CyberwarfareDARPA looking for "Precision Electronic Warfare"

In warfare, precision follows mass. During the Second World War, for example, U.S. and British strategists developed the strategy of “strategic bombing” — massive, indiscriminate bombing of German and Japanese cities and industrial centers in order to disrupt military production and demoralize the population. During the 1950s, the U.S. doctrine governing nuclear war called for “massive retaliation” in the case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The United States, in the words of General Curtis (“Bomb Them Away”) LeMay, would turn the Soviet Union into “a smoking, irradiated ruin at the end of two hours” (to be precise, this was the way President Dwight Eisenhower paraphrased briefs on the U.S. nuclear war plans submitted to him by LeMay, who was then the commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command). It was only in 1962 that Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s secretary of defense, began to elaborate plans for limited nuclear war (then known as “city avoidance” strategy) and replaced massive retaliation with precision bombing (then called “surgical strikes”) of Soviet military bases and airfields.
We notice a similar trend in the new field of cyber warfare. Lewis Page writes that DARPA researchers are looking to build networks of small, low-power transmitter boxes which together can perform “surgical jamming” of digital signals —- shutting down cellphones and sat nav receivers within an area “on the order of a city block corner.”

The new initiative is called Precision Electronic Warfare (PREW). According to DARPA, in hardware terms PREW would consist of “an ad hoc sparse array consisting of multiple airborne and/or ground nodes… robust, low cost, small size, weight and power distributed platforms.” Each PREW node would be equipped with a highly accurate clock synchronized with those aboard its fellows, perhaps one of the tiny ones developed for the Chip-Scale Atomic Clocks program, and would probably be able to communicate with them as well. It would also have “localization” — that is, a good idea of its location, presumably from GPS sat nav or some similar tech.

Page notes that all these would merely be enabling accessories, however, allowing the PREW radio-cloud to use its “energy transmission” capabilities with unusual precision. The 40-plus nodes would be able to point and focus their jamming power on an area perhaps 100 meters across — as DARPA says, a street corner — from as far as 20 km without affecting reception in adjacent areas.

Exactly what frequencies the PREW should be able to target is a secret, but DARPA offer a broad hint by saying that “target signals were chosen as representative of a range of signal classes, to include navigation, digital infrastructure-based communications, and digital non-infrastructure communications.” Or in other words GPS sat nav, cellphone, and CB-type radio bands.

There is another handy wrinkle:

For point-to-a-spot the general belief is that a closed-loop beacon approach will be needed to achieve the required accuracy. The proposed system can utilize beacons that are within the node constellation, near the target area, or within the target area. The beacon device can be a cooperative participant in the system or a device that is unaware that it is being used as a beacon.

In other words, the system would be able to lock onto your cellphone and hold you within a bubble of jamming no matter how you moved about, denying you any communications or navigation services. If you were not carrying a suitable marker beacon, one could be planted on you. Presumably in time DARPA will also be able to make the street lights switch off as you pass, then switch on again once you move on.

Another application could see a bubble of sat nav denial wrapped around an enemy missile or autonomous vehicle, without affecting nearby U.S. units; or a given cell tower suddenly blotted out.