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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High Power Laser High Power Optics Pointer I Tracker I Atmospheric Target
Device and Beam Shaping Target Designator Propagation
EXHAUST
TRACKER
Atmospheric,
absorption,
ENERGY SOURCE scattering,
and turbulence
Figure 2, Elements of an HEL Weapon System
Laser Devices
LASER FUNDAMENTALS
The term "Laser" is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of
Radiation. It is a unique device that employs the quantum states of matter to store
and convert energy into electromagnetic radiation. The resulting radiation is referred to
as "coherent," meaning it is single wavelength or "monochromatic" and highly focusable
due to its well controlled phase. In its simplest form, any laser device can be viewed as
an "energy-conversion" box with one input and two outputs. The input is energy, which
can take a variety of forms (electricity, light, or a chemical reaction) depending on the
specific laser, while the two outputs are a coherent beam and heat (Figure 3). Since
the overall energy-conversion lasing process is considerably less than 100 percent
efficient, significant waste heat is generated which must be removed from the laser.
Inside the laser is a "gain-medium" which stores a fraction of the input energy in its
atoms or molecules and then releases the energy at the laser's selected wavelength.
The laser also contains "resonator" mirrors which repeatedly relay the beam back and
forth through the gain medium to increase its energy level. The laser device functions
as the optical equivalent of an electrical oscillator with the resonator optics providing
the feedback. Different lasers, which use various materials as their gain medium, emit
radiation at wavelengths ranging from the infrared through the visible spectrum and
into the ultraviolet.
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