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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 OFFl&I.t.k YSE &P•tv FREE-ELECTRON LASERS Free-electron lasers (FELs) are unique in that they are not limited to lasing only at specific wavelengths dictated by the characteristics of a specific solid, liqu id, or gaseous gain medium. FELs use a stream of "free" (unbound to atoms) electron bunches, moving at almost the speed of light, to provide the lasing medium. These short bunches of electrons are generated by a photocathode and accelerated by an RF linear accelerator which is powered by klystron tubes. The relativistic electron bunches are then passed through an alternating-polarity set of magnets, called a "wiggler" or "undu lator" (Figure 8) which transversely accelerates the electrons and converts a small fraction of the electron bunches' energy into a coherent optical energy. Output radiation Spent electron beam micropulse Figure 8. Free-Electron Laser Wiggler Resonator optics on each end of the wiggler repeatedly reflect the optical bunches back through the wiggler to increase their strength. The lasing wavelength can be chosen by proper design of the wiggler and selection of the electron beam's energy. Figure 9 is a diagram of a 2 kW infrared FEL built by the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The highest average power FEL to-date is 10 kW. UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOA QFFI&I.t.k YSE 8,.L\f 11
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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.