New Sensor-Blasting Laser: Blinding Brilliance?

What can you do with laser that destroys glass lenses? Zap incoming missiles, neutralize armored vehicles, and wipe out night vision goggles, for starters. In Wired News, I describe the Laser Crazer, a gadget for doing just that. The trick is to use a laser which is phenomenally powerful -– ten million megawatts no less -– but which fires thousands of incredibly short pulses. Pulse length is measured in femtoseconds (millionths of a nanosecond) so the actual pulse energy is quite low, and the laser itself can be compact enough to be portable.

Pulses like that might be a great way to blinding heat-seeking missiles -- either surface-to-air or air-to-air. Current infrared countermeasures use a laser, but can only temporarily confuse heat seekers:

Closed-Loop IRCM would analyze incoming missiles, determine their type, then return a custom jam code sequence that would cause the missile to break lock and move sharply away from the target aircraft, allowing engagement of another target after only 3-4 seconds. This would surpass current open-loop systems, which confuse missiles with random false targets or IR energy, making the missile wobble in flight but not necessarily break lock. The missile can reacquire the target if the jam head moves to another missile.

It might also be a way of neutralizing armored vehicles without destroying them. Armed with one of these you can laser-sandblast the vision blocks and external optics without giving away your own position, leaving them inacapable of firing accurately, or even driving without sticking a vulnerable head out of the hatch.

It could also be used to blind all sorts of sensors – night vision gear, missile sights, pretty much anything that anyone might be using to watch you. In fact, it might lead to a revival of the Stingray Combat Protection System (AN/VLQ-7), described here as:

a tactical laser system integrated on the Bradley
Fighting Vehicle and designed to acquire and defeat threat direct fire control systems. Stingray increases the effectiveness and survivability of the Bradley crew and other friendly forces in the area by employing in-band laser energy to acquire and disable threat fire control systems..."

Stingray detects, tracks, and counters optical and electro-optical devices on tanks, combat vehicles, and other ground and airborne systems "beyond the threat's effective [conventional weapons]
ranges." The weapon works by scanning for a sensor with a low-power near infrared spectrum beam (a novel solid-state neodymium laser), reflecting a small fraction of the light back upon entering an optical system, and then instantaneously increasing the level of laser energy to overload or jam the sensor.

Stingray was developed by Martin Marietta Electronics and
Missiles Group of Orlando, Florida, for the U.S. Army
Communications-Electronics Command, Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey. General
Electric (GE) was the subcontractor for the actual laser. The 350-pound system consists of four components...

Two Stingrays were deployed to Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf
War, but were never used. The program -- along with a whole host of other US projects – was discontinued after 1995. The problem was that
Stingray would be as efficient as permanently blinding humans as sensors, and the 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons effectively banned this class of weapon.

Efforts to create something similar to Stingray with lasers which only dazzled rather than blinded were never successful. However, as the detection technology advances – a couple of years ago the Georgia
Institute of Technology revealed a system which can target the CCDs used in digital cameras–
it might become feasible to build something capable of knocking out night vision devices, weapon sights and other threats without harming human eyes.

Certainly, you have to assume that the intention behind the Laser
Crazer is to have something that will target people as well as sensors.