I’m no engineer, but that was kin of my first thought as well.
They’re also fixing something that isn;t broken so to speak.
All I can figure is the Navy is in a hurry to deploy energy weapons — which suggests to me that they are a lot further developed than I’ve heard of.
They are and they aren’t. There are some jammer/blinder/deflector defensive lasers already deployed in the fleet. Offensive weapons, not so much - but railguns require quite a lot of power to fire and those are pretty close to a production reality. The Chinese have been observed to be testing a railgun at sea by third party nationals, for example - they’re ahead of us there. Railguns are likely going to be the next ‘big gun’ in naval matters.
Current deployed/openly testing US laser weapons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SEQ-3_Laser_Weapon_System
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2022/10/19/navy-destroyer-adds-helios-laser-to-arsenal