China Unveils 55-Pound Laser That Burns Drones in 4 Seconds

China just put a counter-drone laser on a soldier’s back. At the Defence Information Equipment & Technology Exhibition that opened June 16 in Beijing, the state-linked contractor Harbin Xinguang Optic-Electronics Technology rolled out two man-portable laser weapons, the Lijian II and Lijian III.

They were designed to let a single soldier shoot down drones at roughly 1,600 feet (500 m) in about four seconds.

One operator. One backpack. One four-second kill.

The Lijian III is the lighter, faster version

The Lijian III is the smaller of the two, weighing 25 kg (55 lb) and built around a roughly 2-kilowatt laser emitter with AI-assisted targeting.

The system splits into three pieces, a laser emitter, an air cooler, and a handheld control terminal, packed into a single bag a soldier can carry alone. It burns through a drone in about four seconds and needs under five seconds to cool before firing the next shot.

The Lijian II is the heavier sibling at 30 kg (66 lb), built for one or two operators rather than a single carrier. The wider Lijian product series goes out to 1,200 m at the high end, but the man-portable variants run noticeably shorter, with the 500 m engagement window being the spec attached to the backpack-sized models actually on display.

Pricing has been reported in Chinese-language coverage at roughly 2 million yuan per unit, or around $280,000. That figure was not confirmed by Harbin Xinguang itself, but it points at the real argument these weapons are making to procurement.

The economics, not the laser, are the story

As MSN reported, for years the math of counter-drone defense has been broken. A small commercial drone retrofitted into a one-way attack munition might cost a few hundred dollars, and the missile a Western air defense system uses to swat it can cost six figures.

Spending a Patriot interceptor on a hobby-grade quadcopter is what military analysts have been calling the cost-exchange problem, and it is the part of drone warfare that has kept defenders up at night.

A laser turns that equation around. Once the system is paid for, every shot costs roughly the price of the electricity needed to power it. There is no missile to replace, no magazine to reload, no logistics tail trailing the soldier with crates of expensive interceptors. A 2 kW emitter burning down a $400 drone in four seconds is the first time the defender’s cost actually falls below the attacker’s.

Counter-UAS gets more important by the day, because drones do a lot of damage in very little time. A laser that ends a drone at 500 m in four seconds opens the door to something new: dedicated drone-killer squads, units of soldiers whose only job is clearing a sector of sky in minutes. My bet is Russia would take delivery of a few dozen of these tomorrow if Beijing offered.

China is moving on portable laser counter-drones faster than the West

This is not China’s first counter-drone laser. The Silent Hunter platform has been around for years as a vehicle-mounted system, and Chinese firms have been exporting mobile laser counter-drone systems abroad, including the NI-L3K shown in Malaysia earlier this year. What is new is shrinking the form factor down to backpack scale and putting it in infantry hands, not on the roof of an armored vehicle.

Western counter-drone programs have leaned more on radio-frequency jammers, kinetic interceptors, and larger vehicle-mounted directed energy systems.

There are man-portable U.S. options in development, but a fielded, exhibition-ready, AI-guided laser carried by a single soldier is not something the U.S. Army has rolled out for cameras yet. Beijing is clearly comfortable showing the hardware before anyone else does.

The exhibition setting matters. Defense expos like this one are where state firms signal both capability and intent, and the choice to put two portable lasers on the floor at the same time, in two weights for different mission profiles, reads as a product line, not a one-off prototype. Harbin Xinguang is showing it has thought about the customer.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what nobody is saying out loud. The drone has been the cheap weapon of the past decade, and counter-drone has been the expensive answer. A 25 kg laser that runs on batteries and ends an aircraft in four seconds is the first credible sign that the defender is about to win the cost war, not lose it.

That matters far beyond China. Ukraine has been showing the world that a $500 quadcopter can disable a $3 million tank, and every Western army has been scrambling for a defense that does not bankrupt the budget.

Whoever fields the first reliable, low-cost-per-shot, man-portable counter-drone system at scale rewrites the economics of every battlefield where small drones operate, which now means essentially all of them.

Anti-drone laser systems have been in development for years. The big defense firms have managed to mount them on ships and vehicles, but nothing this portable, nothing you can carry on your back. The questions now are simple. How effective is it for real, and is it safe for the soldier carrying it?

The open question is whether these systems work in the field as well as they work on the exhibition floor. Lasers have a long history of impressive expo demos and disappointing combat performance, with rain, dust, smoke, and atmospheric scatter degrading effective range fast.

A 500 m burn in a Beijing arena is not the same as a 500 m burn over a battlefield in summer haze. Watch whether the Lijian models show up in an actual operational deployment, or stay parked in product brochures.

Photo credit: Handout, The War Zone.