The US Navy’s USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier has reached the Philippines, and it looks like China has jamming equipment in the South China Sea. While jamming isn’t anywhere near shooting, the provocative activity “could lead to an escalatory pattern that could be negative for both sides,” and the US will “not look kindly” on the practice, according to an expert. US officials told the Wall Street Journal early in April that intelligence officers detected China moving radar and communications jamming equipment to the South China Sea.
For those familiar with these operations, this type of attack is not surprising, and teams anticipate disruption with a combination of tools. Using a multi-domain modeling system prepares operators by analyzing GPS reception in an operations area, and if that will interfere with the aircraft’s reception of GPS signals.
The U.S. Army wants drone-mounted cell phone jammer now to dominate future electronic warfare and is switching to a little-understood and lightly regulated contracting method to get them.
The Russians began jamming some smaller U.S. drones several weeks ago, the officials said, after a series of suspected chemical weapons attacks on civilians in rebel-held eastern Ghouta. The Russian military was concerned the U.S. military would retaliate for the attacks and began jamming the GPS systems of drones operating in the area, the officials explained.
According to the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the Russian military has invested heavily in electronic warfare gear in recent years, and its units “layer these systems to shut down FM, SATCOM, cellular, GPS, and other signals.” Russian forces have used these jamming capabilities before. During the Ukraine crisis in 2014, Russian forces grounded a U.N. surveillance drone fleet during operations in Eastern Ukraine using GPS signal jammer, and Ukrainian forces reported widespread comms degradation. Last year, the U.S. Maritime Administration reported a GPS spoofing attack off the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, which caused the GPS displays on multiple merchant ships to show incorrect positions. The incident was not definitively linked to Russian forces, but reports indicate that it affected at least 20 ships.
The US Navy’s USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier has reached the Philippines, and it looks like China has jamming equipment in the South China Sea. While jamming isn’t anywhere near shooting, the provocative activity “could lead to an escalatory pattern that could be negative for both sides,” and the US will “not look kindly” on the practice, according to an expert. US officials told the Wall Street Journal early in April that intelligence officers detected China moving radar and communications jamming equipment to the South China Sea.