They worked on Droids in Star Wars, so why not an al-Qaeda com­mu­ni­ca­tions center.

“They” are electro-magnetic grenades — not some­thing you’ll find in the typ­i­cal armory but appar­ently some­thing that could soon be in the hands of GIs.

“EMP grenade tech­nol­ogy is out there, but I’ve never had my hands on one,” said Col. Laurie Buckhout, chief of the newly formed Electronic Warfare Division, Army Operations, Readiness and Mobilization, dur­ing a blog­gers round­table Tuesday from the Pentagon.

A Web search for “Electro Magnetic Pulse grenade” turns up a num­ber of hits, many related so Star Wars and gam­ing sites. One Star Wars-oriented site notes EMPs also are known as Electrostatic Charge Detonators and were an anti-droid weapon used dur­ing the Clone Wars.

The EMP grenade was one of sev­eral sci-fi type weapons that the mil­i­tary has been devel­op­ing and, in some cases, field­ing. Buckhout also men­tioned lasers for tak­ing out mis­siles and the so-called Active Denial System, which uses microwaves which heat a person’s skin to uncom­fort­able levels.

The pur­pose of the round­table to was dis­cuss the Army’s new Electronic Warfare career field, a 29-series MOS that will include offi­cers, war­rant offi­cers and enlisted per­son­nel. The career field grew out of the Army’s need for an expert force able to counter radio-controlled IEDs, though the troops mak­ing up the new spe­cialty will be doing more than that, accord­ing to the Army; they’ll also be the go-to peo­ple for com­man­ders want­ing to know how they can exploit the elec­tro­mag­netic spec­trum tac­ti­cally across their operations.

The Army has wanted an organic EW corps for some time. Personnel respon­si­ble for EW in Iraq and Afghanistan are mostly drawn from the Navy and Air Force, accord­ing to Buckhout. Using portable jam­mers, they can dom­i­nate the radio spec­trum defeat any sig­nal com­ing from a cell phone or other device used to trig­ger a road­side bomb.

But there’s a prob­lem: the jam­mers may also inter­fere with legit­i­mate radio sig­nals. These can include U.S. troops’ own sys­tems, radio-controlled links to robots used by IED demo­li­tion teams and emer­gency com­mu­ni­ca­tions systems.

Thus, the Army’s drive to come up with signal-jammers that can be slewed into spe­cific emit­ters. Large sys­tems, such as those employed by air­craft, can do the job, Buckhout said, but it’s “like using a sledge­ham­mer to kill a mosquito.”

It kills the mos­quito, she said, but it does a lot of dam­age, too.

“The Army needs to have its own … on-the-ground assets to com­ple­ment our abil­i­ties,” she said, “to get the enemy first or stop them from get­ting us on the ground.”

“Electronic war­fare is going to be fought on the ground, not just in the air, and you have to have an attack from the ground point of view.”

The new Army career field will num­ber 1,619 Soldiers in all, and th-ey will come from the active-duty, reserve and National Guard, she said. It will give the Army the largest pro­fes­sional ED cadre of any branch of the U.S. or NATO mil­i­taries, she said.

(more…)

In just a few months, the first elec­tronic attack ver­sions of Boeing’s F/A-18 fighter jet will make their way to Whidbey Island in Washington State.

The EA-18G will have state-of-the-art jam­mers and com­mu­ni­ca­tions gear, as well as an arse­nal of mis­siles and bombs, Boeing and Navy offi­cials said this week at the Navy League con­fer­ence. The Navy plans to buy about 80 Growlers, at a cost of roughly $8.7 bil­lion, accord­ing to the offi­cial pro­gram plans.

The new jets will replace the aging EA-6B Prowler fleet, which pilots say is much harder to land on a car­rier than its brand-new replacement.

This year, the Navy will hold oper­a­tional eval­u­a­tion test­ing, while also deliv­er­ing planes to Whidbey Island so instruc­tors can get ready to train the first squadron next year. The planes will come online offi­cially in Sept. 2009, the pro­jected date for Initial oper­a­tional capa­bil­ity and grad­u­a­tion of the first class.

(more…)

We posted on our sis­ter site at Military.com a story today about the use of EA-6B Prowlers to counter the impro­vised explo­sive device threat in Iraq. 

This is sig­nif­i­cant because it marks the first time the story has made it out into the open press. Those of us who have embed­ded in both Iraq and Afghanistan over the years knew about this pow­er­ful counter-IED tech­nol­ogy, but we refrained from report­ing on it at the request of com­man­ders who didnt want the secret mis­sion out in the open. 

It was the spring of 2004, when I was in Bagram, Afghanistan, that I first saw the Prowlers in action. I remem­ber ask­ing the Army PAO there whether I could do a story about the fact that EA-6Bs were deployed there the first time Id seen such air­craft in The Stan. 

The PAO looked me straight in the eye and said, what Prowlers? 

I coun­tered: Those four sit­ting right there next to the 160th birds (refer­ring to the impos­ing, black-painted spec ops MH-47s lined up along the tarmac). 

There are no Prowlers here, he said, mak­ing me think of the famous Obi Wan line these are not the droids youre look­ing for 

There are no Prowlers here, is said robotically. 

For nearly two years I and other reporters I know who knew wanted to tell this story. At one point, a col­league of mine reported on the issue based on state­ments from a Prowler dri­ver at a con­fer­ence of Old Crows. He was quickly slapped down by his com­mand, and the Navy pleaded with our pub­li­ca­tion to pull the story. 

Later, in Iraq, it was known as bang­ing trons. Prowlers would orbit dur­ing night patrols, using their pow­er­ful elec­tronic jam­ming gear to run through the spec­trum in hopes of det­o­nat­ing IEDs while bomb lay­ers were plant­ing them. This was known to hap­pen on more than a few occasions.

(more…)

This just in:

WASHINGTON (AP)- The Air Force says it’s cor­rect­ing tech­no­log­i­cal glitches in roughly 87 F-22 Raptor fighter jets.

The com­puter sys­tems on six of the air­craft were dis­abled ear­lier this month dur­ing a flight from Hawaii to Japan.

An Air Force colonel says the stealth fighter jets were par­tic­i­pat­ing in an inau­gural 12-hour test flight to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa when a “nav­i­ga­tion anom­aly” occurred.

The com­puter glitch hap­pened as the air­craft crossed the inter­na­tional date line. It crip­pled nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems and hin­dered communications.

The Air Force says one pilot was able to con­tact con­trac­tor Lockheed Martin to trou­bleshoot the error dur­ing the flight.

Several pilots attempted to reboot the sys­tem with no suc­cess and returned to Hawaii with the help of aer­ial refu­el­ing tankers as a safety precaution.

(Copyright 2007 Associated Press.)

Okay, that’s it. Carry out the plan of the day.

A recent transpac crip­pled six F-22s as they made their way from Hawaii to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. The cul­prit: The International Date Line.

When the fight­ers crossed the line, all of their com­puter sys­tems went Tango Uniform — fuel sub­sys­tems, nav­i­ga­tion, and some of the comms.

We turn to CNN’s John Roberts and retired Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd for expert com­men­tary on the matter:

ROBERTS: Twenty five years from devel­op­ment to deploy­ment, the F-22 Raptor is the most advanced fight­ing machine in the air. But it was no match for a com­puter glitch that left six of them high above the Pacific Ocean, deaf, dumb and blind as they headed to their first deploy­ment. So what hap­pened? We turn to a man who’s at home in the cock­pit, Retired Air Force Major General Don Shepperd. Don, let me set the scene. These F-22s, eight of them, were headed from Hickam Air Force base in Hawaii to an Air Force base in Japan. They were approach­ing the inter­na­tional date line, pick it up from there. 

SHEPPERD: You got it right, John. You want every­thing to go right with your front­line fighter, $125, $135 mil­lion to copy. The F-22 Raptor is our front­line fighter, air defense, air supe­ri­or­ity. It also can drop bombs. It is stealthy. It’s fast and you want it all to go right on your first deploy­ment to the Pacific and it didn’t. At the inter­na­tional date line, whoops, all sys­tems dumped and when I say all sys­tems, I mean all sys­tems, their nav­i­ga­tion, part of their com­mu­ni­ca­tions, their fuel sys­tems. They were — they could have been in real trou­ble. They were with their tankers. The tankers — they tried to reset their sys­tems, couldn’t get them reset. The tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real seri­ous. It cer­tainly could have been real seri­ous if the weather had been bad. It turned out OK. It was fixed in 48 hours. It was a com­puter glitch in the mil­lions of lines of code, some­body made an error in a cou­ple lines of the code and every­thing goes.

ROBERTS: This is almost like the feared Y2K prob­lem that hap­pened to these air­craft. We should point out that com­put­ers con­trol almost every aspect of this air­craft, from their weapons sys­tems, to the flight con­trols and the com­put­ers absolutely went hay­wire, became useless.

SHEPPERD: Absolutely. When you think of air­planes from the old days, with cables and that type of thing and direct con­nec­tions between the sticks and the yolks and the con­trols, not that way any­more. Everything is by com­puter. When your com­put­ers go, your air­planes go. You have mul­ti­ple sys­tems. When they all dump at the same time, you can be in real trou­ble. Luckily this turned out OK.

ROBERTS: What would have hap­pened General Shepperd if these brand-new $120 mil­lion F-22s had been going into battle?

SHEPPERD: You would have been in real trou­ble in the mid­dle of com­bat. The good thing is that we found this out. Any time — before, you know, before we get into com­bat with an air­plane like this. Any time you intro­duce a new air­plane, you are going to find glitches and you are going to find things that go wrong. It hap­pens in our civil­ian air­lin­ers. You just don’t hear much about it but these things absolutely hap­pen. And luck­ily this time we found out about it before com­bat. We got it fixed with tiger teams in about 48 hours and the air­planes were fly­ing again, com­pleted their deploy­ment. But this could have been real seri­ous in combat.

ROBERTS: So basi­cally you had these advanced air — not just supe­ri­or­ity but air supremacy fight­ers that were in there, up there in the air, above the Pacific Ocean, not much more sophis­ti­cated than a lit­tle Cessna 152 only with a jet engine.

SHEPPERD: You got it. They are on a 12 to 15-hour flight from Hawaii to Okinawa, but all their sys­tems dumped. They needed help. Had they got­ten sep­a­rated from their tankers or had the weather been bad, they had no atti­tude ref­er­ence. They had no com­mu­ni­ca­tions or nav­i­ga­tion. They would have turned around and prob­a­bly could have found the Hawaiian Islands. But if the weather had been bad on approach, there could have been real trou­ble. Again, you get refu­el­ing from your tankers. You don’t run — you don’t get your­self where you run out of fuel. You always have enough fuel and refu­el­ing nine, 10, 11, 12 times on a flight like this where you can get some­where to land. But again, atti­tude ref­er­ence and nav­i­ga­tion are essen­tial as is com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In this case all of that was affected. It was a seri­ous problem.

ROBERTS: So the fact the com­put­ers run so much of the sys­tems on these air­craft, General Shepperd, is the — is the mil­i­tary at risk of over engi­neer­ing here so if they did have a prob­lem like that when they were going into a hos­tile sit­u­a­tion, they could be, as you said, repeat­edly in real trouble?

SHEPPERD: Well, you have redun­dant sys­tems but it’s just a fact of life in the mod­ern com­puter age. By the way John, you are going to have the same prob­lem com­ing up on your lap­top com­puter as we con­ferred from — from stan­dard time from day­light sav­ings time to stan­dard time. Your pro­gram — your com­puter is pro­grammed for one thing and we have changed the dates and you are going to have a prob­lem. It’s going to have to be dealt with.

ROBERTS: Do me a favor Don. Make sure I’m not on my lap­top com­puter when I’m fly­ing in an F-22 on that day.

SHEPPERD: Absolutely.

And make sure you don’t try to con­duct any strikes across the International Date Line. One side or the other, war plan­ners; one side or the other.

Full report at DailyTech.

– Ward