The rapid maturation of high energy lasers and lower‑power optical dazzlers has moved directed energy from laboratory curiosity to deployed capability. Over the last half decade multiple services and vendors have transitioned shipboard, vehicle and base‑defense laser systems from test articles into operational trials and limited deployments, creating an urgent export control problem: components and subassemblies with obvious commercial uses are now potential inputs to weapons that can be exported, copied, or repurposed far more easily than missiles or radars.

The legal floor for lasers is clear but narrow. Protocol IV of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons bans weapons specifically designed to cause permanent blindness and proscribes their transfer. That prohibition remains an important humanitarian baseline, but it covers a narrow slice of directed energy risks and does not regulate the vast majority of high energy laser effects nor the trade in enabling technologies. States therefore rely on export control regimes to fill the policy gap between blinding‑laser prohibitions and the broad proliferation of laser sources, optics, power conversion, and beam control subsystems.

Multilateral export control forums play a central role but struggle to keep pace. The Wassenaar Arrangement is the principal venue for consensus controls on dual use conventional arms and enabling technologies. Its 2023 plenary produced clarifications and edits to categories that touch sensors, optics and other technologies relevant to directed energy, but Wassenaar is a consensus body and updates tend to be incremental and conservative. That reality leaves gaps in national practice and creates divergent national lists that sophisticated buyers can exploit.

The United States architecture for laser controls is fragmented between the Department of State’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the Commerce Department’s Export Administration Regulations. Reforms dating back to 2016 moved many items once on the US Munitions List into the Commerce Control List to better calibrate controls by capability and end use. The effect has been mixed. Moving certain production and test equipment to the CCL lowered the licensing burden for purely commercial flows while creating new edge cases where an item is legal to export under one rubric but dangerous in a particular end use. More recent BIS rulemaking and Federal Register activity in 2024 continued that regulatory churn, demonstrating that the executive branch is still trying to find the right technical thresholds and licensing policy for a technology family that spans welding machines to multi‑kilowatt military lasers.

Enforcement incidents highlight the real world problem. At least one widely reported U.S. prosecution illustrates how apparently civilian laser fabrication and welding equipment can be diverted to national security sensitive end users through falsified paperwork and intermediary channels. That case is a reminder that the technical line between a laser used in industry and a laser used to enable weapons effects can be thin and that controls are only as good as industry compliance and enforcement.

Allied interoperability and information sharing complicate but also partially mitigate export risk. Mechanisms born of operational partnerships allow faster technology sharing between like minded states. Recent policy work within frameworks such as AUKUS and comparable bilateral measures has sought to create licence‑free or expedited transfer corridors for sensitive defence items among trusted partners. Those arrangements ease industrial integration, but they are not a substitute for careful end‑use controls when systems or components transit to third parties or commercial supply chains.

There are three technical and legal friction points that matter for any sensible control strategy. First, classification by nominal power alone is insufficient. A modest optical subsystem combined with ruggedized beam directors and stabilization enables battlefield effects at lower per‑beam power than simple kilowatt metrics imply. Second, ‘‘non‑lethal’’ dazzlers occupy a legal grey area: Protocol IV outlaws blinding weapons specifically designed to cause permanent blindness, but states routinely conduct legal reviews to determine whether a dazzler risks prohibited effects and whether export or use is lawful. That process is ad hoc and often opaque. Third, the dual use nature of photonics supply chains means components cross multiple jurisdictions and regulatory lists, complicating enforcement.

Policy prescriptions should be pragmatic and technically grounded. They should include:

  • Harmonized, capability‑based thresholds. Multilateral partners should agree a set of technical criteria that combine beam power, pulse characteristics, tracking and beam control capability, and intended end use to classify items that require stringent controls. Relying on a single metric such as continuous wave kilowatts invites evasion.

  • ‘‘Specially designed’’ end‑use triggers. Reaffirm the 2016 approach of treating items specially designed for military applications as subject to stricter controls while clarifying the bright line with concrete examples and test criteria. This reduces uncertainty for industry while preserving controls for clearly militarized systems.

  • Strengthened end‑use and end‑user verification. Improve pre‑licence checks and post‑shipment verification for sensitive photonics exports. This requires better intelligence‑to‑licensing feedback loops and increased resources for export enforcement. The 2024 enforcement cases show the cost of under‑resourcing verification.

  • Collaborative legal reviews for dazzlers. States should publish declassified guidance on how they assess dazzler risks versus Protocol IV prohibitions. Transparency would reduce regulatory uncertainty and help companies design products that are compliant by design.

  • Industry engagement and technical assistance. Governments must invest in outreach so SMEs in photonics can identify controlled items early in design and supply decisions. Export control compliance is most effective when it is an engineering as well as legal exercise.

Export controls for laser weapons are not a single policy lever that will stop every bad actor. They are one piece of a layered approach that includes treaty law, national regulation, allied coordination, enforcement and responsible industrial practice. As directed energy moves into mainstream defense architectures it will be tempting to rush either to liberalize trade to support industrial scale up or to overcontrol and stifle a commercial sector that also drives non‑military innovation. The smarter path is a calibrated, capability‑driven export framework coordinated across allies, backed by meaningful verification, and grounded in a clear legal baseline that preserves the humanitarian ban on blinding weapons while preventing the more general proliferation of militarized directed energy subsystems.