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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 Figure 12. Typical Atmospheric Absorption and Scattering in the Infrared Brief History of DoD Laser Weapon Research The Department of Defense began funding research in high energy lasers soon after the invention of the laser in 1960 when it was thought that they might (if scalable to high power) have tremendous impact on how wars were fought. The Advanced Research Projects Agency led the way with studies on the use of lasers for strategic applications, such as anti-satellite and anti-ICBM, while each of the services began looking at more modest tactical applications and began building one-of-a-kind demonstrators. By the mid-1970's, the Army had placed a 50 kW carbon-dioxide (CO2) laser with a 40 cm beam director in a tracked vehicle called the Mobile Tactical Unit (MTU) and had shot down small drone aircraft. The Air Force placed a larger CO2 laser in a KC-135 (the Airborne Laser Laboratory or ALL) and, by the early 1980's, had used it to shoot down air-to-air missiles such as the AIM-9. See Figures 13 and 14. UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOA OFFI&I.t.k YSE 8,.L\f 16
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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.