As the United States moves toward possible military conflict with Iran, the White House and the Pentagon have been boasting about an exotic arsenal of directed-energy weapons that could signal a new era of lethality in warfare.
The administration’s public talk about the new weapons systems followed the success of U.S. forces on Jan. 3 in penetrating Venezuelan air defenses, neutralizing defenders there and snatching President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. After that decisive operation, officials began providing a glimpse of weapons that are rarely discussed. Perhaps they hope to intimidate prospective military opponents, such as Iran or China.
These disclosures about U.S. directed-energy capabilities come as a Post report raised new concerns that Russia or another foreign adversary might have secretly used a pulsed-energy weapons over the past decade against CIA and State Department personnel, inflicting a constellation of symptoms known as “Havana syndrome.” Descriptions of the effects of U.S. and alleged foreign attacks are eerily similar.
President Donald Trump blurted out some hints of new systems during a Jan. 24 interview with the New York Post when he said U.S. forces used what he called “the Discombobulator” to storm Maduro’s compound. “I’m not allowed to talk about it. I would love to. … They never got their rockets off. They had Russian and Chinese rockets, and they never got one off. We came in, they pressed buttons, and nothing worked.”
Trump offered another clue in a Feb. 13 speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg, the home of some of the Army’s most elite warriors. “Everyone’s trying to figure out why [Venezuelan air defenses] didn’t work. Someday you’re going to find out,” Trump said, according to a report from a North Carolina news outlet The local reporter noted that the disabling weapon sounded like little-known Air Force systems that use high-powered microwaves to disrupt electronics.
Another flashy advertisement of U.S. capabilities came in a social media post from the office of Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer. “Yes, the @DeptofWar has directed energy weapons. Yes, we are scaling them,” his office said on X on Jan. 23. The post was accompanied by a bright red image of a laser cannon with the words: “Light-Speed Lethality … Directed Energy Dominant.”
Wall Street analysts foresee an investment boom in this spooky technology. A research report last month by Astute Analytica predicted that the global market could grow from $7.1 billion in 2024 to $32.5 billion by 2033.
Public reports cast light on some U.S. weapons that could have effects like those described in Venezuela. The Air Force in 2017 posted a video simulation of a rocket carrying a high-powered microwave system known as CHAMP. The video shows a rolling blackout across a city, like what is said to have happened in Caracas early last month.
A more advanced microwave weapon known as HIJENKS was described by the Air Force and Navy in a 2023 release. It explained that the system uses high-powered microwaves for “disabling of computer systems, damaging targeted electronics, disrupting security and industrial control systems, etc.”
The Pentagon has developed sonic weapons, known as Long Range Acoustic Devices, that can fire beams of sound at adversaries. Smaller versions of these “sound cannons” have been used by police forces in the United States and abroad for crowd control, according to a human rights watchdog group.
Public White House discussion of these exotic weapons began on Jan. 10, a week after the Venezuela attack, when press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X: “Stop what you are doing and read this.” She then shared what purports to be a Venezuelan security guard’s account of what happened the night of the attack, as summarized by a right-wing social media influencer:
“We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation,” said the security guard. “At one point they launched something — I don’t know how to describe it … it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.”
What’s striking about this account is how similar it is to the first known incident of Havana syndrome. The victim’s experience was described in the preface to a 2020 report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine: “An individual assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Cuba was awakened one night at home in Havana in 2016 by severe pain and a sensation of intense pressure in the face, a loud piercing sound in one ear with directional features, and acute disequilibrium and nausea. Symptoms of vestibular and cognitive dysfunction ensued.”
What caused these symptoms? The National Academies study assessed scores of incidents and decided that directed energy was “the most plausible mechanism in explaining these cases,” as I noted in 2021. But the U.S. intelligence community, led by the CIA, reversed that finding in 2023, concluding that it was “very unlikely” that a foreign adversary had used a “novel weapon” to inflict the damage.
The judgment seemed to shift once more when the Biden administration’s National Security Council decided in January 2025, in its last weeks, that “pulsed electromagnetic or acoustic energy remains a plausible explanation in certain cases.”
Last weekend, alarm bells started ringing again with The Post’s disclosure that a Norwegian scientist had built a pulsed microwave system and tested it on himself — causing neurological symptoms like Havana syndrome. U.S. officials had visited Norway in 2024 to explore his findings, and the CIA had covertly acquired and tested a foreign-made device that used pulsed radio waves. Yet CIA analysts continued to assert that Havana syndrome cases weren’t linked to Russia or other foreign governments — infuriating some victims.
Former CIA officers who served in Moscow told me they’re frustrated by the agency’s long-standing reluctance to recognize the severity of Russian attacks using exotic technologies, whether they were to blame for Havana syndrome or not.
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who spent two tours in Moscow, said in an email message: “As far as I know, the agency has never interviewed the living retired officers who can paint a picture of the operational conditions in Moscow in the 1970s and ’80s that provides the context for assessing the health threat — such as microwaves, X-rays, laser attacks, electronic bugging devices, tunnels, and other exotic technical attacks. The truth is they had no idea what the KGB was doing — and still don’t.”
The Russian surveillance was so intense that a Russian command post in a church across from the American compound in Moscow was known as “Our Lady of Telemetry,” because it bristled with “every type of technical monitoring device known to man,” including lasers and heat sensors, writes Rosie Mowatt-Larssen, Rolf’s wife and a part-time case officer, in a recently published memoir.
Here’s the bottom line: Ready or not, we’re entering an era of directed-energy weapons. As with any new technology, the first obligation is to set “rules of the road” for the United States and then, hopefully, with other countries. A starting point is to distinguish between attacks on military personnel, as in Venezuela, and on civilian diplomats and intelligence officers, as is alleged in the Havana syndrome cases. The first may be permissible; the second shouldn’t be.
The larger question is whether we’re setting off a new arms race that could ultimately hurt America more than its adversaries. Soon, other countries, too, will be able to launch rockets and drones that can trigger rolling electricity blackouts, fry computer circuits and cause severe neurological damage. A warning to enthusiasts for what Trump called “the Discombobulator”: What goes around comes around.
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