The effects of a detonation are far reaching, with long-lasting psychological, economic and political repercussions preventing a return to normality. It’s now easier than ever to access the knowledge and materials required to build a remote-controlled bomb, increasing the burden on security and policing forces to disrupt hostile actors, or ultimately ‘make safe’ suspected IEDs when they are discovered.
This article explores the threat of IEDs over the last 50 years and explains how Leonardo’s Guardian Shield – an advanced electromagnetic countermeasures (ECM) system – is used to protect the public, bomb disposal teams, and infrastructure from remotely triggered bombs.
Before the turn of the millennium, IEDs were primarily used by paramilitary and terrorist groups as a relatively cheap and low-risk way of targeting civilians, military and police without engaging in direct combat. Using readily available components, remote controlled devices were discretely placed – affixed to vehicles and deposited in bins – to maximise the loss of life and destruction, particularly in public areas.
Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) teams are the specialists tasked with making these devices safe, often at great risk to their own personal safety. Electronic Countermeasures (ECM) have traditionally been bulky and expensive, indiscriminately broadcasting at high power across specific parts of electromagnetic spectrum to have an effect. This has meant that the primary users of ECM equipment have usually been the military, rather than security forces and policing services.
While ECM systems have continued to develop slowly over time, remote-controlled IEDs have advanced at an increasingly rapid pace – countering the countermeasures at an unsustainable level. Furthermore, the electromagnetic spectrum is more congested than ever – relied upon by both commercial and government users. Those with nefarious intentions can easily hide amongst the volume of these legitimate signals.
This is where Guardian Shield breaks the loop.
Designed, coded and built from the ground up with future threats in mind, Guardian Shield is highly versatile, able to adapt to new threats within hours instead of weeks. Threats are defeated using software-defined radios, meaning the signals it broadcasts can be tailored with software updates. Guardian Shield is also compliant with open software and hardware standards, enabling complementary systems to communicate and interact with it.
But how does it work in reality? Picture the scene: a suspect package is found in a busy multi-storey car park in a densely populated city centre.
Police and security forces are alerted to a suspect package through a call by a member of the public to the emergency services. First responders on the scene confirm the presence of a potential threat, clear the area, inform EOD specialists – who are now en route – and establish a perimeter cordon until they arrive.
Guardian Shield can be transported in a range of vehicle types – from specialised vehicles used by the British Army to the equivalent of a commercial van or civilian 4x4 more commonly used by police bomb disposal teams around the world.
Now on scene, the EOD operator quickly assesses the situation and based on intelligence, decides to deploy Guardian Shield. Legacy systems comprised several monolithic components, each with specific electronic warfare functionality, that took a relatively large amount of time and resource to deploy and operate. With Guardian Shield, deployment is simple, as the system consists of two components:
- The forward deployable element contains integrated Electronic Surveillance (ES) and Electronic Attack (EA) capabilities.
- Command and Control (C2) and ES processing module, which is operated from the vehicle platform at the incident control point.
The forward deployable element can be moved into position by most medium-sized Remotely Controlled Vehicles (RCVs), preventing EOD specialists from putting themselves in harm’s way to setup the countermeasure in-range of the suspect package. In extremis, a single operator can manually position Guardian Shield if unable to do so with an RCV.
With Guardian Shield now deployed, the operator can employ a variety of surgical and targeted techniques to protect life and infrastructure, preventing the device from being remotely activated.
The EOD operator neutralises the threat, returning the situation to normal with minimum disruption. The threat to life and property is now over.
As threats evolve, new RF waveforms and capture effects can be uploaded to Guardian Shield through software updates, exploiting the system’s software-defined radios with brand new ES and EA techniques.
Leonardo has integrated best-of-breed electronics while designing and building Guardian Shield, but should any hardware changes be required, the system’s modularity makes these changes relatively inexpensive compared to legacy systems.
Open standards underpin this rapid upgradability, enabling customers to choose from an ever-growing library of software and ecosystem of hardware.
Guardian Shield is a culmination of nearly half a century of innovation and partnership between Leonardo and the British Army. Our equipment has been used to protect life through high-threat operations including Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are proud to continue to deliver advanced EOD ECM systems.
The system is readily available for export for military, security and policing customers.