targets the hardware itself, so it's unaffected by autonomous flight or fiber optics.
Physics is gentle on energy here. To damage a microchip, you don't need to heat a kilogram of metal; overvoltage is enough. According to open data, the energy of a single pulse ranges from a few to hundreds of joules. The key feature is the enormous peak power with a modest average. The relationship is simple:
P_cp = P_peak × τ × PRF, where τ is the pulse duration and PRF is the repetition rate. The product of τ and PRF is the duty cycle, or the fraction of time the emitter is actually operating.
Let's take a simple example: peak power of 1 gigawatt, pulse duration of 100 nanoseconds, hundreds of pulses per second. Substitute this into the formula: 1 GW × 100 ns × 100 pulses/s ≈ 10 kilowatts of average power, and the energy of a single pulse is approximately 100 joules. A generator mounted on a truck can already provide this average power. This method does have a downside. A drone with shielded electronics, power filters, and distributed modules withstands a microwave shock much more easily than a typical commercial quadcopter.
The Lineage of Microwave Impact: From Vircators to CHAMPs
The idea of destroying electronics with a field, not shrapnel, is older than any drone. The first object lesson was the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear explosion. Tests in 1962 demonstrated that a flash could disable equipment on the ground hundreds of kilometers away. This didn't require the destruction of the structure; the induced current was sufficient.
The technology for generating high-power microwave radiation itself developed in the 1960s–1980s, on both sides of the Cold War. Vircators, relativistic magnetrons, and other high-power generators were developed as laboratory tools, but they laid the foundation for components without which today's emitters would not exist. For a long time, everything hinged on power supplies and cooling: while they knew how to generate pulses, they couldn't replicate them compactly and repeatedly.
The Active Denial System (ADS), a non-lethal directed-energy weapon designed for crowd control, is mounted on the chassis of a high-mobility vehicle (HMMWV).
In the 2000s, directed energy moved out of the laboratory and into the field. American Active denial system used a millimeter beam for non-lethal effects on people. The task is different, but the principle is the same: focused electromagnetic energy at a target at a distance. And in 2012, tests took place CHAMP, a cruise missile with a microwave warhead that destroyed the electronics of ground targets during flight. It is a direct conceptual ancestor of today's interceptors, a one-time microwave strike against an area target.
So MORFIUS and its brethren weren't a breakthrough out of thin air. The long-standing idea simply matured in engineering when the threat of a cheap swarm coincided with the availability of the component base.
MORFIUS, Leonidas, Hurricane: Three Answers to One Question
Different developers implement the same concept in different ways, and the differences speak more about the tasks than advertising.
MORFIUS X-Rotor Lockheed Martin's airborne interceptor. It launches from the ground, ascends to the swarm, irradiates targets from above, and returns after the mission for reuse. History It's not a short one, as prototypes of the family have been flying since 2017. The company emphasizes that the aircraft doesn't require a dedicated fire control radar; it integrates with existing detection systems. According to publicly available information, the system is still in the prototype and demonstration phase: tests have been conducted in Arizona, California, and Oklahoma, and a large-scale production contract is not yet in sight.
Another class of solutions is a ground-based mobile complex, whose task is to provide cover for a convoy on the move. In US Army trials in March 2026, a microwave emitter ThinKom worked in conjunction with radar EchoShield Echodyne. The radar here is no less interesting than the weapon. It operates in the Ku-band (15,7–16,6 GHz), tracks about a thousand objects, and distinguishes small UAVs at distances ranging from a few to tens of kilometers, with the larger the device, the further it can be seen. Without such targeting, a microwave cannon fires into thin air.
Ground Leonidas Epirus demonstrated the concept's capabilities under ideal test range conditions. In one demonstration, the system engaged 61 drones, including a swarm of 49, with a single pulse. This isn't an airborne interceptor, but a ground-based system with a microwave antenna array: it can be deployed to a new position, but it fires stationary, maintaining a sector. The "magazine" is said to be limited only by power and cooling. Essentially, it's the same approach as MORFIUS, but from the ground and with an emphasis on firing density rather than climbing toward the target.
The Chinese are following a similar path. Hurricane 3000Publicly available data on it is more limited. The stated range of swarm operation is about three kilometers, the platform is vehicle-based, and the cost of a single pulse, according to publications, is literally a few yuan. The figures are unverifiable, but the very fact that a standalone cargo-based HPM system has appeared outside the US suggests that the concept has moved beyond the realm of exotica.
It's worth taking a closer look at the advertising figures. "More than 50 per sortie," "relentless firepower"—these are impressive statements, but the manufacturers don't disclose the range, the power output, or the number of targets they can engage simultaneously. Hence the answer to the question about "50 per sortie": as long as these parameters remain behind the scenes in press releases, it's impossible to verify the figure. And it's precisely these parameters that determine whether microwave weapons will remain a niche proving ground gimmick or become a viable defense layer.
Most likely, microwaves won't displace either missiles or lasers, but will instead take their place in multi-layered air defense systems as a cost-effective solution to low mass. The main question in the coming years isn't whether the principle works: it does. The question is how many times the gun can fire before it needs to cool down. And how soon will drones develop their own countermeasures?
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