Heading to Russia anytime soon? Well, that cell tower that you see in Russia may actually be a missile jammer.
Missile jammers aren’t exactly new as far as technology is concerned, but Russia’s implementation of it might. According to a report from Motherboard, it seems that over in Russia, the government is apparently considering stepping up their military defense by equipping civilian cellphone towers with missile jammers.
According to a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman who spoke to the Izvestiya newspaper, “At the present time, the tests of the item have been completed and the system has been accepted into the inventory.” Dubbed Pole-21, these missile jammers can be mounted onto cellphone towers and given the spread of cellphone towers, the end result could be a dome-like defense system that can cover entire regions and protect it from satellite navigation signals.
However it should be noted that the US already has cruise missiles like the Tomahawk which has been designed specifically to counteract against GPS jammers, meaning that it is unclear as to how effective this setup will be, but Russian military analyst Anton Lavrov seems to think it will be good enough.