Army Manual Raises Emphasis on Electronic Warfare

[Purveyor]

Source: Associated Press

(02-25) 13:22 PST FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) --

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the Army is updating its plans for electronic warfare, calling for more use of high-powered microwaves, lasers and infrared beams to attack enemy targets and control angry crowds.

The new manual, produced at Fort Leavenworth and set for release Thursday, also is aimed at protecting soldiers against remote-controlled roadside bombs and other nontraditional warfare used by increasingly sophisticated insurgents.

"The war in Iraq began to make us understand that there are a lot of targets that we should be going after in the offensive or defensive mode to protect ourselves," said Col. Laurie Buckhout, chief of the Army's electronic warfare division in Washington, D.C.

The 112-page manual, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press before its release at the Association of the United States Army meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., doesn't offer specifics on new equipment or gadgetry but lays out in broad terms the Army's fear that without new equipment and training, U.S. forces may be at a deadly disadvantage.

The Army has let its electronic warfare capabilities lapse since the early 1990s, when nascent insurgencies were less sophisticated and less deadly. Army patrols currently rely on specially trained Air Force and Navy members whose electronic expertise helps sniff out IEDs, which have killed more than 1,700 U.S. troops since the war began.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/02/25/national/a112330S87.DTL

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. we spend trillions on defense, FOR FUCKING WHAT? ? ? ?

is this nuts, or is it my imagination, that our budget on military spending (excluding Iraq and Afghanistan) is larger than the next 25 largest national military budgets added all together? How can we waste so much money, only to find that massive, constant increases in military spending sucks, and that we always seem to be in an emergency of our own making?

damn, we need to cut this budget something fierce.

[Grinchie]

2. If you knew how much Oil the Military uses per year, you'd know.

Add to that all the new gizmo's designed to Kill or Destroy. so powerful that even the thought of using them would cause the rest of the World to be motivated to destroy the U.S. These technologies deplete our scientific, natural and economic resources to the point where there is nothing left for social services, or the training of the drones to operate these weapon "Systems". They are part of the "Systemic" problem that infests our Corporate controlled Government, which is happy to print money and inflate the money supply in order to placate these Military Industrial behemoths that are simply too big to fail, because anarchy would result.

Unfortunately, these same entities hold massive amounts of leverage over Government policies, because they can hint that can fail and instigate it anyway if they don't get fed money.

Time to sweep these idiots out the door.