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Monday, August 08, 2005

Electronic Warfare 
Here's an idea from the comments section to the blog.

For warfare against cellphone based threats, we have 3 choices. The first, is to do nothing, and let our men die. The second, fly over with the EA6B Prowler and radiate enough electromagnetic energy that the all civilian radios will be burned out. The third, do something similar with a microwave radiation source on a vehicle. The third, use the cell phone technology to our advantage: Improvise, Adapt, Overcome as Gunny Highway would say. Cell phones and the towers communicate to know which cell phone is in which cell. Put your cell phone next to your AM radio and every minute or so, you'll hear "clicka clicka clicka" and that is the phone and the cell tower exchanging communications and ID numbers. So, if the enemy is using cell phones, our forces should put up a "spoof" cell phone tower, and send out the message "all cell phones register now". This is done by your cell phone company anyway. Hackers do it also to steal phone numbers in the US. Then, have an automated dialer call every number that is there, at 3am. If you hear a boom, the bomb went off. And it might have gone off on the enemy's workbench. heh heh heh.....

The Isrealis do this. I have heard on the news that the Russians do something similar in Chechnya.

Also, when the cell phones register in, that is when radio direction finders can locate the position of each phone. If the position of the phone is the highway that some troops will be traveling on, it might suggest that a bit more investigation be done.

In terms of ground penetrating radar, think of a system similar in concept to how the P3 aircraft would find Ivan's subs out in the ocean. A map that was made of the earths magnetic field could be compared against a new map made in realtime. If there is a difference, and there is no surface ship present, then Ivan is found. The radar could be used to map the ground under the roads. The next time a check is done, if there is something different, then be afraid. The radar is used on construction to find pipes already, and to map out construction areas before the earth is moved. Lots of computers are needed to work this.


Now, we do have a vehicle-mounted system that does have some electronic capabilities. I don't know the specifics about how it works and I'd keep them to myself if I did. I'm not a technical geek though. There was some talk recently about the insurgency using infrared detonation devices specifically to circumvent US countermeasures. And maybe the force behind this is that the US electronic measures are having some effect?

I know it would frustrate me if I were a terrorist to go through the time and expense of building an IED, risking my neck to go emplace it, wait half the night for a convoy to roll through, and then hit "dial" on my cell phone only to have nothing happen. What a demotivator!

But if US countermeasures weren't effective, maybe they wouldn't use an IR detonator, which requires line of sight, and for that reason may expose the bombers to direct fire.

Any subject matter experts know anything about this? Can we force all cell phones on the network to register, and cause some premature detonations?

Can we magnetic map MSRs to detect changes in the earth's magnetic field beneath an improved road? (Remember, pipes usually extend beyond the street in either direction. A sub-road IED doesn't.)

If that technology can be mounted on a UAV or helicopter, it would not be a problem to put into use. Interesting stuff.

Now, if it works, you also have a synchronization issue: You do not want to force register every cell-phone for miles while you have an EOD team out defusing a bomb in a residential neighborhood. And I would hate to see a whole apartment building blow up because we've set off two 155 shells on someone's kitchen table. Then again, these Iraqi communities are going to have to police themselves. They can solve that problem ahead of time by turning these guys in.

Splash, out

Jason

Comments:
Jason, are you giving me a soapbox? ;-)

I’ve been thinking more about the IEDs, cellphones, our troops and so forth. Uh Oh…..
And it is not just about electronic warfare, it is also about “information warfare”.

Well, “all’s fair in love and war”…. My wife convinced me of at least part of that…

But here’s the major point I’m thinking: supercomputing has applications at the tactical unit level, and it hasn’t been applied yet (to my knowledge). Obviously it (supercomputing) is doing great things for aerospace designers, strategic surveillance systems, and missile interceptors. “Patriot vs. Scud!”

The costs are falling dramatically, and networking technology is enabling new designs. Look what computing researchers put together with a bunch of Playstations. Yes, Playstations, mounted in racks, networked together, and they’d fit in an enclosure on the back of a full size pickup truck. Intro: http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/ Picture: http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/cluster.php

This setup at the time it was made in 2003 cost $50K, and it was one of the 500 most powerful computers in the world. The price of the PS2 has fallen since then. And computing power has increased.

OK, so what. How does that help the soldier?

Well, good intelligence helps the soldier. And good intelligence can be derived from the signals transmitted by cell phones. But, it needs to be analyzed in real-time. What I’d envision is that 3 or more signal monitoring sites would be set up outside of a place like Mosul. Each would monitor cell phone ID communications and signal strength. These monitoring sites (obviously also with some form of computer control) would relay info of signal identity, strength, and time (based off of the GPS master clock). And based upon the data coming in, the supercomputer could then derive the positions of each cell phone in the region, its number, and whether it just dialed a call. That database would then be filtered in accordance with the needs of the mission planners. “Give me the list of phones that haven’t moved in the last day, for which the calculated position happens to be a roadway.” “Give me a list of phones that dialed a number 10 seconds before that last IED blew up.” “Give me a list of the phones that dialed within 15 minutes of our troops losing track of the terrorists that fired on them at 2:30AM while on recon”. “Give me a list of the numbers common to my last three search requests”. And if you knew the nom-de-guerre of the local terrorist leader, build in the software the ability to also compile a list of phone numbers upon which the signal processing equipment detected that name. Call that last one a feature for the upgrade to the system.

As an application, for instance, in Fallujah of last November, perhaps each cell phone position would indicate either that a terrorist, or a scared woman with kids was at a certain location. Either would be good to know. And think of the psychological effect on the terrorist, if he has a phone, to get the call on it, telling him “surrender or die” as the US forces move in to position around his location. And if he was unsophisticated enough to have brought in the phone from his home in Saudi Arabia, he might even have the phone in his own name, and if our guys at the three letter agencies have a dossier on this guy, we could have a three way conference call on the battlefield with the guy and his mom back in Mecca. Mom might express a different idea about her boy meeting the 72 virgins in this manner. Just daydreaming I am, out of my ignorance about this topic.

As the terrorists realized that they could not use a phone more than once and live to tell about it, they’d adapt. And the signal monitoring guys would have to do something new to adapt, like “give me in realtime a notification that a new cell number was just activated in this region”, or “give me the positions of all cell phones that have been activated in the last month, but which never have made an outgoing call”.

Some of what I am thinking about is based upon what is reported by the German police in busting the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group in the ‘70s. They put together a daily database of all electrical consumption on a per-electric meter basis, and began to see a correlation to kidnappings, bombings, murders, and changes in electrical use in the apartments that were used as safe-houses by the gang. The police staked out these apartments, and caught the suspects.

The mobility of cell phones certainly adds a twist to this cat and mouse game.




Guess who provides cell-phone service in Iraq? Turns out to be Worldcom, of the Bernie Ebbers $11 Billion accounting scandal. http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,81345,00.html
I’m hoping our intelligence guys are plugged in to the network control centers. ;-)
(And that we have good eavesdropping equipment in place someplace, and Arabic language specialists listening in…)


The FRS and GMRS radios don’t have the unique message identifiers built in to their datastream, so more thought would have to go in to dealing with them. But I bet you give a guy/gal with a PhD a research grant, and a 90 day limit, and something would come out. Since the FRS and GMRS radios don’t transmit anything when in receive mode, like the IED seen at http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/2005/08/jungle-law_10.html, something different would have to be done to detect them. The new radio designs don’t give off the electromagnetic noise like things did in the past. Maybe just jamming these things is the best we can do, or jamming with enough power to damage the devices.


Yes, I like Tom Clancy and the X-Files.

I’ve read of how Homeland security funds are spent. $80K for one small town to buy gym equipment for the part-time fire department, $12K for a plasma TV, a town on Martha’s Vineyard (where Clinton’s vacation) got $260K for bio-response equipment, Concord (home of the Minuteman statue) got $1.7M for ‘a anti-terrorism first responder program’. Well, anyway, we have troops in harm’s way at present, I question the priority here.

Maybe, just maybe, some similar funding has been found to get a truck mounted supercomputer and software system made to work in the military environment, that will help our guys in the realtime it is needed.

Matt
 
Here's the questions I got.

1) Why aren't the forces in Iraq using mine sweepers and sweeping devices before convoy's roll through an area?

2) I like Jason's "spoof" tower idea. I was thinking about that black box that kills all cell phones in its zone. There was an article in the Washington Post a while back that talked about this outlawed technology that's available in Japan where cell phones can't send or receive within its radius. The Japanese use it in restaurants and movie theaters but it is outlawed in America. Increase its power and mount it in the first, middle and last vehicle, and now you got a rolling black hole.
 
check this out:

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/inscom/liwa/

"Information Dominance"....

YO!
Matt

(Jason, thanks for all you do!)
 
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