Abstract: As the first navy demonstrator of high energy solid-state laser weapon, the laser weapons system (LaWS) of US Navy was deployed on US Ponce warship. Firstly, application goal, development team and system configuration of LaWS were introduced. Laser, transmitting telescope and control system were analyzed in detail. Fighting capability of LaWS was deduced from its system parameters. A series of demonstration tests of LaWS were reviewed. Technical issues exposed in tests and the corresponding solutions were summarized. The analyses show that common aperture design was used in the transmitting telescope of LaWS system; incoherent synthesis of fiber laser was used as light source of combat. In system integration, apart from a small amount of custom parts, a large number of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) were used widely, such as industrial lasers, inertial measurement unit, sensor and video trackers. LaWS system used the progressive improvement in the development to reduce systemic risk and development costs to some extent. Technical development trends of LaWS in the future were analyzed in the end.