Electronic warfare

Making sense of CHAMP, the silver bullet miracle missile that isn’t

The worst time for people to learn about a new weapon is in the middle of a geopolitical crisis. So it is with CHAMP, a long-in-development missile built for the Air Force that is now, thanks to several delays in production, making a popular debut coincidentally paired with fears about North Korea.

CHAMP, or the “Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project,” is a missile built to fry computers, with microwaves. It is almost certainly not, despite recent coverage at CNN, NBC and elsewhere, a silver bullet against a North Korean ICBM.

So what does CHAMP have to do with North Korea?

Great question! The short answer is nothing. CHAMP predates the current tensions between North Korea and the United States, and CHAMP will likely post-date them as well. For our purposes, there are only two points about CHAMP worth mentioning.

The first is that, as a weapon built to fry electronics and computers, we’d be hard-pressed to find another conventional military that CHAMP is less useful against. North Korean artillery poses a major risk to military personnel on the DMZ and yet thanks to both the age of the artillery pieces and thanks to the rocky emplacements protecting the weapons, they would likely be unaffected by a microwave blast from CHAMP.