Is it possible for one eccentric professor to neutralize the enormous years-long labors of thousands of highly skilled scientists, engineers, and workers to develop precision "smart weapons" at the cost of tens of billions of dollars? "Easy," as they say in Russia. A St. Petersburg scientist, Dr. of Technical Sciences Valentin Vladimirovich Kashinov, has managed to do just that. With his inventions he has virtually "shut down" western efforts to create 21st century weapons, precision "smart" weapons which find targets based on information from satellites, and thus are today considered nearly one hundred percent effective. Valentin Kashinov made his "contribution" to the defense capability of the US and NATO, practically knocking out the latest, multi-billion dollar military space system, and at the same time raising doubts about the advisability of Washington's development of a national ABM defense.

Summoning Missiles to the Oven

In the heat of massed missile strikes on Belgrade and Yugoslavian air defense radar positions in the spring of 1999, the telephone rang one night in a St. Petersburg apartment.

It was the chairman of the radio club of Yugoslavia, Khranislav Milocevic. Valentin Kashinov answered. The Yugoslav described the great destruction and casualties caused by strikes of NATO aircraft, "HARM" air-to-ground missiles, and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Milocevic asked for help in fending off these bombardments. Valentin Vladimirovich immediately inquired if they had any microwave ovens. This was followed by a puzzled silence, and then: "Of course!" Kashinov advised that they get some ordinary microwave ovens and aim them upwards, with doors open, around an installation they wanted to protect, and then turn them on. Khranislav understood at once. The fact was that an American HARM missile would home in on any strong source of radio emission in the 400-10,000 MHz range, exactly the range of conventional household microwave ovens. Literally the next day following this conversation, NATO forced bombed their own embassies in Belgrade.

NATO pilots were fooled, and bombed microwave ovens instead of Serbian tanks for nearly half the time of the air attacks.

According to a British officer who spent six months in the region and offered his own assessment of bombing damage, the Serbs lured the NATO planes using household microwave ovens to simulate the emissions of armored transport systems.

The NATO propaganda machine initially announced that more than 100 tanks, 250 APCs, and 389 cannon had been destroyed. These damage figures have since been revised, since independent observers found only 13 tanks knocked out. As it turned out, the same targets were targeted (and destroyed) repeatedly by different pilots.

A NATO officer who gave an anonymous interview to the British Herald stated that only three tanks were found. "The Serbs use a lot of tricks to elude NATO bombs. The use of microwave ovens from houses in Kosovo to thumb their noses at the alliance was only one of their ruses."

The beauty of Serbian countermeasures lay in the fact that it demanded nothing of them, since they used 100-dollar decoy devices (microwave ovens) which were available in every household. And the guided bombs cost around 30,000 dollars.. They also studied Iraq's experience in the "Gulf War" (or rather, "Desert Fox," when they jammed the American GPS satellite system).

As for the military operation "Desert Storm" against Iraq in 1991, it is now clear that the Americans almost lost it, again thanks to the inventions of Russian scientist Valentin Kashinov. According to information from the Reuters agency, at the time American planes in Iraq were able to hit less than a third of their marked targets. Most of the bombs dropped on Iraq failed to hit their targets. Most of them "hit the sand," as they say. According to reports from US Navy representatives, the bombs fell at a distance of several tens of meters from the target. Of twenty-five radars, only eight were destroyed. Nearly all the guided AGM-154A bombs deviated sharply to the left. According to Navy representatives, this was because of an error in the guidance software system. But again the Americans prevaricated. The simple fact was that the entire space guidance system didn't work.

A Mini-Jammer for Bombs and Satellites

In the last ten years, America has tried to fight by the contact-free method, without shedding the blood of its soldiers. The US beat the Taliban regime in six weeks without a single casualty! In these six weeks they achieved political and strategic goals which the USSR was unable to achieve in 10 years of ground war in Afghanistan losing tens of thousands of soldiers.

America is quietly cutting its ground forces. Divisions remain only on paper. The US no longer needs an infantry. The Navy and Air Force remain, but only as carriers of munitions to theaters of military action. The US is building itself an ABM system, but as a secondary, half measure. Their chief goal is to create a space infrastructure, in the guise of an ABM system, to fight future contact-free wars.

Precision "smart" weapons now take center stage. These find their targets from information transmitted by satellite, and thus, their creators believe, they are nearly one hundred percent effective. "But that is only in the minds of the creators," Valentin Kashinov believes. "What is the actual case? Some of the Tomahawks flew off into Macedonia and Bulgaria in the Yugoslavia campaign, and some self-destructed in the air."

After the famous telephone conversation, the Petersburg scientist e-mailed a plan to Yugoslavia for a simple radio device which could suppress the signals of the American NAVSTAR GPS satellite navigation system. Deprived of their satellite guide, the missile was "blinded." Result: about 10 percent of the cruise missiles failed to reach their target. According to a BBC report, 28 missiles self-destructed in the air in a single raid.

The American NAVSTAR GPS satellite navigation system is the NATO standard for all types of weapons-ships, aircraft, including cruise missiles and guided bombs, tanks, and even individual soldiers. It has been been successfully developed for ten years now. The system is reliable and user-friendly, and all combat arms have gotten used to it and trust it without question. The GPS accuracy is 10 meters and its operating zone is the entire planet.

The US has even tried to introduce the GPS as the standard for the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), but this did not happen for many reasons, particularly because of its extremely low resistance to the slightest interference.

Without going into the technical details, let us say only that Russian scientists conducted an experiment with Ashtech GPS receivers of the OEM "Sensor" type (which can easily be purchased in Moscow). The experiment showed that inference in the form of a carrier wave of any frequency between 1576 and 1578 MHz with a radiated power of -55 dB blocked reception of satellite signals by a receiver located nearby. If we do the math, a few watts of power, about what a flashlight uses, is enough to jam GPS signals within line of sight at a distance of up to 500 km.

Thus so-called GPS mini-jammers can have a power of a few watts. The jamming area is line of sight, and for a Tomahawk cruise missile traveling at a height of 25 meters is 20 kilometers.

The Storm Hits the Sand

Today, when the Americans are intensifying preparations for a new military operation against Iraq (which, according to some data, will cost the US 200 billion dollars), Kashinov's mini-jammers may again be in demand. Especially since, it turns out, Baghdad has used them very successfully since 1991.

Valentin Kashinov relates: "Before Desert Storm began, I sent a registered letter to Baghdad suggesting that they use such rudimentary transmitters for electronic warfare (EW) against the American GPS navigational system. The Iraqis immediately adopted this suggestion. An organized team of specialists traveled through the desert setting up transmitters. US and British planes hunted this team, and continue to do so, for the war against Iraq has not halted even for a minute. I learned from the mass media that more than 100 Tomahawks have self-destructed in the air en route to Iraq. These missiles have built-in receivers and control computers. Before flight, a program of the flight trajectory and target coordinates are entered in the computer. The job of the mini-jammers is to create interference on the airwaves which prevents reception of satellite signals. The phase-modulated signals used in the GPS are still considered the height of interference resistance, but that is not the case. It is a serious miscalculation. The optimal interference for jamming phase-modulated signals is simply a detuned carrier wave. A simpler EW device could not be imagined. A self-destruct program is included in the computer for just this case. And this means that the Tomahawk is by no means a flawless weapon, as the Americans have assured the entire world. Nor is the widely trumpeted American NAVSTAR GPS satellite navigation system, which consists of 24 satellites on orbit, and compact palm-sized receiver/displays. They show the location of an object in any coordinate system, as well as the speed and height of displacement. But the higher-tech the weapon, the more easily it can be suppressed. Western scientists have generally forgotten how to think; the computer is supposed to think for them."

Stealth Armor Covers the Whole Country

It should be noted that during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the Russian scientist sent Brussels a description of the anti-weapon against the NAVSTAR GPS system, warning that if they did not cease their outrages, he would publish methods for "rubbing out" other navigational systems as well, for example TACAN, DME, LORAN, etc.

And these means enormous losses for the West. It has been calculated that because of Kashinov's mini-jammers, which virtually put the NAVSTAR system out of commission, the Americans lost 80 billion dollars and 20 years of work by their scientists. According to available information, today they are trying to develop a new system, since the GPS system cannot be improved, and this will require time and money. So the US will hardly be able to develop an ABM system with guaranteed effectiveness.

You see, the arsenal of anti-weapons includes devices which create short, or as they are called, "nanosecond" pulses of electromagnetic radiation of enormous power, exceeding the power of a nuclear burst. When they act on modern high-tech microcircuits (transistor diameter less than the thickness of a human hair), in the best case these emissions create system glitches, and in the worst case they put the microcircuits out of commission. Naturally, the weapon controlled by the computer which is destroyed by the pulse is also knocked out, be it a missile, ship, or tank.

Portable space navigational system jammers produced by a Russian company were first displayed at the Moscow International Aerospace Show in 1997, provoking genuine shock and horror among military users of these navigation systems.

Of course, as they say, it is impossible to shut down America, and this is the normal course of the rivalry between armor and projectile. But today "Russian armor" can reliably protect, for some time, any country which desires it.