Wrong on two main counts. Originally Posted by herfacechair*Sigh*
Why did I feed the troll?
Look PuddyCat, the company I own just happens to build some of those fancy gadgets that keep you alive out there. I've got a pretty good foundation on this subject. How about we inject some verifiable facts into this argument other than "I once saw 'Warlock' painted on a sign in Iraq", shall we?
The Warlock Green and Red systems referred to in the WikiLeaks documents were part of the Counter Remote Control Improvised Explosive Device (RCIED) Electronic Warfare (CREW) system. These early "CREW-1" devices were built in very limited numbers to act as a stop-gap measure until the more capable CREW-2 system came online. The Warlock systems were actually nothing more than upgraded Shortstop proximity fuse counter measure systems that were hastily re-built to include jamming capability in the spectrum used by cell phones. A grand total of 400 Warlock Green and 1500 Warlock Red systems were produced by EDO Corp (now part of ITT). All of them were delivered by January of 2006. No Warlock units have been built since. You can read about the history of Warlock here: http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...d/an-vlq-9.htm
The military realized, however, that the Warlock technology did not fully address the remote detonated IED problem so they immediately set out to replace the Warlocks with new and improved systems based on the CREW-2 standard. In 2004 CENTCOM directed that ALL HMMWV's, FMTV/LMTV's, M2's, and Strykers in the Iraq and Afghanistan operating theaters be fitted or upgraded with CREW-2 devices as soon as they were available. This started happening in 2007. You will find the initial contract solicitation for the first 10,000 CREW-2 systems to replace the Warlocks, issued December 2006, here: https://www.fbo.gov/?s=opportunity&m...=core&_cview=0
ITT won that contract (it's contract number N00024-07-C-6311 if you want to look it up) and started replacing or upgrading all of the Warlock CREW-1 systems to the CREW-2 standard in early 2007. The work was 100% completed in May 2008. All of the CREW-1 Warlocks were gone by that date. All of them.
After that the DoD went hog wild on jammers. More than 70,000 CREW-2 level systems where put into the field since 2007. These systems come from a variety of manufacturers under the names ICE (Raytheon), Symphony (Lockheed), Duke (Syracuse), Spiral (ITT), and a few others. CREW-3 capable Spiral systems are now appearing out of ITT as well.
So what does all this mean?
It basically means that you're full of shit.
1. The WikiLeaks document only referred to the CREW-1 systems and was released years after the practically worthless CREW-1 Warlocks had been phased out. Even if there were some old Warlocks still out there when the document was released, they would have been a tiny, tiny fraction of the 70,000+ CREW system in field. The document had no impact on the operational effectiveness of the CREW program. It didn't endanger anybody.
2. The fact that some parts of the military still calls every jammer a "Warlock" has nothing to do with anything. It's pretty common, as you well know, for a name to stick in the heads of you E-3/4 grunts once you've heard it. Just because you call everything with a button and dial a "Warlock" doesn't change the fact that the CREW-1 Warlock systems were long gone before the WikiLeaks document was published.
3. As you should also well know, the bad guys figured out how to bypass the whole CREW system almost as quickly as we put them into the field. IED makers switched over to passive infrared triggers once we had a significant number of jammers in the field. While I wouldn't go on a Sunday drive through the northern provinces without a CREW system, they certainly were not the end of the IED threat. Fact is, all of the CREW jammers are easily defeated by using a $5 IR sensor instead of a $20 RF trigger. The bad guys had already figured out how to get around CREW and WikiLeaks did nothing to change this.
4. Your concept of "general public" vs "in the field" is simply misguided. The guys who make those triggers aren't goat herders in Basra, they're educated electrical engineers in Iran and Pakistan. Those guys do have both the training and info they need to defeat or work around the jammers. Jamming a cell phone is electrical engineering 101. These devices work on basic principles of physics and there is very, very little inside one of those jammers that any experienced electrical engineer would not know about already. In fact, the exact same electronics found in the Warlock Red were used to jam cell phone signals in movie theaters. If you wanted to learn about Warlock all you had to do was order one of these commercially available devices and you'd know all about it. Your distinction between the public and the experts is nonsensical. It's the experts we're worried about and they already had the info.
So, if you were, as you claim, actually being sent outside the wire in 2009 with nothing but a Warlock Red system then either:
a) you were operating in a time warp rather than a war zone, or
b) your CO was trying out a creative means of eliminating one of his little problems.
From your demeanor on this board I'd go with option b all the way.
As for all the other stuff, blah blah blah, blah blah blah, so what. You've proven that, like all experienced trolls, you're long on rhetoric and hyperbole and far, far short on facts. When you can do better than "but I swear I saw one in my truck last year" come on back and I shall taunt you some more.
Cheers,
Mazo.
PS - Note that I'm not talking about Warlock Blue systems here. That's a completely different, although equally worthless, class of device that has nothing to do with the WikiLeaks document. If you're talking about turning off your Warlock Blues when going inside the wire then you're even more clueless about this subject than you appear to be.