High-Power Microwave (HPM)

Emits a burst of high-power microwave energy that induces destructive currents in drone electronics — potentially the most effective counter-swarm weapon in development because the beam is wide enough to service multiple targets in a single pulse. Tactical employment is defensive and site-centric: the emitter is truck-, trailer-, or fixed-mounted at a protected asset (airbase, port, logistics hub, forward operating base) and covers a directional cone measured in hundreds of milliradians out to a few kilometres. Fire-control is cued by radar or RF detection; on trigger, the pulse floods the target volume and disables any airframe whose flight-control electronics are not hardened, regardless of whether the target is under RF control, on autonomous machine-vision guidance, or trailing a fibre-optic cable. This makes HPM the most technology-agnostic hard-kill layer available — it defeats the specific evasion methods (fibre optics, mesh RF, autonomous seekers) that reduce every other soft-kill layer to zero. The known limits are power, weather-independent geometry, and fratricide. Prime-power requirements confine the systems to vehicle or fixed installation, effective range drops sharply beyond a few kilometres as pulse energy density falls below the kill threshold, hardened mil-spec autopilots and Faraday-shielded payloads survive exposure, and friendly electronics inside the cone are at risk unless they are shielded or physically outside the beam — which restricts where the system can be pointed near own-force positions. Recent fielding and combat evidence: the U.S. Army's IFPC-HPM Gen II contract of September 2025 targets >2× the range of earlier prototypes; live-fire demonstrations against a 49-drone swarm achieved 100% kills with a single pulse (Epirus 2025); a subsequent government test in December 2025 downed a fibre-optic-guided FPV — the first public demonstration of a mature counter to that specific threat class (Tectonic Defense, disclosed 2026); General Dynamics has since demonstrated an autonomous ground-vehicle-mounted HPM C-UAS configuration (JED May 2026); and a joint Epirus / GDLS / Kodiak AI autonomous HPM system was unveiled in 2026. Congressional Research Service tracking (CRS R47928, IF12421) confirms HPM as the U.S. Army's preferred answer to the counter-swarm problem at the price of continuing power, cooling and integration risk.