Documents / Official release
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office and dated 31 March 2010. It was produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It reviews chemical, solid-state, fiber, ultra-short pulse and free-electron lasers, as well as beam control, atmospheric propagation, DoD laser history and how spacecraft could be damaged by lasers. It projects that electrically powered lasers could enable MW-class weapons and spacecraft laser weapons within 20 years. It ends with shielding recommendations for spacecraft.
From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/31/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD surveys the development of high-energy laser weapons and notes that, although lasers had already become important military tools for ranging, guidance, and other lower-power uses, true weapon-class systems remained limited by power generation, beam control, atmospheric propagation, and logistics. The report reviews major laser types along with the optical, tracking, and thermal-management systems needed to make them militarily useful. It argues that high-energy lasers can offer important advantages over kinetic weapons in speed, precision, and low collateral damage, especially against softer or fast-moving targets, while also emphasizing that practical deployment has long been hindered by hazardous chemical fuels, thermal blooming in the atmosphere, power-supply constraints for mobile systems, and waste-heat removal.
UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOA OFFl&I.t.k YSE &P•tv CHEMICAL LASERS Chemical lasers use a chemical reaction in gas or liquid to re lease the energy which produces their lasing. A reaction can be initiated with an electric current, by light from another source, or by simply mixing hypergolic chemicals. These lasers include familiar low power, sea led gas types such as helium-neon, argon, or krypton-ion and typically produce light in the visible or near infrared. Excimer lasers are another low average power sub-category of gas lasers. These use dimer molecules as the lasing medium, are generally electrically excited, and lase in the ultraviolet. To-date, every laser which has been scaled to MW-class average power falls in the chem ical category . They use large quantities of rapidly flowing chemicals to produce reactions which ,.c:.;_i:::~: ::~=?:.;:~•.i;:;,..~•...::'.'i••/~:"'I, ::.--- then release the required energy. The <"-"""'- ~..'"::~~~~ - carbon dioxide laser (CO2 at 10.6 ~1m) was the first to be scaled to high power around 1970 followed by the deuterium fluoride laser (DF at 3.8 μm) and its first cousin the hydrogen-fluoride laser (HF at 2.8 μm) in the mid-1970s. These devices lase in the far- to mid-infrared and depend on exciting vibrational and rotational states of the lasing molecules. CO2, DF, and HF lasers resemble rocket engines because they combust a fuel with an oxidizer. The DF laser ignites a mixture of nitrogen-trifluoride (NF3) with ethylene (C2H4) and then injects deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) into the exhaust stream to produce the lasing molecule of deuterium-fluoride. Figure 4. Cylindrical Gain Generator for HF Chemical This laser was the choice of the Navy Space Based Laser and Army in the 1970's and 80's for tactical laser development while the HF laser was the choice of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) for their Space Based Laser development in the 1980's (Figure 4 ). The newest chemical laser to be scaled to high power is the Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL at 1.315 μm) which excites vibronic states (simultaneous change of vibrational and electronic quantum numbers) in monatomic iodine to achieve the near infrared wavelength. COIL generates light in a more complex process which does not involve combustion but still releases considerable heat. Gaseous chlorine (Cl2) is mixed with a destabilized hydrogen-peroxide (H2O2) mixture to produce an excited oxygen molecule and water. The oxygen molecule is then combined with iodine (Iz) in a reaction which separates t he iodine molecule into monatomic iodine and transfers the oxygen molecule's energy to it. Iodine then becomes the lasing atom. This near infrared laser was the device of choice for the Missile Defense Agency's Airborne Laser program. UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOA QFFI&I.t.k YSE 8,.L\f 5
Not linked to a story yet.
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 31 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.