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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 17. The Advanced Tactical Laser C-130 Aircraft Laser-Material Interaction Laser radiation, with the exception of ultra-short pulse, damages materials by rapidly depositing heat on the target's surface. The field of laser effects/lethality studies this interaction at levels ranging from basic energy transfer physics to how specific military targets (such as missiles or mortar shells) could be defeated. The interaction of a laser beam with typical target materials such as metal, ceramic or fiberglass can vary significantly with parameters such as laser wavelength, irradiance level, material surface preparation and airflow. A material's hardness to laser radiation is frequently described using the parameter "W" in units of joules/cm 3 . This is a measure of the total energy (in joules) required to melt or remove one cubic cm of material under the specific conditions of the test. Over the past three decades, a wide variety of materials have been tested using a CO2, DF and (more recently) Nd:YAG lasers. Although specific results are usually classified, general observations can be offered about typical material classes used in aircraft and spacecraft. A wide variety of metals are used for applications such as missile skins, pressurized fuel tanks, electronics enclosures, and structural members. Laser coupling can vary quite widely, from a few percent to almost 100 percent, depending on the laser wavelength, type of metal, surface preparation, and temperature. If not under structural load, failure is usually from complete melt-through. If the metal piece is under aerodynamic load or is part of a pressure vessel, failure will typically occur from crack initiation and propagation well before complete burn-through. Airflow is beneficial, providing melt removal and aerodynamic loads. The total energy which would cause a metal plate or pressure vessel to fail is thickness dependent in a fairly linear fashion. UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOA OFFI&I.t.k YSE 8,.L\f 20
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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.