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Listen up kiddos. The light scattering through the atmosphere is a real problem for laser weapons, but not in the way you experience it using your ebay laser pointers where it just fades out over distance.
MUH WIDE BEAMS:
When you shoot a laser through the atmosphere, the scattering effect creates a SUPER-HEATED channel of air where the laser is. What you would see on infrared sattelites is the after-effect of the actual laser leaving a path of hot air around where the actual beam was.
As soon as these hot air channels form around the beam, diffraction from the heat makes re-firing in the same position the laser useless. The beam loses all coherence in a matter of microseconds as the air in the path of the laser heats up.
To avoid losses from heat-induced diffraction and deliver maximum impulse power, laser weapons are fired in FEMOTOSECOND IMPULSES.
You will never see the actual laser beam through a telescope or radio telescope, so good luck finding the satellite with a smoking gun. In fact it is unlikely any laser weapon would be in the infrared spectrum at all since you would get more power on the ultraviolet side of the spectrum if you could generate such a beam (which your shitty ebay lasers can). Then again such a weapon might be at lower frequency than infrared. The frequency of the beam would be optimized to pass through water and atmospheric particles to minimize transmission loss and slow the formation of the superheated channel as described above.
