By While people in North Korea continue to starve the Kim regime is busy spending money on devices that will do nothing more than jam the GPS receivers for Seoul taxi drivers:
North Korea recently jammed GPS signals in South Korea in an apparent bid to disrupt Seoul’s annual military drills with U.S. forces, government sources said Sunday.
GPS signals in Seoul and nearby cities, including Incheon and Paju, were temporarily disrupted on Friday afternoon, causing mobile phones and certain military equipment in the area to malfunction, the sources said.
“My understanding is that errors were detected in a very few equipment within the telecom industry,” a defense official said. “Some measurement equipment in artillery units was also affected but only very slightly.”
The jamming signals are thought to have come from vehicle-mountable devices at military units north of the inter-Korean border. Former Defense Minister Kim Tae-young said in October that he had intelligence that the communist regime had imported from Russia such devices capable of jamming GPS signals. [Yonhap]
8:23 pm on March 6th, 2011 1
Thank you, dear comrades in DPRK! Your participation in our exercises helps us to find the flaws in our defenses.
10:04 pm on March 6th, 2011 2
I'm certain this is more serious than people want to believe. If they can jam something on the ground, they can jam something in the air. Its not often you hear "the JDAM landed off target." Another point I find interesting is a vehicle mounted jammer reaching Seoul. That's a pretty good distance and all I can say, is I hope the jammer operators are done having kids.
10:26 pm on March 6th, 2011 3
You can thank the Russians, too. The Russians still cooperate militarily with North Korea yet South Korea turns a blind eye and publicly seeks closer ties to Moscow.
10:27 pm on March 6th, 2011 4
It's probably a beta-version of something they've been working on for a while. If they can get it to work effectively, it would have severe (military) impacts on not only aircraft, but artillery, armor and especially the ground forces. Most of todays soldiers can't navigate without GPS. The old standard map and compass is a thing of the past.
10:29 pm on March 6th, 2011 5
Do South Koreans really think cell phones would operate on the day of an invasion from the North? Just imagine the panic as the cell phones and internet stop working. Maybe then they'll realize that they should have taken the threat from the North more seriously.
4:47 am on March 7th, 2011 6
archieb, you make a good point about relying too much on cell phone service.
Shortly after I arrived in Hawaii, we had an earthquake that knocked out power to the entire island of Oahu for most of the day. Electricity was out and most people found their cell service was spotty or nonexistent, while those who had dropped their traditional landline for Internet-based phone service (which is cheaper) had the rudest awakening: they could not even call 911.
In the US at least (and Korea, too, I believe), landline phone service is on a different, low-energy line system from the electric grid, and it might have staying power when the electricity is taken out or goes out on its own.
Hawaiian Telecom uses the earthquake in its advertisements even now.
11:30 pm on March 7th, 2011 7
Iraq used Russian jammers to thwart our smart bombs during the second war and it didn't do much. They have backup navigation systems like INS. Also, in a real war, they are painting theirselves as targets when they turn those things on.
4:01 pm on March 8th, 2011 8
#7,
Yes, like a criminal who removes his fingerprints is only making himself much easier to find.