EMP weapons
These have been discussed for years.
Back in the bad old days the Sov's had regiments of SS18's with 25 MT warheads to zap western comms and electronic systems. The USA may well have had some weapons intended for similar purposes.
What is a relatively recent development is the creation of conventional EMP weapons. These were (allegedly) available at the time of GW1 but not used as the US felt confident that they could crack the Iraqi C3I system open without revealing the actual weapon to public exposure. I saw an article about this in JDW around 93(?). The Sov's (as was) were also supposed to have these things also.
There are also a number of softkill systems in the US armory - in GW 1 they used Tomahawk to deploy spools of carbon fibre over poser stations - they trailed over the transformers and cables and shoerted out the civilian power supply. No doubt they will have some new tricks to add bring to the party this time.
I suspect the C130 thing may be misdirection though it would have to be very well shielded to prevent the aircraft wiping out its own avionics. Perhaps the crews of these C130's will be easily identified by the fact they will all have clockwork watches, as the digital ones they used to have had all melted.