AAWSAP DIRD, State of the Art and Evolution of High-Energy Lasers, March 2010

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 13. Army Mobile Tactical Unit Figure 14. Air Force Airborne Laser Laboratory
In 1973, a new chemica l laser technology, based on deuterium fluoride (DF), was
determined to be scalable to high power at mid-infrared wavelengths which propagate
far better in the atmosphere than CO2 laser beams. The Navy and ARPA jointly built a
multi-hundred-kW class laser and mated it with a 70 cm beam director. In March 1978,
this integrated system succeeded destroying operational TOW anti-tank missiles in
flight.
The Navy then used this technology to produce the nation's first MW-class HEL weapon
test bed. The Mid-lnfraRed Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL, Figure 15) and the
Sealite Beam Director (SLBD, Figure 11) were installed and integrated at White Sands
Missile Range in the mid-1980s and used for experiments by the Department of
Defense. Subsonic drones and multi-mach missiles as well as strapped down ICBM
boosters were among the many targets successfully engaged.
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