Report 214 · Defense Tech
Britain's new soldier-worn counter-IED jammer, Project CRENIC, was supposed to start arriving in 2026. In June the defence ministry told Parliament the planning date is now 2028. The coverage treated that as a procurement slip. The ministry's own wording points at something more useful: a bomb jammer is two products on two different clocks, and only one of them is late.
I served as a Counter-IED and Electronic Warfare Officer, so a delay to a dismounted bomb jammer is the kind of defense news I read past the headline. The headline here is simple. The more interesting part sits in two short written answers in the UK Parliament, both from Luke Pollard, Minister for Defence Readiness, to Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty.
The first answer, published 5 June 2026, responds to a question about progress on Project CRENIC. Here it is in full:
Project CRENIC passed Critical Design Review in summer 2025, and the first prototype systems are expected in Q1 2027 for testing. Work is ongoing to optimise the capability to protect Service Personnel from emerging radio-controlled threats, while ensuring the procurement and delivery model supports continuous through-life development and upgrades in response to an increasingly complex threat landscape.
The follow-up, answered on 16 June, asks when the capability will enter service. The answer is one line: "The Planning Assumption for Service Entry (PASE) for the dismounted, soldier worn CRENIC system is 2028."
Compare that with the launch. When Defence Equipment and Support announced the contract on 28 October 2022, it described a five-year, £45 million systems integration deal with Team Protect, a group made up of PA Consulting, Leonardo, Leidos Innovations UK and Marshall Land Systems. The first stage was to "deliver replacement vehicle and soldier-carried systems to active operations," and the announcement said: "First deliveries of the new equipment are due to take place in 2026, with a view to incrementally deploying equipment." Army Technology, which reported the June answer, counts that as at least six years from contract award to fielding.
A soldier-worn jammer is a radio transmitter, a receiver, antennas, a battery and a processor that a person has to carry on patrol. Everything about that is a hardware problem: weight, heat, power draw, ruggedness, and not jamming your own radios (which I covered in Report 037). Hardware moves on a procurement clock: requirements, design review, prototypes, testing, production. CRENIC is on that clock right now. Design review in summer 2025, prototypes in early 2027, service entry planned for 2028.
The thing a jammer actually fights is not on that clock at all. The clearest public description of why comes from a 2012 Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest article by Michael Pesci on the U.S. Marine Corps counter-radio-controlled IED program, known as CREW. It's an American program, not the British one, but the physics and the workflow are the same. Pesci's assessment of the threat is blunt: "RCIEDs continue to evolve as quickly as they are countered." The resulting needs, he writes, "must be met in a matter of days or weeks, not months."
The piece of a jammer that answers on that timescale is the threat load, which Pesci defines as "the technique employed by the hardware to interfere with the IED communication link." His article describes a formal process for changing those loads, triggered by "an advance in wireless technologies, adaptation of new communications protocols, deficiencies or changes to current anti-RCIED hardware, or a 'find' by U.S. or coalition forces." A new trigger radio shows up in theater, someone analyzes it, someone writes and tests a technique against it, and the fleet gets new loads. The box on the soldier's back doesn't change. What it knows does.
Pesci also makes the point that the software layer can do more than swap techniques: firmware changes "may improve performance by unlocking or allowing additional capabilities not originally possible with earlier software/firmware iterations." That is the whole argument for building the hardware so it can take those updates without a redesign.
Read the June answer again with that split in mind. The minister didn't just give a date. He said the work is about protecting troops from "emerging radio-controlled threats" while making sure the delivery model "supports continuous through-life development and upgrades." The 2022 announcement made the same promise in different words, saying the project would keep pace with "fast-evolving road-side bombs" and seek "innovative ideas from outside the traditional Defence industries." PA Consulting's own 2022 release describes Team Protect's job as designing and delivering software-defined force-protection countermeasures.
That is the right design goal, and it's also the honest reason these programs take a long time. A jammer that ships on time but can only be updated through a slow, vendor-locked cycle will be out of date within months of fielding. A jammer built so the second clock can run fast, with an open pipeline for new threat loads, is harder to get through design review. My reading, and it is a reading rather than anything the ministry has said, is that a late box with a fast update path is a better outcome than an on-time box with a slow one. The cost of the slip is real, though: until 2028, whatever dismounted UK troops carry today stays in service longer.
The same software-defined logic is why the U.S. Navy could turn its JCREW bomb jammer into a counter-drone system, which I walked through in Report 185. Hardware that can be reprogrammed outlives the threat it was bought for.
Every counter-drone and counter-IED buy now faces the same two clocks. When you read that a jammer is "late" or "fielded," ask which clock you're looking at. Fielding the hardware is the start of the job, not the end. The question that decides whether it still works in year three is how fast new threat loads get from an analyst's bench to the soldier's back, and almost no public reporting asks it.
The reason for the slip. Neither answer explains why 2026 became 2028. Anything beyond the dates is inference.
The vehicle-mounted element. The 2028 date is for the "dismounted, soldier worn" system. I found no public date for the vehicle systems the 2022 announcement also mentioned.
How CRENIC handles threat loads. The update pipeline described above is from the U.S. Marine Corps CREW program as published in 2012. The ministry has said CRENIC is meant for continuous upgrades, but has not published how its update process works.
The UK's soldier-worn counter-IED jammer, Project CRENIC, now has a planned service entry of 2028, two years after the first deliveries promised in 2022, with prototypes due for testing in early 2027. The hardware runs on a procurement clock. The threat it fights runs on a days-and-weeks clock, answered by updated threat loads rather than new boxes. The ministry's own answer says the design goal is continuous through-life upgrades. Judge the program, when it arrives, on how fast that second clock runs.
U.S. Army combat veteran (Counter-IED / Electronic Warfare), peer-reviewed researcher in microwave spectroscopy, and founder & CEO of Shroombiosis. Consults on laboratory operations, AI, and supplement formulation.