History
One of the first examples of electronic countermeasures being applied in a combat situation took place during the Russo-Japanese war. On April 15, 1904, Russian wireless telegraphy stations installed in the Port Arthur fortress and on board Russian light cruisers successfully interrupted wireless communication between a group of Japanese battleships. The spark-gap transmitters in the Russian stations generated senseless noise while the Japanese were making attempts to coordinate their efforts in the bombing of a Russian naval base. Germany and Great Britain interfered with enemy communications along the western front during World War I while the Royal Navy tried to intercept German naval radio transmissions. There were also efforts at sending false radio signals, having shore stations send transmissions using ships' call signs, and jamming enemy radio signals.
World War II ECM expanded to include dropping chaff (originally called Window), jamming and spoofing radar and navigation signals. German bomber aircraft navigated using radio signals transmitted from ground stations, which the British disrupted with spoofed signals in the Battle of the Beams. During the RAF's night attacks on Germany the extent of electronic countermeasures was much expanded, and a specialised organisation, No. 100 Group RAF, was formed to counter the increasing German night fighter force and radar defences. Cold War developments included anti-radiation missiles designed to home in on enemy radar transmitters.
Read more about this topic: Electronic Countermeasure
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)