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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.
“The Advance”10 pages
UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOA OFFl&I.t.k YSE &P•tv Energy source ( Lasing Medium Laser beam Waste heat Figure 3. Basic Laser Concept The principles behind the laser were first described by Basov and Prokhorov at the Soviet Lebedev Institute of Physics in 1952. The first concept demonstration was actually at microwave frequencies (24 GHz) in 1953 by Townes, Gordon, and Zeiger at Columbia University. They called their device a MASER for Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. The first working laser, initially called an "Optical MASER," produced milliwatts of visible light using a ruby rod as the gain medium. This was done in 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories in Ca lifornia. Since then, many types of lasers have found uses in an extremely wide variety of applications ranging from everyday life (bar code readers, CD players, flashlights), to industry (cutters, welders, surveyors, levelers), to the military (range finders, precision guided munitions, dazzlers). These lasers have proven to be inexpensive when produced in large quantity, rugged, reliable, and safe. Since the earliest days of the laser, the Department of Defense (DoD) has conceptualized and led the development of hig h-average-power lasers for weapon applications. There have been many open literature reports of similar work in Russia, China, and other countries. Lasers currently exist in a wide variety of forms with many solids, liquids, gases or even electrons being used for a gain medium to produce beams over a wide ra nge of wavelengths and power levels. However, only a small group of laser types have shown the potential to produce weapon level powers. UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOA QFFI&I.t.k Y&E 8,.L\f 4
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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.