But not birds ... right? We wouldn't want to vaporize some birds to save the nation.
Grin, why no, of course not. That's actually been the hold up of the entire program. They had to develop a combination of powerful airborne radars and sensitive IR and visual band sensors, use sophisticated data-fusion algorithms... All so they could detect any wildlife in the area that might be adversely affected by a discharge of the laser. Obviously the battle manager beam planning routines take this into account when determining shot-opportunities... :-)
And of course, since obama is all about transparency and being a good "world citizen" (except when it comes to birth certificates I guess)... If we were ever to put ABL into use in an operational scenario I'm sure he'd issue orders that would reflect his sensitivity to the world stage... "Hey NK, please warn your citizens we have an ABL aircraft orbiting 75 miles off your coast, due east of your missile field at {some unpronounceable name}. Notify your citizens that if they see a smoke trail of one of your missiles headed up, not to look up and avert their eyes - we don't want to hurt anyone."