The War on Terror is far from a traditional war: it typically involves small battles and improvised explosives developed by a small group of terrorists or fighters, instead of the Hollywood-style front lines that most Americans envision when they consider what a war looks like.
Those small explosive devices known within the military as IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices. They typically use a cellular phone for detonation and have been one of the leading causes of troop deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To thwart this guerrilla-style assault on American troops by foreign fighters, the military has developed what it calls an “IED Jammer”. These devices used radio waves to overload a cell phone’s signal and reception capacity, thus making it impossible for the bomb’s architects to detonate it when American troops are nearby and in most vulnerable.
Development of the Device
The IED jammer that the military currently uses is the evolution of several models that all worked questionably and inconsistently. Since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the first wars to feature a large presence from private contractors, the military had originally challenged those entities to create radio jamming devices rather than take the project on themselves.
This resulted in limited success, with some devices jamming cellular signals and keeping troops safe, while other devices tended to be less effective and still allowed cellular phones to receive a signal and detonate explosive devices. In fact, some of these early radio jamming devices effectively “jammed” themselves , cell phones till functioned just fine, but the frequency jammer was overloaded by its own overabundance of radio waves.
Those early technological difficulties have since been worked out, however, and the current generation of radio jammer hardware is helping to win the War on Terror by effectively neutralizing the opposition’s best weapon. They simply are having a harder time using IEDs against American troops.
Benefits of Radio Jammers
The War on Terror is largely a series of small battles and events that the American government hopes will disband terrorist groups and bankrupt their efforts to harm American lives. With the development of devices which jam radio frequencies, they are primarily pursuing convoy protection for the troops who fight these battles.
The goal of terrorist fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan is not to kill large numbers of Americans on the battlefield. It is instead to prevent the battles from happening, kill Americans when they’re on their way to the next fight, rather than wait for them to get there.
With this innovative investment in convoy protection , American troops are able to get past the IEDs that once prevented them from being fully effective in the War on Terror. They are now able to take the battle directly to terrorist campsites and headquarters, neutralizing their enemy and killing foreign fighters before they’ve had a chance to adequately respond.
This technology has proven essential on the battlefield; it continues to become more sophisticated, and more common, as Americans reach their objectives and troops begin to come home victorious.
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