I know this is from last week and the left has since moved on, but below is a great video on the EF-18 Growler.
When I was in the Navy, we still had the EA-6B Prowler, affectionally called the “Queer.” The Growler has the same job, it’s just been modernized. There were 2 squadrons of these in the Venezuela theater: one was carrier based, the other was located in Puerto Rico.
There was a legend going around when I was in the service about a Prowler that had turned its jamming equipment on over Washington state and shut down everything: radars, radio, television, all of it for almost 15 minutes. Don’t know if it is true, but it certainly is within this plane’s capabilities. The jamming pod these aircraft carries is the AN/ALQ-99, which can jam all RF signals between 64 MHz and 20GHz.
In the run up to the Venezuela attacks, those Growlers would have shut down all radio and radar. No missiles, no tracking or seeing aircraft, and no issuing of orders to anti-aircraft batteries. All command, control, and communications (C3) would have been shut down. All radars inoperable. Anything that tried to shoot or track anyhow would have been eliminated by the F-35s that were operating over the country.
An entire nation’s air defense, shut down in a couple of minutes.
8 Comments
Joe Blow · January 9, 2026 at 6:55 am
Buddy of mine rode shotgun on a EA/6B Growler for a few years after high school. Forget which boat. The tech available to the US is pretty impressive, can’t imagine what it’s like today. I gotta imagine however, there’s counter-measures (beyond fiber-optic wires)? I know, it’s a cat-mouse game where each-side one-ups the others… Vz is reported to have had the S-300, so a little dated, but supposedly there were some more modern chink radars. Would be curious to see/hear an un-biased analysis. Anything from either side can’t be trusted.
Birdog357 · January 9, 2026 at 7:28 am
Remember those shows of force over the past couple months where a Super Hornet would troll their airspace with transponders hot so the entire damn world could see him? They weren’t Super Hornets. They were Growlers and they were soaking up all kinds of data….
Divemedic · January 9, 2026 at 9:52 am
Yep.
Michael · January 9, 2026 at 9:08 am
Divemedic with respect do you think perhaps a system deployed since 2004 hasn’t been studied and countermeasures developed for it?
If it’s THAT much a superweapon, why do we seem only to deploy it against a nation state about the military equilateral of Maryland NG?
Would have prevented a few “exciting” situations in the Hothi-Navy Games where so far, we’re Hothi’s 3 and Navy 0.
More WH information is coming out every day that Venezuela’s Air Defense was neutralized by suitcases of 100-dollar bills. Or perhaps that curious fact that only 32 Cuban security forces were the causalities? Funny not funny that the Venezuelan Militarty wasn’t in the way, eh?
Interesting how laser guided manpads are now sold by the Chinese:
https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2025/cambodia-turns-to-chinese-qw-3-manpads-and-th-s311-system-to-develop-a-mobile-air-defense-capability
Divemedic · January 9, 2026 at 9:55 am
That isnt quite how it works. Was there some money tossed around? Perhaps. Who cares? If you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying.
Dave · January 9, 2026 at 10:22 am
Great to see that these aircraft are still performing these missions. I was a crew chief on the EF-111s for a few years. The EA-6s took over this mission after we retired the F-111s. I’ve also heard the stories about jammers being turned on while flying cross country and knocking things out along the way. An EF-111 actually got the first confirmed kill of desert storm by running an Iraqi F1 Mirage into the ground when it went down to the deck to avoid it. Great memories being in that world.
Dan D. · January 9, 2026 at 10:54 am
Whenever RF jamming comes up I remind everyone within earshot to look at spark gap transmitters again. You can build one, literally, with stuff at an automotive scrap yard. And in this era of spread spectrum communications nothing says spread spectrum like the E field from a nice, healthy 12V spark. Its won’t reach up into the 6-7 gig band of ultra wideband that the new WiFi standards use but it will do a number on the usual sub-gig FM comms that HT run. And I suspect it will destroy Bluetooth in the 2.4G band as well since their Rx sensitivities are in the -90dB range.
Old Maine Farmer · January 9, 2026 at 5:38 pm
It reminds me of back in the day……I was in an aggressor squadron flying EA-7Ls (there were only a few of them made). We took off from Miramar, a division of EA-7Ls and EA-3’s to attack the carrier battle group off the coast of LA. As we transited LA airspace, the A-3 accidentally started dumping a chaff corridor, totally obliterating LAX airspace radar. OMG did we get in trouble! It looked like a Russian invasion.