China Looks to Undermine U.S. Power, With ‘Assassin’s Mace’

China Looks to Undermine U.S. Power, With ‘Assassin’s Mace’
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Could China wipe out an American military advantage with a simple black box? Joshua Cooper Ramo’s thought-provoking book The Age of the Unthinkable challenges all kinds of conventional thinking about everything from venture capital to military strategy. One section caught my eye in particular, about how the Chinese might neutralize American air superiority, using a type of weapon known an “Assassin’s Mace.” The specific device in question is an unassuming little case; how worried should we be?

U.S. airpower depends on the ability to overcome surface-to-air missile (SAM) defenses, and one of the key weapons for this role is the AGM-88 High Speed Anti-radiation Missile (HARM), which homes in on radar emissions. (You can see them, under the F/A-18’s wings in the picture, above.) The defenders can either turn off their radar, thus blinding themselves, or have it destroyed. This is where the black box that Ramo found at a military trade show in Zhuhai in 2002 comes in:

“…packed inside were several thousand microtransmitters and when you plugged the device in and turned it on, it broadcast signals – 10,000 of them – on the frequency of a SAM site. From the perspective of an American pilot – or , more precisely, the perspective of his HARM missile looking for a ‘lock’ on a SAM radar signal – this meant an air-to-ground picture that looked like 10,001 SAM signals, only one of which was real…”

Ramo suggests that if defenders have these black boxes then the U.S. aircraft would be helpless against enemy SAMs, and air superiority would be lost at stroke.

[link to www.wired.com]