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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 15. Mid-Infared Advanced Chemical Laser In 1983, President Reagan gave his "Star Wars" speech which resulted in the initiation of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and the start of a very ambitious set of HEL technology programs which peaked at a billion dollars per year. These efforts produced significant advances but did not result in the fielding of any weapons or major demonstration systems. By the mid-1990s, SDI (then the Missile Defense Agency) had term inated almost all of their HEL programs to better focus on missile development. The sole surviving MDA HEL program is the Airborne Laser (ABL) which has accounted for $200M to $500M/yr over the last decade. Its purpose is to place a MW-class chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL) system in a Boeing 747-400F (Figure 16) to demonstrate boost phase intercept of ICBMs and IRBMs. UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOA QFFI&I.t.k YSE 8,.L\f 18
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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.