The USNavy plans to fire a 150-kw weapon off a test ship within a year, he said. "Then a year later, we'll have that on a carrier or a destroyer or both."

That's quite a jump from the kw AN/SEQ-3(XN-1) Laser Weapon System (LaWS), which deployed in 2014 on the amphibious transport dock USS Ponce.

And the kind of power needed to power such a weapon won't come with a simple flip of a switch.

"The Navy will be looking at ships' servers to provide three times that much power," says Donald Klick, director of business development, for DRS Power and Control Technologies. "To be putting out 150 kws, they (the laser systems) will be consuming 450 kws."

That is more than most currently operational ships are designed to accommodate, at least when they are conducting other tasks.

Few power systems onboard ships can support sustained usage of a high-powered laser without additional energy storage," noted a recent Naval Postgraduate School paper titled "Power Systems and Energy Storage Modeling for Directed Energy Weapons".