Im checking on the accuracy of the report, but I thought it would be worth giving this story from Debka file a closer look.
I usually take Debkas entries with a grain of salt, but I gotta tell you, sometimes theyre eerily on the mark. Rumor has it, the site is a public voice for the Israeli intelligence services, dropping hints to real or imagined threats in hopes of smoking out reality. On this one, Im only too happy to oblige.
Debkas latest post hints that al Qaeda is starting to develop its own electronic countermeasures to U.S. anti-IED technology. As has been reported on these pages quite frequently, the U.S. relies heavily on electronic means to detect and defeat roadside bombs. It seems that AQ is getting in on the act possibly with Iranian help.
Soon after [electronic jammers] were fitted on US military vehicles and went into successful use, al Qaeda came up with a device capable of jamming and disarming both US electronic measures by radio signals. The Islamist terrorists thus escalated their challenge to the US military by introducing electronic warfare.
Their success has boosted the US and British death toll in Iraq. Of the 50 US and UK soldiers who died in Iraq in the first 9 days of April, 30 were killed by IEDs. Al Qaedas mystery device is believed by military experts to account for the soaring rate of effective roadside bomb hits on American vehicles, even those fitted with the new counter-measures…
…al Qaeda is suspected of acquiring its advanced electronic warfare technology from Iran, which also supplies the IEDs to Iraqs Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents. Tehran owns an interest in the successful performance of its weaponry on Iraqs battlefields and, most of all, in proving its technology is superior to American systems.
The notion doesnt seem too far fetched. When it comes down to it, a lot of the back and forth on IEDs is a low-tech game: washing machine timers, radio phone transmitters, garage door openers, cell phones. Maybe its not so hard to counter American counter-measures after all?
(Gouge: WaZinn)
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Firstly, calling the insurgency “Al Quaeda” is definatly a tipoff to be suspicious. Likewise Iran cooperates strongly with Shiites, but would be quite happy to see the Sunnis burn in hell, while Al Quaeda is a Sunni group. Thus any site which would conflate the two must be viewed with suspicion.
Second, it is a cat and mouse game which there are well known countermeasures to electronic jamming: IR triggers (both “pass a point” triggers and line of site command detonation. Think remote control), physical triggers, wires, timers, etc.
Third, the US EM jamming can’t be absolute, as the US radios still have to work. Expect radio-detonated bombs to converge into that part of the frequency space.
Yeah, I smell bullshit. There are any number of RF devices that can be used for a trigger across a pretty wide spectrum of just the commercial/civilian frequencies. Cell & Cordless phones, garage door openers, UHF, VHF, and so on. A cheap wireless microphone might have hundreds of potential freqs. Transmitter power on the Hummer would be limited by both the potential of interference and the power available from the hummer, which we all know is already taxed. Any IED transmitter would only have to generate a stronger signal to be effective. IF door chimes or line of sight devices would create additional problems for our attempts to defeat. We would literally have to bombard the entire RF range with white noise at very high power (tens of thousands of watts) and the IR spectrum with “light” to defeat all possible scenarios. Very difficult when the device needs less than an tenth of a second to receive that signal. This is all strictly Radio Shack stuff too, you don’t need a multi-million $$$ ECM budget (or the Iranians for that matter) to pull it off. Finally, any sort of hard wire defeats all these countermeasures.
How are you going to jam a jammer? I’ve worked with all those devices over there as an infantryman, I’m not going to go into detail – but from what I’m reading here such a device would not work against what we use there. I hope they are trying such a thing though, because we could easily triangulate the source of any jamming attempt and eliminate it. There are easier ways to defeat the jammers we use, broadcasting your location to every antenna farm in Iraq is not a good way to go about it.
Surely any active radio jammers fitted to vehicles simply give the enemy plenty of warning to prepare an ambush with a command line detonated bomb ?
With passive radio direction finding equipment, such vehicle mounted jammers could also betray the movement patterns of patrol or convoy vehicles, over a large distance, given the easy availability of portable computers and software capable of plotting such signals rapidly and automatically onto a map.
Again, the units on the hummers must be fairly low power (a 120 watt amplifier would use about 4 amps) due to power limits, plus not interfereing with their own comm gear. I don’t think it would be efficient for us or them to network the proper triangulation, especially in an urban environment, but it may come to that.
>With passive radio direction finding equipment
You could also have that mounted on the vehicle and detect where RF signals came from to detonate RF triggered IEDs. The next second the IED is triggered, you get to know where the IED team is and they are dead. By the way, do you think the IED teams will be able to have access to those equipment for sure? They don’t need that in the first place. They’ve got scouts to spot the vehicles. They even used kites to alert vehicles nearby.
The story as linked smells of propganda. In simplest terms, it doesn’t make technical sense; it’s either balderdash or using the wrong terms to describe what they’re talking about.
I’m not even going to start on what’s wrong with this article. As soon as it mentions AQ and Iran as partners I began to laugh. This author doesn