A Disarming Champ

Up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a super missile that will shut down your console video game player… oh… and every other electronic device, gadget or appliance on which it focuses its highly classified microwave beam. It can shut down an entire building, an entire block, an entire power grid and almost any computers or file servers in its path. Zap!

It’s made mostly by the warm and cuddly folks at Boeing (actually at their invitingly labeled Phantom works) with a little help from Raytheon. Boeing calls it the Counter-Electronics High-Powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (they must’ve squirmed to get this acronym – CHAMP). Honey, will shut off your television and get to bed! Right now! Or I’ll…..

“CHAMP's invisible payload arrives in discrete bursts and arguably makes it the world's most advanced (and likely expensive) non-lethal weapon: the prototype can target multiple individual buildings without ever having to detonate and hurt someone. Boeing is still developing CHAMP in a multi-year program and doesn't have guarantees that it will become military ordnance, which gives us enough time to accept that saving lives is far, far more important than the risk we'll have to stop fiddling with our technology.” Engadget.com, October 23^rd. Hey, it’s certainly lethal if you are on life support and your hospital room is hit! Is $40 million for a government program really that expensive?

So here’s the cool test that made Boeing’s engineers smile and techies wince: they set up all these old computers in a compound of seven test buildings in the Utah desert. The jet-propelled cruise missile was launched from a B-52over the site, and voila! “CHAMP flew over the Utah Test and Training Range … discharging a burst of High Power Microwaves onto the test site and brought down the compound's entire spectrum of electronic systems, apparently without producing any other damage at all. Even the camera recording the test was shut down… Struggling to contain his enthusiasm, Boeing's Keith Coleman says, ‘We hit every target we wanted to. Today we made science fiction into science fact.’” BusinessInsider.com, October 25^th. Everything electrical was shut down before the missile self-destructed in the empty desert beyond.

It’s not just that you can render your enemy’s command and control center useless or that you can stop worrying about their radar systems altogether, but you can tank an entire power grid or telecommunications system almost anywhere… until they learn how to do it back to us. Mission – to render electronic and data systems useless – accomplished.

I’m Peter Dekom, but wouldn’t “clap on, clap off” be a heck of a lot cheaper?