Historical research guide · 0035 · 2010

State of the Art and Evolution of High Energy Laser Weapons (DIRD 23)

J. Albertine / DIA

In one minute

When the Defense Intelligence Agency listed the thirty-eight reference documents it had commissioned for the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications programme, one title was held back. It surfaced in January 2019, and this is the report behind it: a survey of high-energy laser weapons written for the agency in 2009 and issued on 31 March 2010. It reads like a working engineer’s overview. It sets laser weapons beside conventional kinetic weapons, walks through chemical, solid-state, fibre, ultra-short-pulse and free-electron lasers, covers beam control and atmospheric propagation, sketches the history of Department of Defense laser research, and asks what a laser beam could do to a spacecraft. Its argument is that chemical lasers reached megawatt power by the late 1970s and then stopped there, because the chemicals were heavy, hazardous and expensive, and that electrically powered solid-state and free-electron lasers are the line that carries on from here. In space, it concludes, the beam is easy and the power and waste heat are hard.

Connection

Chapter 1's rule is to check provenance and account for every source before drawing an inference, and this is the test case: the one DIRD title the agency withheld turns out to be conventional laser engineering rather than exotic physics. That makes the rest of the set — the wormhole, warp-drive and vacuum-energy reports chapter 4 works from — easier to stand behind, because the list is now fully accounted for.

From the source

The report's stated purpose is to give an overview of the current state of the art and the potential evolution of megawatt-class high-energy laser weapons, and to address the implications for spacecraft in or beyond Earth orbit.Introduction, p. 1
As of 2009 there had been very large advances in laser and beam-control technology but no deployment of any high-energy laser weapon; concepts were repeatedly discarded or deferred for technical immaturity, expected production cost, lack of apparent utility or logistics concerns.Summary, p. v
The most significant technical impediment to deployment may have been the large quantities of expensive and hazardous chemicals required by the only available high-average-power lasers — a constraint that electrically powered solid-state and free-electron lasers remove.Summary, p. v; Projection of Future HEL Weapon Capability, p. 23
Space is the ideal environment for laser beam propagation, because there is no atmosphere to attenuate or spread the beam; large distances could be bridged quickly, with range set by the size of the transmitting telescope and damage set chiefly by the laser's output power.Summary, p. v
Initial spacecraft laser weapons are conceivable within twenty years and laser power could grow into the megawatt range as solid-state and free-electron technology matures, but the limiting factor is the spacecraft rather than the laser: a megawatt solid-state laser at about 25 percent wall-plug efficiency draws at least 4 megawatts and leaves roughly 3 megawatts of heat to store and dissipate.Summary, p. v; Projection of Future HEL Weapon Capability, pp. 23–24

The way in

https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/dia/AAWSAP-DIRDs/DIRD_23-DIRD_State_of_the_Art_and_Evolution_of_High-Energy_Laser_Weapons.pdf

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

A Defense Intelligence Reference Document produced for the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications programme, numbered DIA-08-1003-019 on its title page, marked UNCLASSIFIED / FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY and dated 31 March 2010 with an information cut-off of 1 December 2009. The author’s name is withheld under FOIA exemption (b)(6) and the preparing office under 10 USC 424. Released under FOIA and served in full by the DIA electronic reading room and by The Black Vault, where it is filed as DIRD 23. TEXT. The body below is the complete report as released — Summary, Introduction, Laser Devices, Beam Control and Atmospheric Propagation, Brief History of DoD Laser Weapon Research, Laser-Material Interaction, Vulnerability of Spacecraft to Laser Radiation, Projection of Future HEL Weapon Capability, Recommendations and Sources of Further Information — taken from the FOIA release and cleaned of the scan’s OCR damage. The report carries a copyright warning against further dissemination of its photographs, so the eighteen figures are not reproduced; their captions are kept in place and Table 1 is reproduced in full. The front-matter contents and figure lists are omitted. Greek letters, micrometre symbols, exponents and one root-mean-square phasing figure were restored from context where the scan had flattened them, and inequalities are written out in words so the page renders.

How to cite it

J. Albertine / DIA (2010) State of the Art and Evolution of High Energy Laser Weapons (DIRD 23) https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/dia/AAWSAP-DIRDs/DIRD_23-DIRD_State_of_the_Art_and_Evolution_of_High-Energy_Laser_Weapons.pdf

Where it sits in the curriculum

The reference documents and the institutional record