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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 3 10 .._ Visible 0 • Near IR "' ,-.. 10s ~r,i QI "3 0 '-' """'QJ 500- 700 nm 1.05 μm to 1.15 1.2 μm to 1.4 400-450 nm-3I,.. .I r,i= 10 •••• .,0 Ae, I . 'i ~ QI 400-700 nm . . t -6 •=I,.. 0 10 .: ... ... u A -15 -12 ·9 -6 -3 0 3 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 Time (seconds) Figure 18. Single Pulse Maximum Permissible Exposure Vulnerability of Spacecraft to Laser Radiation Man-made objects in space, whether in earth-orbit or beyond and manned or unmanned, have attributes which lead to unique laser radiation vulnerabilities: • Whole-body vulnerability - Spacecraft operate in a delicate thermal equilibrium which requires maintenance of an overall, long-term temperature fairly close to 70 °F for the survival of electronics and personnel. They are heated by absorbed so lar radiation, onboard electronics, mechanical and propulsion systems, internal heating systems, internal cooling systems, and any personnel on-board. Because of the surrounding vacuum, black-body radiation and material ejection are the only available methods of removing heat. If laser radiation were to permanently alter the solar absorption or black-body emission characteristics (referred to as the aif. ratio) of a significant portion of the spacecraft's external surface, this thermal ba lance could be destroyed with slow, but catastrophic results. This damage could conceivably be inflicted rapidly from a large earth-based laser weapon, if the spacecraft were in earth orbit, or inflicted more slowly by a smaller laser weapon which was onboard a much closer spacecraft. • Alternately, if a large earth-based laser system were to flood - load a spacecraft with a total power of megawatts for a few minutes (the typical duration of a low-earth orbit pass over a fixed location on earth), the spacecraft could potentially be heated to the point of failure. UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOA OFFI&I.t.k YSE 8,.L\f 22
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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.