Then they'd connect the two-and-a-half inch wide lamp bases to firing circuits, and to Soviet-era munitions. By early '02, al-Qaida bomb-makers were cramming radio frequency receivers and simple digital signal decoders into the bases of Japan InstaLite fluorescent lamps. troops with improvised explosive devices in the first days after the October 2001 invasion. The first of the these machines begins field-testing next month.Īfghan militants began attacking U.S. They were prepared to bring me into the R&D facility where company technicians were developing what could amount to the ultimate weapon of this electromagnetic war: a tool that offers the promise of not only jamming bombs, but finding them, interrupting GPS signals, eavesdropping on enemy communications, and disrupting drones, too. They were finally able to retell the largely-hidden battles for the electromagnetic spectrum that raged, invisibly, as the insurgencies carried on. Company executives were ready to discuss the jammer - its evolution, and its capabilities. Recently, however, I received an unusual offer from ITT, the defense contractor which made the vast majority of those 50,000 jammers. But the dark veil surrounding the jammers remained largely intact, even after the Pentagon bought more than 50,000 units at a cost of over $17 billion.
That equipment - a radio-frequency jammer - was upgraded several times, and eventually robbed the Iraq insurgency of its most potent weapon, the remote-controlled bomb.
military developed a technology so secret that soldiers would refuse to acknowledge its existence, and reporters mentioning the gear were promptly escorted out of the country. In the early years of the Iraq war, the U.S.