https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37775/how-the-once-elusive-dream-of-laser-weapons-suddenly-became-a-reality

Huge efforts have been poured into creating laser weapons small and efficient enough for use in aircraft, tanks, and ships. Who knows how many test platforms and pre-production models are out there at this point? Plenty, I imagine. The article includes a photo of a 747 built over a decade ago with an early nose-mounted laser weapon; nearly the entire aircraft was filled with the necessary equipment. Things have gotten a LOT more compact and powerful since.

After decades of toiling and dead-ends, the dream of operational laser weaponry is about to become a reality.

. . . What that meant was that the system demands, the platform demands were greatly reduced, and it meant that the laser weapon, not just the laser, the whole laser weapon, could now start being made small enough, powerful enough, to now be deployed on Army vehicles, Navy ships, and even on aircraft. So, that's really what changed the game. And as you can see, there's a lot of activity in this domain from our customers, all the services are now advancing capability in laser weapon systems for land, sea, and air. Lockheed Martin is a premier provider of this technology in all these domains, and we are working in all these domains.

So, the kind of the key message is the final piece of the puzzle to enable the fielding of laser weapons was solved using the fiber, the beam combined—spectrally beam combined fiber laser technology. Now what we're looking at is we're moving beyond S&T, Science and Technology demos... Is this even possible? We are now seeing those initial systems being built and ready to be deployed on platforms. For example, we have the program, the HELIOS [High Energy Laser and Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance] program, which is to build, integrate, and install a laser weapon system on a DDG Arleigh Burke class destroyer.