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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. OFFI€il.t.L YSE er•tv 25 to 50 fibers have been combined into an even larger fiber with a resultant output power of 50 kW and an effective beam quality of about 30 . Highly reliable commercial welders and cutters are made today with fiber lasers which combine beams by splicing laser fibers together to increase output power. Some of these devices operate at a reported wall plug to light-out efficiency > 30 percent but these numbers do not include any power required for cooling. As a weapon, these off-the-shelf lasers could produce useful beams for short distances. A significant advantage of fiber lasers is their inherent ruggedness when compared to slab or rod lasers. Most of the optical functions (such as wavelength and polarization control, beam splitters and combiners) which are required to produce a high-power beam with good beam quality can be integrated into the fibers while slab laser systems require discrete components which must be kept clean and held in mechanical alignment. Given the immaturity and rate of advance of fiber lasers today, it is impossible to predict where they will go. Current power scaling research has been centered on Yb:YAG and Nd:YAG fibers at 1 μm with limited effort at 1.5 μm and 2 μm. Although lagging the maturity of 1 μm fibers, they offer potential for increased eye safety. If the maturation process continues as it has, fiber lasers will offer the best promise for high power and good beam quality with inherent ruggedness and reliability. Militarized devices at the 50 kW to 100 kW should be available within the next 15 years and it's not difficult to imagine MW systems within 20 to 30 years. ULTRA-SHORT PULSE LASERS Ultra-Short Pulse (USP) lasers, sometimes called femtosecond (fs) lasers, produce pulses of light shorter than 1 picosecond (10-12 second). Some USP lasers have produced pulses less than 10 fs which is a length of 3 microns and equivalent to only a few cycles of visible light (by comparison, a human hair is about 100 microns in diameter). They were developed in the 1970s using long pulse lasers to illuminate chemical dyes which then produced the short pulses; today USP lasers employ slabs such as Titanium:Sapphire or a variety of fibers and table-top size devices are commercially available. Although the average power of these devices is typically sub watt, the short pulses result in peak powers which can range from a terawatt (10 12 watts) to a petawatt (10 15 watts). The extremely high power contained in very short pulses has proven useful for precision machining, drilling tiny holes, and selective material remova l in a wide variety of materials. In addition to commercial machining applications, medical uses such as eye surgery and cancer cell destruction have been developed. When propagated in the atmosphere, these ultra short pulses do not obey the usual laws of diffraction spreading and can (under certain circumstances) remain tightly focused over long distances. This technology remains in its infancy and research is ongoing to increase average power (generally with a higher pulse rate), to better understand the physics of USP propagation, and to explore material interactions with USP. Much of the USP research today is found in world-wide academic institutions. Other than the potential for inflicting sensor damage, the military potential of these devices is yet to be determined. UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOA QFFI€il.t.L YSE 8,.L\f 10
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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.