Stardate 20030119.1645

(Captain's log): In response to the previous article about development of High Power Microwave weapons to attack enemy semiconductors, James writes:

Wouldn't it be kind of stupid for our military to develop HPM weapons? If other nations acquired the tech required to construct them, which they probably would eventually, our armed forces would be at a distinct disadvantage?

Development of military technology is the Red Queen's Race.

Alice looked round her in great surprise. `Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!'

`Of course it is,' said the Queen, `what would you have it?'

`Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a little, `you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'

`A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. `Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

There's no advantage as fleeting as a technological one, and you can't stop the march of progress. If you want to maintain superiority, you have to keep moving. No one else is going to stop just because you did. American wizard weapons of 2003 will be commonplace in 2023 and obsolete junk in 2043. Whether we develop HPM or not, others are going to. But we have a good chance of developing them first, and taking advantage of them first. Refusing to work on them does nothing to decrease our vulnerability; it just throws away our chance of gaining an advantage from them.

HPM is not a doomsday weapon; it can be defended against. It's not that it instantly and automatically destroys all semiconductors within a given area. What it destroys is semiconductors which are in equipment which wasn't designed to survive such an insult, and a lot of what our enemies have isn't. (And essentially all civilian electronics isn't, and won't ever be.)

You can design electronics to be impervious to truly mammoth levels of EMI, but it radically changes the design problem and you have to keep it in mind at all times. For instance, if you're designing an aircraft and need to run signals around, you have to use fiberoptic instead of wires. All wires are antennas, and the longer a wire is, the more efficient it will be at picking up EMI and pushing a big spike at you. Fiberoptic won't do that.

You have to put all your electronics inside of metal boxes (which amount to local Faraday cages), and make sure that openings in the boxes are as small as possible. You use optoisolators heavily. You need to make sure that whatever power source is used doesn't make you vulnerable. And ultimately you'll need to test the stuff against massive EMI bursts just to make sure you didn't overlook anything. All of this makes the process vastly more complicated and expensive, and most of the military electronics out there hasn't been developed under such a protocol, or only partially.

But it's not clear that we would be at a disadvantage in this, partly because we've always been willing to spend a lot more on our equipment than anyone else, and this is one of the reasons why. This danger is not a new one. The threat was originally thought to be from EMP, electromagnetic pulse, which is something that is associated with battlefield use of nuclear weapons, and for a long time now they've been designing our military systems to survive that. What non-nuclear HPM technology would do is to move that threat from the theoretical to the practical. And it's also noteworthy that a lot of what would truly be attacked using HPM would be non-military electronics. It's going to make life interesting in your weapons bunker if all the card-key readers are instantly toasted on all the locked doors, wouldn't you say? And will your trucks run if the electronic ignition got smoked?

What common use of HPM will do is to make all weapons which rely on electronics much more expensive if they're not to be highly vulnerable, which favors the country with the biggest wallet and the greatest willingness to spend money. Guess who that is?

The reason this is cool is that it instantly and substantially reduces the effectiveness of a force, while increasing confusion and fear, without actually killing very many people. (People in moving vehicles at the time of the burst are still at risk, of course.) But this isn't a super-weapon against which there's no defense. It's another step in the process of development, just like the JDAM.