to defend against small targets such as drones, mortar shells, and other threats. The Air Force is studying the use of lasers on aircraft for defensive and offensive purposes.The reputed new Russian laser facility is called Kalina. It is intended to dazzle, and therefore temporarily blind, the optical sensors of satellites that are collecting intelligence overhead. As with the U.S. LAIRCM, dazzling involves saturating the sensors with enough light to prevent them from functioning.
Kalina reportedly operates in a pulsed mode in the infrared and produces about 1,000 joules per square centimeter. By comparison, a pulsed laser used for retinal surgery is only about 1/10,000th as powerful. Kalina delivers a large fraction of the photons it generates across the large distances where satellites orbit overhead. It is able to do this because lasers form highly collimated beams, meaning the photons travel in parallel so the beam doesn’t spread out.
Based on the reported details of the telescope, Kalina would be able to target an overhead satellite for hundreds of miles of its path. This would make it possible to shield a very large area – on the order of 40,000 square miles – from intelligence gathering by optical sensors on satellites. Forty thousand square miles is roughly the area of the state of Kentucky.
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