Secretary of Defense Gates said that "I don't know anybody at the Department of Defense, Mr. Tiahrt, who thinks that this program should, or would, ever be operationally deployed. The reality is that you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful than the chemical laser in the plane right now to be able to get any distance from the launch site to fire."Good thing the Navy is getting good at shooting down missiles the old fashioned way."So, right now the ABL would have to orbit inside the borders of Iran in order to be able to try and use its laser to shoot down that missile in the boost phase. And if you were to operationalize this you would be looking at 10 to 20 747s, at a billion and a half dollars apiece, and $100 million a year to operate. And there's nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept."
The Air Force did not request further funds for the Airborne Laser for 2010; Air Force Chief Schwartz has said that the system "does not reflect something that is operationally viable." In December 2011, it was reported that the project was to be ended after 16 years of development and a cost of over $5 billion.
Incorrect. While true we were able to get only about half the design power out of the test vehicle's COIL in ABL, we could easily (with a straightforward redesign and the knowledge we have now) get that power up 2 to 3 times it's current levels. That would be MORE than enough to suppress all ballistic missile activity in a theater the size of Iran 24 hours a day with a fleet of 7-10 ABLs (depending on the assumptions you make regarding reliability, on station availability, etc).
ABL’s range is only weakly tied to laser power. It's range is a much stronger function of the adaptive optics system which could be enhanced to significantly increase lethal range from the current test bird. If that quote from Gates is accurate, he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
On the other hand, I also am a skeptic about the operational viability of ABL, but for a host of logistics and maintenance reasons unrelated to the performance of the laser weapon itself. Oh, and there were many of us in uniform far more informed than him that felt the system could be developed into a viable operational platform. Give us one year's overrun in the F-22 program, and we could have cleared the skies. It's all a matter of priorities.