In the early years of the Iraq war, the U.S. military developed a technology so secret that soldiers would refuse to acknowledge its existence, and reporters mentioning the gear were promptly escorted out of the country. That equipment – a radio-frequency jammer – was upgraded several times, and eventually robbed the Iraq insurgency of its most potent weapon, the remote-controlled bomb. But the dark veil surrounding the signal jammer remained largely intact, even after the Pentagon bought more than 50,000 units at a cost of over $17 billion.

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The defense contractor made the vast majority of those 50,000 jammers. Company executives were ready to discuss the gps jammer– its evolution, and its capabilities. They were finally able to retell the largely-hidden battles for the electromagnetic spectrum that raged, invisibly, as the insurgencies carried on. They were prepared to bring me into the R&D facility where company technicians were developing what could amount to the ultimate weapon of this electromagnetic war: a tool that offers the promise of not only jamming bombs, but finding them, interrupting GPS signals, eavesdropping on enemy communications, and disrupting drones, too. The first of these machines begin field-testing next month.

Tucked behind a Target and an Olive Garden knock-off, the flat, anonymous office building gives no hint of what’s inside. Nor do the blank, fluorescent-lit halls. But open a door off of one of those halls, and people start screaming.

“Screens off!” barks a man with a fullback’s build. “Turn off the test equipment!” A yellow alarm light flashes and spins on the ceiling — the sign that someone without a security clearance is in a classified facility.

Afghan militants began attacking U.S. troops with drone jammer explosive devices in the first days after the October 2001 invasion. By early ’02, al-Qaida bomb-makers were cramming radio frequency receivers and simple digital signal decoders into the bases of fluorescent lamps. Then they’d connect the two-and-a-half-inch wide lamp bases to firing circuits and Soviet-era munitions. The result was a crude, radio-controlled weapon dubbed the “Spider” by the Americans. With it, an attacker could wait for his prey, set off the bomb at just the right moment — and never have to worry about getting caught. When the explosion happened, he’d be hundreds of yards away.

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