[infowar.de] DEBKA 10.04.07: Al Qaeda Wages Electronic War against US Forces in Iraq

[Georg Schoefbaenker <schoefbaenker -! - aon - at>]

http://www.debka.com/article_print.php?aid=1266

Al Qaeda Wages Electronic War against US Forces in Iraq
April 10, 2007, 9:00 PM (GMT+02:00)
US vehicle destroyed by IED in Iraq

In 2006, the Pentagon spent $1.4 bn to develop sophisticated counter 
measures for roadside bombs, which account for more US deaths in Iraq than 
any other weapon. They were designed to locate and detonate the improvised 
explosive devices IEDs from afar, before American convoys drove past the 
spot where they are planted.

One such system has a sense of smell which sniffs out the presence of 
explosives; another uses radio beams to jam the IED's electronic signals.

Soon after they were fitted on US military vehicles and went into 
successful use, al Qaeda came up with a device capable of jamming and 
disarming both US electronic measures by radio signals. The Islamist 
terrorists thus escalated their challenge to the US military by introducing 
electronic warfare.

Their success has boosted the US and British death toll in Iraq. Of the 50 
US and UK soldiers who died in Iraq in the first 9 days of April, 30 were 
killed by IEDs. Al Qaeda's mystery device is believed by military experts 
to account for the soaring rate of effective roadside bomb hits on American 
vehicles, even those fitted with the new counter-measures.

The Pentagon department entrusted with finding a new solution, the Joint 
Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, is working day and night 
to produce a new counter-measure which is not susceptible to the al Qaeda 
blocker.

The Israeli high command is anxiously watching this turn in the Iraq war 
for two reasons:

Firstly, operational innovations appearing on one terror warfront tend to 
spread with the speed of a contagion to the other fronts.

Secondly, al Qaeda is suspected of acquiring its advanced electronic 
warfare technology from Iran, which also supplies the IEDs to Iraq's Shiite 
militias and Sunni insurgents. Tehran owns an interest in the successful 
performance of its weaponry on Iraq's battlefields and, most of all, in 
proving its technology is superior to American systems. If Iran is indeed 
the source of al Qaeda's blocking device, then it is only a matter of time 
before this advanced electronic technology reaches Hizballah in Lebanon and 
is smuggled to the Palestinian Hamas and Jihad Islam in the Gaza Strip.

According to some military experts, the system is already in the hands of 
one or more of these terrorist groups, but is being held in reserve to 
catch the Israeli military unawares at the right moment. The device could 
expose an advancing tank column in Lebanon or the Gaza Strip to mass 
casualties.

But there are other possible sources:

1. Al Qaeda developed the technology on its own. The problem with this 
hypothesis is that the Pentagon, to produce the US anti-IED jammers, 
activated America's most advanced and best-equipped scientific and 
technological infrastructure, a network of test laboratories and hundreds 
of the finest scientific and electronic engineering brains. Where would al 
Qaeda find these resources?

2. Some private military-scientific element outside Iran, unknown to the 
US, contracted to develop al Qaeda's counter-jammers for a price running 
into hundreds of millions of dollars. This is not entirely far-fetched. An 
enterprise of this kind, headed by the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, 
A.Q. Khan, once ran a black market which illegally flogged nuclear wares to 
North Korea, Libya, Iran and China.


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