Defense & Security Technology

My bombs can still blow up your electromagnetic weapons...smart or dumb as they may be.

Actually I think that this Economist article is part of a disinformation campaign. It is the American military that is highly reliant on high technology that an electromagnetic weapon might disrupt. That is it might disrupt our military if they hadn't already researched this approach, identified how to mitigate, and realized that it's a wasteful expense to even try to develop this kind of a weapon. Maybe we can bankrupt a few terrorist organizations by tricking them into developing these weapons.

Or, maybe the government is developing such systems in order to be prepared to disrupt citizen systems in the event of popular dissent getting out of hand...Think Twitter, Facebook, the Internet itself.

I always get a kick out of conspiracy theories that assume that the government which can't finance its way out of a wet paper bag or shut up a lowly private who releases thousands of classified documents...well...you get the idea...

Well, the cards are face out from Arab Spring, how does a government do (or attempt) such a thing? Easy...You get to the service provider. No special bomb required.

Actually, we can do it, using a "bomb" (not much real destructive power, since it doesn't rely on blast effects to do its damage) which can be built on a small (think 8 foot U-Haul) trailer, with EMP affects being applied for up to about 5 miles around, depending on terrain and other factors. But one of you hinted at the real developmental need in the event we try to routinely use them. It is hard to protect your own equipment against the effects. And whose equipment is closer to the pulse, theirs, or ours. So, you say, air-drop it, like a conventional bomb. Can also be done, and has, in tests. But the result is harder to predict, for the reasons given above.

So, the reason for doing it is that if we knock out enemy comms before we send in ANY troops (boots on the ground, wings in the air, SEALS in/on/etc. whatever it takes) we can use fewer troops, and take less casualties, getting the job done at less expense in human costs. But the reason for NOT doing it, YET, is that we need sophisticated (read fragile) electronics more to wage war than almost any other country in the world.

Once again, does technology serve us, or do we serve it?

I'm remarkably curious as how EMP stalls a diesel in a metal box.

Not a diesel, IF it doesn't use an electronic injector system. And not in a metal box, IF the metal box forms a complete enclosure, and all parts are grounded to a good solid body/frame/block ground. But if the box has open seams, or, worse yet, drainage or other fairly large holes, where localized currents can create even VERY momentary high-potential-arcing, it is the resultant arcs that fry everything nearby with secondary RF spikes resulting from the arcing.

But a fully mechanical diesel, with NO electronics to control it at all, would probably be OK. At least until it needed to use its glow-plugs again, at which point, they would probably have already fused, or had their contacts blown off, by the aformentioned arcing.

The "box" would need to be constructed in the form of a Faraday cage.

Regarding EMP weapons, the US has had them perfected for many years.

How difficult, and expensive, would it be to build one that could disable individual vehicles from a helicopter or car ? Not a bomb, but some sort of electrical overload or jamming signal.

The problem is two-fold, developing a rapidly rising waveform with a VERY steep leading edge, and creating an RF-dense enough field to do the job. And currently it involves using an explosive charge to explosively compress a physically large coil (read, fill a pickup truck bed) so that the electromagnetic field surrounding it is forced into a smaller magnetic volume, and the instantaneous following field collapse is that much larger in magnitude. No doubt others can, and will, describe it better and more accurately, but the salient points are a) it CAN be done from a vehicle, but it has to be close to the device being saturated with the EMP, and b) it DOES involved explosives.

Are Americans going to be the lab rats for these weapons test ? they have already used some of the microwave weapons of protestors.

Use them on the Occupy-ers! If nothing else, maybe the lice and cockroaches will run!

yeah protect the banker so they can come up with more schemes to steal the Equity Americans have worked hard to build. Would not want those theives to be threatened in anyway.