Russia is testing its GPS signal jammer weapons in the neighbourhood

“Routine military exercises” is always the official Russian response. Yet exercises with simulated jamming are just as effective. Lab tests, live exercises deeper inside Russia, field operations in the Ukraine and Syria – all have ensured the Russian military knows precisely how well their jamming equipment works. They have no need to disrupt and endanger Norwegian air traffic and lives to ensure military readiness.

For AC-130 crews, an enemy jamming their communications systems or data links could be especially perilous for both American special operators and supporting conventional forces and innocent bystanders. The gunships rely heavily on those systems to help locate and positively identify targets and then coordinate their attacks with other manned and unmanned aircraft and joint tactical air controllers on the ground.

Russian forces jammed GPS in northern Norway again last month. The effects were particularly felt by aviation and telecommunications. This follows a similar week-long jamming episode in the same area in September, and jamming in the Baltic later that month which disrupted cell phone service in parts of Latvia, Sweden and Norway. It also came at the same time as Russia reportedly began jamming and disabling sophisticated US weapon systems in Syria.

Jamming GPS receivers could also more directly impair a gunships ability to accurately attack targets. The AC-130W Stinger II, one of the types we know has been flying over Syria and Iraq, relies heavily on precision-guided munitions, including GPS-guided types such as the GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb (SDB).

The U.S. Army wants drone-mounted signal wifi jammer now to dominate future electronic warfare and is switching to a little-understood and lightly regulated contracting method to get them.

The jammers are able to differentiate between hostile drones from hon-hostile ones. If the threat is identified as hostile it will be classified as an actual threat which will then be intercepted in the “Act” phase. The Jammer can be deployed in minimum time frame and comes into action immediately. These drone jammers work only within a secured areas and can completely disable all drone flights ranging from 1 meter to 2000 meters.