Free space laser communication receives an increasing interest in both the military and civilian information society due to the potentially high bandwidths and high security from deception and jamming. The atmosphere influences the link performance due to attenuation and turbulence induced fading. This report treats fading and finds that this can be substantially reduced using an adopted aperture size which gives aperture averaging, and by using several spatially separated transmitter or receiver channels. The use of different wavelengths in the same spatial channel is not so effective especially noting the increase in system complexity. The following can be noted: Aperture averaging can substantially reduce the turbulence variance. The total variance after aperture averaging is weakly dependent on wavelengths. Under the assumption of weak turbulence (lognormal statistics) the use of several receiver/transmitter channels (transversally separated by a distance larger than the turbulence transversal correlation distance) very effective in reducing fading. The use of several independent channels is not as effective for strong turbulence (gamma distributed pdf) as for weak turbulence. The turbulence loss can reach values of 4-12 dB for typical tactical ranges in ground applications. Combined visibility and turbulence statistics is needed to have reliable information about the link availibility.