The U.S. Army wants drone-mounted signal jammer now to dominate future electronic warfare and is switching to a little-understood and lightly regulated contracting method to get them. The expert said jammers can be built into VIP motorcades if they are intended to counter threats. There are many better methods that could have been used to deal with possible threats in Parliament.
According to the expert, signal jammers are starting to pop up in private businesses where they are used to “improve productivity in manufacturing and against corporate espionage”. The local Gunfighter Flag exercise held in mid-April led to unintended consequences after military jamming equipment used to train aircrews also blocked navigation signals used by local farmers, pilots and city workers.
Controlling jamming technology controls future communications
Illegal cellphones have been a chronic problem in prisons across the country. In South Carolina, they’ve been used to arrange a contract killing of a prison officer, plot an escape and conduct all manner of fraud. Fighting over such contraband helped spark a riot that killed seven and wounded 22 at Lee on April 15, officials have said, and inmates used their illicit phones to stoke the unrest.
Seizures of contraband phones are up, and last week federal prosecutors indicted 14 former state Corrections Department employees on smuggling charges. But even with 6,200 phones seized from the state’s prisons last year, the devices remain ubiquitous.
For years, officials in state and federal prisons have spoken out about the dangers posed by cellphones in the hands of inmates, who can use them to continue their criminal endeavors behind bars, including drug trafficking, extortion scams, and even hits on witnesses and others.
The GPS cell phone jammer during Red Flag and other exercises this winter are intended to prepare pilots and air crews for operations under those sorts of hostile electromagnetic conditions. The Army will conduct its own GPS jamming exercises as well at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Polk in Louisiana, and at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, during the same timeframe.