Report: Air Force Chooses Missile to Carry Computer-Killing Weapon

The Air Force has reportedly picked Lockheed Martin’s long-range Joint Air-to-Surface Missile to carry a new computer-killing electronic attack payload with the stunning capability of being a "first day of war" standoff weapon.

Major Gen. Thomas Masiello of the the Air Force Research Laboratory says the technology, known as CHAMP — for Counter-electronics High-powered microwave Advanced Missile Project — can destroy electronic equipment with bursts of high-power microwave energy, Flight Global reports.

The technology will be "miniaturized" to suite the Lockheed missile, Flight Global reports.

"That’s an operational system already in our tactical air force, and that is really what will make us more operationally relevant," Masiello said at a science and technology exposition at the Pentagon earlier this month, Flight Global reports.

"Both the major commands and the combatant commands are very interested in that weapon system. It’s a non-kinetic effect."

According to Foxtrot Alpha, the super-high-tech system will be a "first day of war" standoff weapon.

"The capability is real … and the technology can be available today," Masiello says, according to Foxtrot Alpha. "That's an operational system already in our tactical air force."

The Daily Mail reports that in 2012 Boeing successfully tested the weapon on a one-hour flight during which it knocked out the computers of an entire military compound. The test was over the Utah Test and Training Range, the newspaper reports.

The test was so successful even the camera recording it was disabled, the newspaper reports.

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