FEINDEF 2025: Saab gears up to give Spanish Navy its first laser warning system

Saab is preparing to make Spain’s future F110 frigates the first Spanish Navy warships to be protected from the growing threat from laser-guided weapons with the installation of its Naval Laser Warning System (NLWS).

The company received a contract valued at EUR 3.5 million in April 2024 to install NLWS on the F110 frigates, five of which are currently planned, with the first three now under construction at Navantia’s shipyard in Ferrol.

Briefing on the NLWS at the FEINDEF 2025 defence exhibition in Madrid on 13 May, François Raubenheimer, a business development executive within Saab’s naval electronic warfare business, warned that ships operating near the coast are an “easy target” for shore-based operators with laser-guided weapons.

“There are many laser-guided weapons in this world, and they’re not very expensive, so they can come into the hands of terrorists or pirates [as well as being used by hostile armed forces]. It is a real threat to any naval ship that’s at sea,” he said.

Conversely, a ship cannot easily detect such a shore-based threat, either visually or with radar, with the threat only becoming apparent once a missile is actually in the air, “so the first way to know about this is a laser detection that will give you the first indication that there’s somebody out there,” said Raubenheimer.

The four types of threat, Raubenheimer said, are laser rangefinders, laser target designators, laser-beam-riding missiles and laser weapons. All of these laser systems can cause major damage to ships, onboard equipment and crews.

Raubenheimer explained that the NLWS is actually a laser electronic support measures system (ESM). As well as giving advanced warning of an incoming threat, it can also increase situational awareness by categorising the threat, identifying its direction and initiating a response, whether that is the deployment of countermeasures or the queuing of additional sensors or weapon systems to further identify or counter the threat.

NLWS sensors are installed around a vessel to give full hemispherical coverage, with each lateral sensor offering coverage of 112˚ in azimuth and 80˚ in elevation. Raubenheimer noted that an NLWS shipset for a F110-class frigate involves 10 lateral sensors plus one vertical sensor to give complete coverage. He added that the NLWS sensors detect across a wide wavelength range and are very sensitive, allowing them to detect laser energy outside the beam directly targeting a ship and produce a response rate that is typically less than half a millisecond, but have been proven to give an extremely low false alarm rate. They are also very compact and have low power consumption.

Raubenheimer noted that Saab’s NLWS has twice been involved in competitive sea trials and has won out both times, such that, including Spain, the system has now been chosen to protect the warships of eight NATO navies.

Saab will deliver the first NLWS shipset for the Spanish Navy’s F110-class frigates in 2026.