Radio-Friendly Jammers?

American radio-frequency jammers have done a pretty good job at keeping insurgent from remotely-triggering roadside bombs. But the problem is, the jammers screw up a whole bunch of other gear in the process: bomb-disposal robots go haywire; U.S. radios get filled with chirping static.

But General William Wallace, head of U.S. Training and Doctrine Command, says the military has found a way to fix that. "The Army is now able to operate improvised explosive device (IED) jammers in Iraq without disrupting its communications equipment," says Federal Computer Week.

Navy experts [have] taught Army soldiers how to remove conflicts from the frequency spectrum so that IED jammers and communications equipment can be used simultaneously in the same environment, Wallace said...

The Army is also ramping up its electronic warfare training... Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody recently initiated e-warfare training courses at Fort Sill, Okla., and Fort Huachuca, Ariz., at the tactical and strategic levels, respectively.

The Army plans to make e-warfare a core competency, meaning every soldier will receive some training. Also, the service could evolve the e-warfare specialty to become a separate career field, Wallace said.

The Army will base its training approach partly on the Navy model and plans to replace Navy e-warfare specialists in Iraq...

Meanwhile, the IED threat is changing to adapt to the U.S. military’s countermeasures. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently said that new IED trigger devices in Iraq, supplied by Iran, use infrared driven trigger devices, rather than radio frequency-based triggers.

All that said, "The current policy in [Iraq] AND [Afghanistan] is [to] never turn off [the jammer] system," writes a DANGER ROOM pal. "You know as well as I do that there is always a work-around."