JAMMERS, MICROWAVE BLASTS TARGET I.E.D.S

When U.S. Army Capt. Christopher Sullivan was killed last week by a hand­made bomb, it was a tragedy for his fam­ily — and a trag­i­cally ordi­nary event for the American mil­i­tary. Improvised explo­sive devices, or IEDs, have been respon­si­ble for hun­dreds of American casu­al­ties in Iraq. And so far, there doesn’t appear to be any reli­able way of stop­ping them.
The Pentagon, scram­bling for answers, is in the mid­dle of a fran­tic search for high-​​tech meth­ods to find and neu­tral­ize the jury-​​rigged weapons.
Microwave blasts, radio-​​frequency jam­mers and chem­i­cal sen­sors are among the meth­ods being explored and deployed in this largely secret effort.
But, because IEDs are cob­bled together from “what­ever the peo­ple that plant them can find,” warned Cliff Anderson, a pro­gram man­ager at the Office of Naval Research, “there is no magic bul­let” that will sud­denly end the IED threat…
Daniel Goure, vice pres­i­dent of the Lexington Institute, a Washington-​​area think tank, believes, the most effec­tive IED coun­ter­mea­sure might be a pulse of elec­tro­mag­netic energy that can “fry the cir­cuits of these bombs.“
Researchers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Dahlgren Laboratory in Virginia are work­ing on such a solu­tion, called NIRF, short for Neutralizing Improvised Explosive Devices with RF. The device, accord­ing to a source famil­iar with the project, “pro­duces a very high-​​frequency field, in the microwave range, at very short range” to take out an IED’s elec­tron­ics. The Pentagon hopes to deploy NIRF in Iraq later this year.
My arti­cle in today’s Wired News has details.
THERE’S MORE: The L.A. Times has a dyna­mite story today from Al-​​Ramadi, Iraq, on the dan­gers fac­ing American con­voys there.

As he always does before trav­el­ing the road­ways of Iraq, Marine Staff Sgt. Johnathan Radel on Tuesday said a short prayer.
“Lord, please keep us safe today from IEDs and VBIEDS,” he said as he sat in his Humvee, using the ini­tials for impro­vised explo­sive devices and vehicle-​​borne impro­vised explo­sive devices.
Less than five min­utes later, as the eight-​​vehicle con­voy rolled through the streets of Ramadi in the predawn dark­ness, an IED exploded beneath one of the Humvees, send­ing an orange fire­ball into the sky and shred­ding the vehicle’s back tires.

AND MORE: How does the Army’s 3rd Corps Support Command say you should han­dle IEDs? Read this brief­ing to find out.

January 26th, 2005 | Bomb Squad | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.