Microwave Weapon Downs 49 Drones With a Single Blast

Microwave, Meet the Drone Swarm, Say Hello to the Future

Epirus

Epirus, a company with a name that sounds like a Greek god’s electric cousin, brought a box of microwaves to Camp Atterbury and promptly turned a crowd of airborne toys into a meteorological tragedy.

One shot pulse, 49 drones down simultaneously, and a new chapter in anti-drone tech was written in charred plastic and spinning props.

I’ve written about the extremely promising results of using microwave weapons against drone swarms in the past; you can catch up here:

The Navy’s New Secret Sauce for Drone Swarms? Microwaves

But the short version is this: This is not theater. This is not a press stunt dressed up in cinematic slow motion. This is a weapon family that just matured from academic curiosity to operational tool, and it is legitimately changing how we think about defending ships, bases, and beaches…

Basically, from the same technology that heats up your Hot Pockets!

The Not-So-Secret Weapon: What Actually Happened at Camp Atterbury

On a dusty range, a dozen engineers nervously check laptops, investors fidget with their entry badges, and a field full of quadcopters prepare to die.

Leonidas, Epirus’ high-power microwave (HPM) system, was told to do something simple, like disable a drone here and a drone there.

It obliged.

Then, as a curtain call, the system fired a single waveform, and 49 drones went from autonomous to inanimate, falling like a flock of enraged pigeons.

Speaking of falling pigeons, indulge me in an AWACS story from my time in the Air Force: When we wanted to test the radar system (on the ground) of the E3 Sentry AWACS (also called a live fire), we would need to lock the rotodome so that the beam was pointed away from humans and anyone else who might mosey by.

After all, we were essentially channeling 1 megawatt of power through the radar.

So, I’m standing next to the aircraft monitoring the cooling equipment, looking off in the direction of the radar beam. Of course, it’s invisible, but you can generally tell its approximate location by the direction that the rotodome is facing. And I shit you not, I watch a bird fly in toward where the beam would be and POOF, the bird instantly falls out of the sky and hits the ground.

After the live fire, we checked on the bird, and it was dead. Now… I have my doubts as to whether an AWACS radar beam can outright kill a bird (maybe with prolonged exposure). But it is definitely strong enough to disorient it. So, it was likely its impact with the ground that killed it.

Okay, thanks for the memory, back to the microwave beam.

Why does that matter that one shot knocked out 49 drones? Because drones are cheap, and cheap things are great if you want to swarm a target into submission.

The military problem has been cost asymmetry.

A Shahed-type kamikaze might cost a few thousand dollars, and a swarm of tiny FPVs costs pocket change.

Intercepting them with $500,000 missiles is a losing accounting problem.

Leonidas flips that equation by frying electronics with a pulse. If the target has a circuit board, there is a good chance Leonidas has its number.

Now, Leonidas is not a single box; it is a family, and the version the Navy has been playing with is nicknamed H2O because, absurdly, it can also target waterborne engines.

That is a sexy trick. One pulse disabling a boat engine at range, without fire or explosion, changes the nautical (ROE) rules of engagement.

At the core of Leonidas is something Epirus calls LRAM, Line Replaceable Amplifier Module.

Imagine a set of Lego power bricks, each an independent solid-state microwave generator, smart and hot-swappable.

Traditional microwave devices used fragile vacuum tubes and centralized guts that fail spectacularly when stressed. LRAM is resilient, modular, and scalable.

Want a truck-mounted system? Use fewer modules. Need a ship-mounted monster that fries boats and drones at once? Stack the modules and let the software and AI do the power management.

That software is the other party trick. Leonidas is waveform programmable, which means it can tune frequency, pulse length, and power profile to match different targets.

Plastic quadcopter, aluminum outboard motor, or hardened, shielded drone, the system can change its approach mid-mission. If this sounds like a microwave dream weapon, that is because functionally it is.

A headline-friendly part of the trials involved Leonidas H2O disabling outboard motors sized between 40 and 90 horsepower, the types that turn “fast little boat” into “angry, explosive dice.”

The HPM did not blow the engines apart; it simply stopped them from being engines at all.

In naval terms, this is beautiful. No explosion, no oil slick, no mass panic, just an electrically dead skiff with a confused crew or, more likely, a GPS-guided motor that suddenly lost its mind.

Epirus

If you are thinking about escalation, yes, non-kinetic effects create gray zones. You can neutralize a threat without sinking a vessel or killing people, which, on paper, is the military equivalent of taking your kid’s phone away and watching them flail.

Still, high-power microwaves are not a universal cure. They have ranges and sweet spots.

They are less effective against systems that are hardened with shielding, or against drones with mechanically simple guidance that do not rely on vulnerable electronics. They need power, and mounted on ships or bases, that power is available.

But in austere forward locations with limited energy, you cannot simply plug in an infinite microwave cannon.

Maintenance matters also. LRAM makes the system more robust, but thermal management, electromagnetic safety, rules of engagement, and electromagnetic compatibility with your own kit are all practical headaches you cannot ignore.

This is not sci-fi, where you flip a switch and the bad guys melt into soup. It is closer to a new toolbox, one that drastically changes the calculus in certain environments.

Countermeasures and the Future Arms Race

Nothing stays unchallenged. There will be countermeasures. You can harden electronics with Faraday cages, you can design redundancy and analog fallback systems, and you can build expendable swarm members that act as sacrificial lambs.

You can also vary attack profiles to exploit Leonidas’ frequency windows. But each of those counters adds cost and complexity to the attacker’s drone playbook.

The likely arms race will push swarms to diversify, to use hardened subsystems, and to incorporate ECM and decoys.

Defenders will respond with waveform agility, layered spectrum effects, and combined kinetic-electromagnetic tactics.

The winner will be the side that can iterate faster and mass-produce pragmatic solutions, not the one that invents the prettiest whitepaper.

My one serious warning is doctrinal complacency. Leonidas is a powerful tool, but it should be used as part of a layered defense. Think short-range guns, missile systems for high-end threats, electronic warfare for denial and deception, and HPM for saturation events.

Over-reliance on one technology, and adversaries will find cheap ways to bypass it.

Variety is not just spice, it is survival.

Also, keep political and legal frameworks in mind. HPM effects can be noisy in the electromagnetic spectrum and might affect civilian infrastructure or friendly systems if not carefully controlled.

These are not trivial concerns.

Historical Echoes, Modern Meaning

War does this funny thing where the past keeps whispering in your ear while the future throws new toys at you.

Think of Leonidas as the latest entry in a very old book, the one where every big technological shock forces armies to relearn how to fight.

In World War I, the machine gun rewrote infantry tactics, turning proud linear charges into meatgrinders.

In World War II, radar remade the night, giving air forces eyes where they had none.

Leonidas is just the next chapter, a reaction to a battlefield where the cheap and countless now threaten the precious and costly.

Cheap drones are not a niche annoyance; they are a doctrinal problem.

When a brigade can be harried by $500 quadcopters and $2,000 FPV strike birds, you can’t spend $500,000 on missiles every time the buzzy little things show up. Leonidas answers that calculus. It is the modern equivalent of the World War II radar installation or the Vietnam-era perimeter fence, an answer to a combat problem that shifts how you think about defense geometry. Instead of throwing expensive interceptors at a swarm, you bake a spectrum-denial layer into the fight, and suddenly, whole tactics change.

Remember the polders that turned armored thrusts into mud theater, or the anti-aircraft nets that turned runways into paper-mâché?

Those were simple, crude, and brutally effective responses to specific threats. Leonidas is the 21st-century variant of that idea, except the tool is invisible and electronic rather than earthworks or wire.

It forces attackers to pay in complexity, training, and cost, which is precisely the point: make the cheap expensive, and the cheap tactic loses its sheen.

But technology alone does not win wars; doctrine does.

The real test is how quickly militaries take a fielded capability and stitch it into tactics, training, logistics, and command. A squadron of microwave weapons sitting in a shed is just cool kit.

A fleet of ships and bases that know when to power them, how to integrate them with sensors, how to deconflict their effects with friendly radios and avionics, and how to sustain them under combat attrition, that is operational advantage.

Speed of doctrinal adoption is now as decisive as speed of technological invention.

Screen-grab from video. Epirus

There are trade-offs, of course.

Directed energy systems are spectacular until you run out of power, until someone jams or blinds your sensors, or until the enemy adjusts tactics. Expect adversaries to evolve, using hardened electronics, distributed swarms with sacrificial decoys, or simple numbers and saturation to complicate the defender’s targeting.

That’s not a showstopper; it is just the rhythm of conflict. Leonidas is not eternal; it is iterative. Its value is that it changes the rhythm in your favor for now and forces the opponent to spend to restore parity.

Okay, so what do we think of the video at the top of this piece? It’s impressive to be sure! But Leonidas is not a magic wand; it is a multiplier. It neutralizes cheap swarms, it gives commanders a non-kinetic knob for escalation control, and it tips the cost-benefit ledger in littoral and base defense.

The modular LRAM architecture makes it survivable and scalable, so it is as comfortable protecting a forward operating base as it is sitting on a frigate’s superstructure. That elasticity is exactly what modern militaries need.

Put Leonidas next to Ukraine’s maritime drone renaissance, and you start to imagine the new mosaic of conflict.

The battlefield is no longer measured only in tanks, armor, and aircraft; it’s measured in power, software, sensor webs, and the ability to iterate faster than your adversary.

Leonidas will not win every engagement, but it will save missiles, boats, and sleepless nights. It forces Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, or anyone else to pay up or to change tactics, and that is the operational leverage defenders crave.

The irony is, right now in Moscow, before breakfast, someone is trying to stuff more technology into drones, not less. This actually works in Leonidas’ favor. The more complex the drone, the more to cook… just like my Hot Pockets.

That, my friends, is the very definition of progress in modern warfare: ugly and necessary and oddly satisfying in its own tasty way.

Слава Україні