About ADESC

The Airborne Directed Energy Systems Committee (ADESC) is where the best minds across industry, academia, and government come together to build the future of airborne lasers and microwaves.

While technically an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) committee, ADESC straddles both AIAA and the Directed Energy Professional Society (DEPS).

Two professional societies – one committee – a common goal: push forward the next generation of airborne directed energy technology.

Why This Competition Exists

Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) — high energy lasers and high power microwaves — promise a near-limitless magazine and a fraction of the cost-per-shot of traditional kinetic interceptors. As inexpensive, expendable drones proliferate globally, using million-dollar interceptors to stop thousand-dollar threats has become an unsustainable trade, pushing directed energy back to the forefront of defense research and development.

The hardest part of fielding DEW isn't the underlying physics — it's systems integration: fitting a payload's size, weight, power, and cooling needs onto a mobile platform, a challenge that's most acute in aviation, where every gram and every watt of waste heat costs real performance.

Compounding this is a critical workforce shortfall. Directed energy technology has never had a large commercial market, so the country lacks a deep bench of engineers who understand the unique interplay between high-power payloads and flight platforms. ADESC exists to close that gap: giving undergraduate engineers hands-on, hardware-ready experience designing, building, and flight-testing real directed energy systems, years before they'd get that kind of experience in industry.