“One of the biggest threats in Iraq is [a com­mer­cial walkie-​​talkie] radio,” a defense con­trac­tor tells Aviation Week. “It’s a tiny thing that costs about $100. They’ve got a 10-​​mi. range and oper­ate between 40–50 MHz. That’s what the ter­ror­ists are using. It’s hard to mon­i­tor. They give a guy a radio, put him on top of a hill, and [he and a string of oth­ers] will relay com­mu­ni­ca­tions for hun­dreds of miles.“
So how does the Pentagon plan on fight­ing this $100 threat? With a set of cheap, coffee-​​can-​​sized trans­mit­ters of its own. Except, in this case, cheap means $10,000 a pop. And the lit­tle bug­gers “can lis­ten to enemy radars and com­mu­ni­ca­tions, ana­lyze an opponent’s net­work and move­ment of sys­tems and jam emit­ters or infil­trate enemy com­put­ers with pack­ages of algo­rithms,” accord­ing to the mag­a­zine. An early-​​phase test of the sys­tem, known as “Wolfpack,” is sched­uled for next week.
No one “Wolf” is par­tic­u­larly pow­er­ful. But, col­lec­tively, they can be used to tri­an­gu­late enemy sig­nals — like those walkie-​​talkie con­ver­sa­tions — and mon­i­tor hos­tile net­works. The idea is to “lit­ter the bat­tle­field with these small objects,” Preston Marshall, WolfPack’s pro­gram man­ager at Darpa, explained last year.
He’d like to see the Wolves tough enough to be chucked out of heli­copters, dropped by drones, or places on rooftops by sol­diers. “Once a cylin­der hits the ground, it checks itself out. If every­thing is work­ing prop­erly, the fins will erect and make the device stand up, Marshall said. “An inflat­able antenna goes up and it gen­er­ates a radio sig­nal. They form a net­work. Wolf net­works find other wolf net­works and even­tu­ally find a path back to the com­mand cen­ter.“
“A WolfPack typ­i­cally would have at least five wolves,” Aviation Week adds. “They are designed to be iden­ti­cal, so each of them can take another’s role, includ­ing sub­pack leader, to gather infor­ma­tion, and pack leader to send it into the larger bat­tle­field net­work.“

The sys­tem would come with its own mis­sion plan­ning tool to opti­mize where wolves are placed. And, as long as a wolf can com­mu­ni­cate with any other wolf, it has access to the whole net­work.
The WolfPack net­work is set up to be dynamic and autonomous. The pack will reas­sign respon­si­bil­i­ties as needed, and the net­work may by itself estab­lish sub-​​nets if those would be use­ful in attack­ing a tar­get. Moreover, WolfPack is designed to be smart enough to detect pat­terns in how an adver­sary employs his elec­tronic sys­tems so the key nodes can be jammed, lis­tened to or invaded. The sys­tem is designed to locate emit­ters with enough accu­racy that they can be attacked with a mor­tar or bomb.

THERE’S MORE: “To put it bluntly, the ‘defense con­trac­tor’ [quoted at the begin­ning of the post] is full of crap,” says Defense Tech reader WT.

Every SINCGARS (Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System) radio car­ried in the field is capa­ble of inter­cept­ing those trans­mis­sions, and there are intel­li­gence assets that are specif­i­cally designed to inter­cept and jam those trans­mis­sions. In fact, due to the low power of those radios (typ­i­cally 2.5 to 7 watts out­put), they are very sus­cep­ti­ble to jam­ming. The posi­tion­ing of these radios (on top of hills or tall build­ings) makes them more sus­cep­ti­ble to direc­tion find­ing and inter­cep­tion. They are most def­i­nitely *NOT* hard to mon­i­tor. They are in fact lit­tle dif­fer­ent from the Soviet era VHF radios. The only dif­fer­ence is in size and weight, the dif­fer­ence between a back­pack radio and a hand­held. The out­put wattage and fre­quen­cies are the same, as is the mod­u­la­tion.
I sus­pect that this is a case of jus­ti­fy­ing some­thing that might be needed in the future (note the ref­er­ence to infiltrat(ing) enemy com­put­ers) by tying it to the cur­rent con­flict. A neat toy that could be very use­ful, but not some­thing that is needed in Iraq now, or in the near future. Im not say­ing that this isnt some­thing that should be pur­sued, just that the guy doesnt know what he is talk­ing about.

Why didn’t the U.S. go after Iraqi com­puter net­works as hard as they could have dur­ing the Iraq inva­sion? To keep French ATMs safe, an Aviation Week arti­cle hints.

Basic ser­vices such as auto­matic bank­ing machines could [have been] affected. Parts of the European bank­ing sys­tem, for exam­ple, were a con­cern to U.S. offi­cials plan­ning elec­tronic attacks on Iraq. Much of that country’s elec­tronic infra­struc­ture was built by French firms.

Nevertheless, the mag­a­zine says, the Pentagon is work­ing to develop “com­puter net­work attack devices [that] can hijack enemy trans­mis­sions, insert spe­cially designed algo­rithms and then send the altered data stream back into the foe’s network.”