The U.S. military is building an energy weapon that can blow up improvised bombs before militants do. But it may be some time before the device is used in Afghanistan. Not only is the weapon too bulky for the rugged terrain there, but "civilians could be killed if the weapon is activated over widespread areas," USA Today reports.

Since the Iraq insurgency began in earnest, the Pentagon has spent billions of dollars on ways to harness the electromagnetic spectrum to beat improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Nearly every vehicle now deployed by the military has a radio frequency jammer that cuts off explosives' remote triggers. Electronic warfare aircraft spoof some of those signals, and set off the IEDs from on high. Everything from Humvee-mounted lasers to man-made lightning guns have been tried out as bomb-zappers.

USA Today doesn't provide many details about this particular "highly classified technology," other than saying it "bypasses the triggering device of an IED and detonates its explosive." But the article does note that the ray gun was used at checkpoints in Iraq in 2005 and 2008 and "requires a tractor-trailer-size vehicle" to move it around.

That's too large for Afghanistan – something the military is trying to fix. Improvised bombs are, by far, the number one killer of troops in the conflict there. General James Mattis, head of the U.S. Joint Forces Command, would even like to see the weapon mounted on an aircraft. "This is an offensive capability that will change the face of this war," he tells the paper. (Of course, if civilians happen to be in the way when bombs are detonated by the zapper, that could be a major problem.)

Research on the weapon is being conducted by the Navy, which has a long-standing interest in bomb-blasters. By 2005, researchers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Dahlgren Laboratory were already deep into a project called NIRF (short for Neutralizing Improvised Explosive Devices with Radio Frequency). The device produced a very high-frequency field, in the microwave range, to take out an IED's electronics. During a test early that year, the "generator that creates the radio frequencies damaged a counter-IED component ... in effect, frying itself," Aviation Week reported at the time. But by fiscal year 2008, the Navy was asking for $11 million extra for the system.

In June of last year, the Office of Naval Research launched an effort to destabilize explosives "at the molecular level." In September, the Dahlgren lab opened a "Directed Energy Warfare Office" that evaluates real-life ray guns ability to take out improvised bombs.

Photo: XADS

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