2011
AUTHOR: NOAH SHACHTMAN.NOAH SHACHTMAN IRAQ INVISIBLE WAR
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 06.14.11.06.14.11
TIME OF PUBLICATION: 4:00 AM.4:00 AM
THE SECRET HISTORY OF IRAQ’S INVISIBLE WAR
IN THE EARLY years of the Iraq war, the U.S. military developed a
technology so secret that soldiers would refuse to acknowledge its existence, and
reporters mentioning the gear were promptly
escorted out of the country. That equipment – a radio-frequency
jammer – was upgraded several times, and eventually robbed the Iraq insurgency
of its most potent weapon, the remote-controlled bomb. But the dark veil
surrounding the jammers remained largely intact, even after the Pentagon bought
more than 50,000 units at a cost of over $17 billion.
Recently,
however, I received an unusual offer from ITT, the defense contractor which
made the vast majority of those 50,000 jammers. Company executives were ready
to discuss the jammer – its evolution, and its capabilities. They were finally
able to retell the largely-hidden battles for the electromagnetic spectrum that
raged, invisibly, as the insurgencies carried on. They were prepared to bring
me into the R&D facility where company technicians were developing what
could amount to the ultimate weapon of this electromagnetic war: a tool that
offers the promise of not only jamming bombs, but finding them, interrupting
GPS signals, eavesdropping on enemy communications, and disrupting drones, too.
The first of the these machines begins field-testing next month.
On a
fist-clenchingly cold winter morning, I took a train across the Hudson River to
the secret jammer lab.
Tucked
behind a Target and an Olive Garden knock-off, the flat, anonymous office
building gives no hint of what’s inside. Nor do the blank, fluorescent-lit
halls. But open a door off of one of those halls, and people start screaming.
“Screens
off!” barks a man with a fullback’s build. “Turn off the test equipment!” On
the ceiling, a yellow alarm light flashes and spins — the sign that someone
without a security clearance is in a classified facility.
Afghan
militants began attacking U.S. troops with improvised explosive devices in the
first days after the October 2001 invasion. By early ’02, al-Qaida bomb-makers
were cramming radio frequency receivers and simple digital signal decoders into
the bases of Japan InstaLite fluorescent lamps. Then they’d connect the
two-and-a-half inch wide lamp bases to firing circuits, and to Soviet-era
munitions. The result was a crude, radio-controlled weapon dubbed the “Spider” by the Americans. With it, an attacker
could wait for his prey, set off the bomb at just the right moment — and never
have to worry about getting caught. When the explosion happened, he’d be
hundreds of yards away.
Worse, U.S.
forces had no way of blocking the Spider’s triggering signal. Military bomb
squads carried around a few half-assed jammers. But they couldn’t be mounted on
vehicles, “and they were too weak to provide protection beyond a few yards,” Rick Atkinson notes in his exquisite
history, Left of Boom: The
Struggle to Defeat Roadside Bombs.
‘If somebody sits a kilometer away with a radio and targets our guys, we’ve got no ability to get him.’
Navy
engineers hustled to build something a little stronger, and a little more
portable. By November of 2002, they had a jammer called Acorn that was
hard-wired to stop Spiders. It wasn’t much. As a so-called “active jammer,” the
Acorn put out a relatively-indiscriminate “barrage signal” that ate up power
and generated all kinds of interference. That kept its effective radiated power
— the amount of signal hitting any one bomb receiver — low. The signal was so
weak, the jammer had to be left on and screaming constantly. Otherwise, troops
would be inside the bomb’s danger radius before they ever had a chance to block
it. Worse, it could only block the specific receivers used in Spiders. If the
bombers switched frequencies, the countermeasure would be useless.
Meanwhile,
the Army looked for ways to modify its Shortstop Electronic Protection System, designed
to shield troops from artillery and mortar fire. This was a so-called
“reactive” countermeasure. It monitored the airwaves, listening for one of the
radio signals used by the munitions’ proximity fuses. Once the countermeasure
heard that signal, Shortstop recorded it, modified it, and then blasted it back
at the munition. By confusing the weapons with their own signals, Shortstop
could fool the shells into prematurely detonating.
The soldiers
tweaked the Shortstop to scan for radio-controlled bombs’ triggering
frequencies, and to rely on a Humvee’s power supply. “The wife of one
Fort Monmouth engineer collected miniature kitchen witches that inspired a new
name for the device: Warlock Green,” Atkinson recounts.
Five Warlock
Greens accompanied U.S. forces into Iraq in March, 2003. By mid-summer, there
were 100 jammers in the warzone. It wasn’t nearly enough. Iraq’s militants had
learned from their compatriots in Afghanistan, and were setting off
remotely-detonated explosives everywhere.
Just like
the first turn of this improvised explosive device (IED) war, the electronic
countermeasures were having trouble keeping up with the bombs. It took Warlock
Green, ultimately manufactured by the EDO Corporation, a couple of seconds to
record, modify, and rebroadcast a triggering signal. An insurgent bomber could
set off an explosive in a few fractions of a second, if he had a simple,
low-powered trigger, like a garage door opener. The jammer didn’t have time to
catch up.
The jammers
could only cover a small slice of the radio frequency spectrum. Whenever the
insurgents should change triggers — from say, door openers to key fobs — the
jammer-makers would have to go back to the drawing board. Warlock Greens could
be reprogrammed, within limits. The Acorns couldn’t; the new threats rendered them
useless.
“Every time
we put a countermeasure in the field – especially with Warlock – they were able
to outstrip it,” says Paul Mueller, a long-time defense executive, who
supervised jammer-building operations at EDO and at the ITT Corporation.
“They were a step ahead of us.”
‘Every time we used a countermeasure, they were able to outstrip it.’
But with
insurgents setting off 50 IEDs a week, even the step-behind jammers were better
than no jammers at all. By May 1, 2004 — one year to the day since President
George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations — the improvised
bombs had wounded more than 2,000 American troops in Iraq. The IEDs killed 57
servicemembers in April alone, and injured another 691. “IEDs
are my number-one threat in Iraq. I want a full-court press on
IEDs,” Gen. John Abizaid, then the top military commander in the Middle East,
wrote in a June 2004 memo.
In the early
fall of 2004, the Army signed a contract for 1,000 Warlocks. By March, 2005, the Army upped
that order to8,000 jammers. It was a high-tech,
electromagnetic surge. And it was meant to send the militants sliding back down
the scale of sophistication. “If somebody can sit a click [kilometer] away with
a radio and target our guys, we’ve got almost no ability to get him,” says a
source familiar with the jammer buildup. “But if he’s doing the Wile E. Coyote
thing, and pushing down that plunger, at least we’ve got some chance to shoot
him before he gets it down.”
All the big
defense contractors — and lots of little ones — got into the electronic
countermeasure business. The Marines bought one model; the Army another;
Special Operations Forces, a third. The Army began buying Warlock Reds — small,
active jammers that blocked out the low-powered triggers that Warlock Green
couldn’t stop in time. Warlock Blue was a wearable jammer, to protect the
infantryman on patrol. Each countermeasure had its shortcomings; Warlock Blue,
for instance, was “a half-watt jammer at a time when some engineers suspected
that 50 watts might be too weak,” Atkinson notes. But no commander
could afford to wait for a perfect, common bomb-stopper; too many men were
getting blown up. By May 1, 2005, the number of U.S. troops wounded by the
bombs had climbed to more than 7,700.
There were
drawbacks to throwing all those countermeasures into the field at once. Warlock
Green would sometimes mistake Warlock Red’s signal for an enemy’s, and go after
it. That would lock the jammers in a so-called “deadly embrace,” cancelling one
another out.
When the Warlocks were operational, they wreaked havoc with both the
remote-controlled robots that
were supposed to handle bombs at a safe distance and the radios soldiers used
to warn each other about upcoming threats. Warlock Red “prevented
communications” from three of the Army’s most common radio systems, according
to a classified reportreleased
by WikiLeaks. The report recommended keeping radios and countermeasures in
different vehicles to prevent the “electronic fratricide.” Of course, that
meant a soldier with a jammer in his Humvee was cut off from the rest of his
convoy.
For reporters, pointing
out these drawbacks — in fact, pointing out anything about the
jammers — risked a swift military response. In Baghdad, a top official with the
Joint IED Task Force called me an al-Qaida ally for putting togethera Wired.com report on
counter-IED technologies based
on other publicly-available information. A few months later, David Axe
mentioned the Warlocks in a post for Defensetech.org from Iraq. Shortly after
the post went live, Axe was detained, and was promptly thrown out of the
country.
Even
more secret were the flights of the jammers in the sky. The Navy’s EA-6
Prowlers could not only block triggering signals; they could remotely detonate
the bombs, as well. But they had to be very, very careful. U.S. vehicles
equipped with jammers had to get off of the roads, or risk the deadliest
embrace of all. Pilots had to make sure that civilians were nowhere nearby,
when they set the bombs off.
Despite
the hiccups, the jammers were saving lives — including, I believe, my own.
In July of 2005, I found myself at a rubble-strewn intersection of
two highways, not far from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. The Explosive
Ordnance Disposal team I was traveling with called this place the “Death X,”
because of all the attacks nearby. The bomb squad was called out to the area
because of a suspicious package — a package that turned out to be nothing more
than a balled-up pair of pants. But on the way back from the incident, our
Humvee rolled over an artillery shell, buried in the highway’s middle lane and
wired to a radio. An improvised bomb.
The
IED didn’t go off, for reasons that weren’t completely clear. The Death X
bomber might have gotten cold feet. More likely, one of Warlocks in the Humvee
prevented him from detonating the weapon.
That same day, I took a
Black Hawk ride to the town of Mahmudiya, just south of Baghdad. At the outpost
there, I met Staff Sgt. Johnnie Mason (pictured), who showed off the cordless phone
than nearly killed him. It was wired to a series of artillery
shells, and stuffed under a row of human corpses, rotting by a canal in the 118
degree heat.
The dead bodies, they smelled like catfish bait.
When Mason — a lanky,
31 year-old Texan with big brown eyes and a goofy smile — came across the bomb,
he wanted to puke into his Kevlar protective suit. The dead bodies, they
smelled like catfish bait. But there was no time to heave. Mason knew the
weapon was live, and that he was outside his Warlock’s protective bubble. He
figured he only had a moment or two to act before a bomber remotely detonated
his device. So Mason jumped behind a three-foot berm, and crouched into a fetal
position before the shock wave hit him. “It was too fast for me to think, ‘Oh
God, I’m gonna die,'” Mason said. “It was just instant fear.”
The
bomb was less than twenty feet away when it went off. Dirt flew up. Shards of
bomb zipped through the air. The shockwave knocked Mason over. But he was
intact, somehow.
Mason’s
partner, Pfc. Brian James, ran over. “Are you alright?” he yelled. “Where you
at?”
“I’m
in Iraq, Brook!” Mason shouted back. Brook was his wife’s name.
Mason sat down for fifteen minutes, drank some water. And then he went right
back to the bodies. Before the explosion, he noticed a second shell, 20 meters
away. So Mason took a couple pounds of C4 plastic explosive to demolish the
thing. “I still had a job to do,” he told me.
Five months later, on
the 19th of December, Mason found himself on another
highway, responding to another suspicious package call. His team
stumbled on another IED, practically beneath their feet. Insurgents were
routinely luring bomb squads with one weapon in an attempt to kill them with
the second. In this case, the tactic worked.
Mason
told everyone to clear out of the way while he tried to disarm the device. Then
the bomb went off.
Militant
bombmakers increasingly turned to long range cordless telephones and cell
phones for their triggers. That was a serious issue. The digital devices were
built to overcome dropped packets, reflected signals, and transmission errors.
Warlock Green’s trick of fooling a trigger with its own, modified signal didn’t
work. The gadgets were used to the hiccups.
The ‘deadly embrace’ between the jammers began to loosen.
Behind the scenes, however, there were signs of improvement. The
Navy sent to Iraq hundreds of electronic warfare specialists, to bring the
cacophony produced by 14 kinds of jammers into some sort of harmony. Protocols
were established, to allow one device to send its signal and then go silent for
a few milliseconds, so another gadget could broadcast; that allowed Warlock Red
and Warlock Green to be packaged into a single, combination unit. The ‘deadly
embrace’ between the jammers began to loosen. The Pentagon’s IED task force
became the Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, with a $3.6 billion annual
budget to tame the homemade bomb threat. Mongtomery Meigs, the retired
four-star general in charge of the organization, worked to unravel the
bureaucratic tangle that tied up bomb trigger analysis. The intelligence
specialists at the Combined Explosive Exploitation
Cells got faster and
faster at analyzing which frequencies the insurgents were using. That, in turn,
allowed the jammers to be updated more quickly, so they could counter emerging
threats.
Most importantly,
perhaps, a new generation of jammers entered the battlefield, thanks to
JIEDDO’s billions. Some, like the Marines’ Chameleon countermeasure,
could cover a broad range of frequencies, from low-powered triggers (like key
fobs) to high-powered ones (like walkie-talkies). In February of ’06, the Corps
announced they were buying 4,000 of the 125-pound, Humvee-mounted systems.
Warlock Duke used a technique called “set-on”
jamming to overcome the more advanced digital triggers. Like Green, Duke would
listen for a malicious signal. But rather than confuse a receiver with a
modified version of its own signal, Duke had a series of built-in jamming
responses, designed to fool very specific devices. If Duke heard a particular
FM walkie-talkie, Duke would send out a specific FM spoof. It was actually a
cruder technique than Green’s. And it relied on very detailed knowledge about
exactly which threats were in which area. But it worked. Tens of thousands were
eventually fielded. And slowly, slowly, the percentage of radio-controlled
bombs as a whole began to fall. Then they began to disappear altogether.
“Electronic
warfare defensive systems were instrumental in saving thousands of Soldiers and
Marines from being casualties in Iraq,” emails retired Lt. Gen. Michael Oates,
who led the 10th Mountain Division during its tour in Iraq at the time, and
then became director of JIEDDO. “The high use of remote controlled detonation
capability… was a significant and effective threat until the jammers were
developed.”
By
the time I returned to Iraq, in the summer of 2007, IEDs had become relics in
broad swaths of the country. The insurgents had largely abandoned their tool of
choice.
It
was not altogether good news.
North of Baghdad, insurgents took insulated copper threads, some
not much thicker than a hair, and buried them in the dust. Then they strung
them out for as long as a kilometer. At one end was an insurgent triggerman. At
the other, an explosively formed projectile. It was a crude approach to killing — even more primitive than those first
bombs planted in Afghanistan. But it was lethally effective.
These
“command wire” bombs had a fatal flaw, however. Insurgents had to stick around
to set them off. That made them vulnerable to American counter-attacks and
preemption. And that brought the number of bombs and bomb fatalities way down.
In December of 2007, only nine U.S. troops were killed by IEDs, and another 166
were wounded. It was still an awful toll. But it was a tiny fraction of the 69
slain and 473 injured in December of 2006.
All the gadgets built for Iraq were worthless against Afghanistan’s throwback threats
The casualty figures continued to fall as the military began to
field a third generation countermeasure — one that could stomp out a huge swath
of radio triggers with all sorts of jamming techniques. In April of 2007, the
Pentagon signed a deal with EDO for up to 10,000 of the so-called “CVRJs.” Shortly
thereafter, ITT bought EDO, and began to crank out the machines. The CVRJ held
up to 15 mission loads at once, quadrupled the number of simultaneous channels
it could jam on, and doubled the spectral coverage of pre-existing systems.
More importantly, the CVRJ could be reprogrammed on the fly: not just the
frequencies it covered, but the specific responses it used to counter
particular threats. “For the first time ever,” says Mueller, the EDO-turned-ITT
executive, “we had a canvas to create a painting.”
That
enabled CVRJ to target the most advanced triggers — the ones which relied on
the latest mobile and long-range cordless phones. The new phones hopped between
frequencies and spread their signal across the spectrum to overcome
interference. That made them much harder to jam. But the phones have a
potential flaw. They relied on software protocols to establish connections
between transmitter and receiver. Those protocols could be spoofed, keeping the
connection from ever happening. That is, if you had a fully programmable
countermeasure, like CVRJ.
In
the broadest sense, the strategy behind the U.S. jammer buildup had succeeded.
Thanks to the Americans’ bleeding edge technologies, the militants had dropped
back down the ladder of sophistication. They were now taking the Wile E. Coyote
approach — pushing down the plunger to detonate the bomb — and suffering for
it. “That was the whole intent of the program: pushing the enemy back to
archaic means,” says a source familiar with the effort. “So they’d actually
have to face you and fight you.”
In Afghanistan,
however, the terrain favored the low tech. All the gadgets the Americans
had bought and built for Iraq proved largely worthless against a new slew of throwback
threats. The bombs were largely made of wood and fertilizer, making them
practically invisible to metal detectors. No command wires were needed to set
them off; just the pressure of an unlucky boot. The placement of the bombs
added to their effectiveness. The U.S. military’s new hard-shelled,
blast-deflecting vehicles were
built for Iraq’s well-paved roads. So the insurgents put their explosives in
the gullies and the mud paths, where the trucks were useless. The bomb-handling
robots couldn’t handle the rough terrain, either. And, during the summer, the
weather was so hot, EOD technicians didn’t even bother wearing their protective
suits.
As the fighting grew
more intense — and the U.S.-led coalition poured more troops into the Afghan
campaign — the total number of bombs there crept up, from 1,931 in 2006 to
3,276 in 2008. By July, 2010, that figure had reached nearly 1,400 explosives
found or detonated a month. It’s stayed about that high ever since.
The
deaths and injuries caused by these bombs continued to mount, as well. In July
2008, 25 American troops were wounded by Afghan IEDs. In July 2009, that figure
was 174. In July 2010, the number was 378 injured — about 15 times higher than
the casualty count from two years before.
JIEDDO
shifted its focus to compensate. Jammers alone weren’t going to do much against
these no-tech weapons. The organization spent more on surveillance and
intelligence analysts, trying to find ways to crack apart Afghanistan’s IED
networks.
But
even if those networks are shredded tomorrow, there’s a sense in the Pentagon
that the improvised bomb has now become a permanent threat. Over the last six
months, there’s been an average of 245 jury-rigged explosives found or
detonated — outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. The IED has gone global.
The lab where ITT
engineers work on the fifth generation of bomb-stoppers looks like a schoolroom
— from the desks facing the front of the room to the guy with the ponytail and
circular glasses delivering the lecture. Behind the guy — he’s an engineer, not
an English prof — are two screens. One shows a CGI version of a jammer’s guts:
the amplifiers, the transceivers, what have you. The other screen shows a map
of a military base, covered in red and green. It shows how the countermeasure
might perform with that configuration.
The
Pentagon can’t afford any more to crank out yet another stop-gap countermeasure
for yet another kind of bomb. So the military is instead backing the
development of a jammer that can be used anywhere, and for years to come. The
system is awkwardly known as Joint Counter Radio-Controlled Improvised
Explosive Device Electronic Warfare 3.3. An initial batch of 21 of these JCREW
machines are supposed to ship to the military in July for field testing. If it
passes those trials, among other hurdles, up to 20,000 of the uber jammers
could eventually be built.
‘Aircraft, vehicles, ships, and troops’ are all on the new jammer’s target list.
But before it gets into
troops’ hands, the countermeasure gets simulated here. Lower the antenna from
15 feet to five makes more red splotches appear on the map, indicating gaps in
jammer coverage. Add a bigger amplifier, and some of the red goes away.
ITT
has bigger ambitions for its JCREW machine than simple bomb-blocking. Step
through a door, and there’s a more traditional-looking electronics workroom:
cable-strewn benches, and machines stacked head-high. Guys with soldering irons
connect wires to boxey machines. The goal here isn’t to see how the
countermeasures block signals. It’s to see how they talk to one another.
There’s a JCREW jammer designed for vehicles, another for individual troops,
and a third to protect bases. All of the machines are meant to work together.
The
JCREW 3.3s are supposed to be fully networkable, and able to communicate over
the military’s wireless battlefield networks. That should save them some power
and interference– if you’ve got four jammers in a convoy, for instance, one can
silence a receiver while the other three quiet down. Or maybe that jammer can
spot the threat, record its signal and location, and transmit that information
back to headquarters. In that way, the new machine becomes more than a single
bomb-beater. The system might help track down the explosives, and the guys who
planted them. It could be configured to listen in on communications — those
cell phones are for more than triggering explosives, after all. Hell, if the
machines are passing data back and forth, they could work as radios themselves,
in theory.
With proper power
management and frequency coordination, the new JCREW could have a whole new
range of “potential targets,” according to a company briefing.
Those include “information systems and infrastructure,” drones, communications
grids, sensors, “position, navigation and timing capabilities” (that’s
shorthand for GPS signals), as well as “aircraft, vehicles, ships, troops.” In
other words: everything.
For now, these are just
ideas, not orders. “It’s all on the roadmap, potentially,” Mueller says. “How
much we actually do remains to be seen.”
But
one thing is for sure: it’s a long way from stopping crude triggers, stuffed
into disposable lamps. It’s a long way from frantically tweaking electronics in
the hope of somehow keeping thirty soldiers a day from being blown up. It’s a
long way from the near decade-long fight against remote-controlled bombs in
which the enemy had the advantage of being the first mover. This may be the
chance to get ahead, before the next wave of terror weapons hits.
Photos: USMC,
Wikimedia, Noah Shachtman, ITT
