Nice work if you can get it. BAE Systems just won $150,000 to bombard computers with high-powered electromagnetic radiations to see whether they’ll fritz out. The objective: learn how to fry the other guy’s electronics while protecting your own.
Yesterday, the Air Force announced that Europe’s biggest arms company will develop the first tests for itsHigh Power Microwave Technological Electromagnetic Susceptibility with Laboratory Applicationsproject. Basically, much as microwave jammers stop homemade bombs by interfering with the signals sent from their remote detonators, the Air Force wants to find out how much damage it can inflict on other systems, and how much damage its own systems can handle. Or, in its words, figure out “cost effective, innovative solutions for determining the susceptibility/vulnerability of U.S. and foreign systems to high power electromagnetic (EM) environments.”
Hosted by the Air Force Research Labs’ Directed Energy Directorate at Nevada’s Kirtland Air Force Base, BAE will spend nine months subjecting a “digital system, such as a Personal Computer” with high-powered electromagnetic waves to watch it short out. The idea is to build a predictive model of “when such an upset might occur.” Apparently, no “comprehensive predictive system-level models exist” for understanding digital upset.
The offensive and defensive applications are obvious. Figure out the breaking point for such electronics and you’ll learn what specifications you’ll need for directed-energy weapons like lasers to fry your opponents’ comparable systems; as well as the levels at which your own become vulnerable. Don’t want your Littoral Combat Ship’s communications or navigation systems to be shorted out by a microwave burst? Start out by learning just what size burst will short them out.
The military doesn’t have a working ray gun yet, but it’s got lots of directed-energy weapons in the works. The Navy’s got a Maritime Laser Demonstration program to build a shipboard laser cannon by 2014. The Air Force wants to use microwave blasts to disable drones in advance of the day when a hostile power flies a weapon-bearing drone into the U.S., as well as to mount those blasts on missiles. Darpa wants to mount a laser onto a B-1 bomber or a helicopter gunship, perhaps a more practical step than mounting one on a tricked-out 747 to fight ballistic missiles.
A grand unified theory of frying machines might come in handy for bringing specificity to those kinds of efforts. And it may pay off handsomely for BAE or a successor company. While $150,000 for nine months is loose change in the defense industry, further research will last for five years and total $37 million.
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