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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.
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Figure 9. Elements of the 2 kW FEL at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
Like chemical lasers, FELs have the potential to produce megawatt class average
power. Unlike chemical lasers, FELs do not rely on potentially hazardous chemical
reactions to generate a beam but they do requ ire an electrically powered RF linear
accelerator which is cooled to superconducting temperatures by a large refrigerator.
Precise control of many megawatts of circulating relativistic electron beam is also
needed. Many large RF linear accelerators have been built around the world for
research purposes but all are laboratory devices. A small particle accelerator has been
ruggedized and flown in space but never used operationally in a military environment.
It remains to be seen if the significant technical issues associated with average power
scale-up can be resolved in the laboratory and then engineered to function in a military
environment such as on-board a ship.
Beam Control and Atmospheric Propagation of Laser
Devices
Referring back to Figure 2, the beam control system includes that portion of the
weapon system which generates the HEL beam inside the laser gain generator, relays
and aligns it through the optical train, expands it using the pointing telescope, and then
focuses it at the range of the target. It also contains the sensors and trackers which
acquire the target and hold it stably in the field of view. Since the HEL beam's spot on
the target is generally much smaller than the target, the beam control system must
identify the desired aim point on the target and place the HEL beam there for a
sufficient duration to inflict damage . If wavefront sensors and deformable mirrors are
used to improve the laser's beam quality (referred to as "local loop" adaptive optics) or
to compensate for atmosphere distortion (referred to as "target loop" adaptive optics),
then they are also part of the beam control system. If the propagation path is
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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.