Originally Posted by
pmills575
Most of the ECM cans took some time to become operational, known as "warm up time", the power switch had an alternate position which had a platic guard that could be broken if enough force was used. This was marked as the war switch, it truncated the time the unit took to become operational. Bomber wing at Akrotiri received a panic call wanting to know if we had a problem with any aircrafts ECM. Apparently the VHF comms channels were all being jammed. A quick run around all of the airframes that had power on discovered a Green Salad???? unit (VHF Jammer) with the war switch on and the plastic guard broken. The panic was that it effectively wiped out VHF comms in the easterm Med including most of Israel, who were about to bring all of their forces to the highest alert level fearing an imminent attack. Akrotiri was only 90 miles from the Golan heights. We never found out how it, or who, managed to operate the war switch.
There was an early VHF jammer called Green Palm replaced by ARI 18146.