I would like everyone to take a close look at Lt. Dudley in the foreground (first big picture middle of the article).
Can you imagine moving long distances or fighting for your life on uneven terrain with all of that stuff dangling off of you and weighing you down? Also notice that the soldiers behind him have full cargo pockets on their pants.
It's interesting to notice the interplay of how new technology enables the soldier to carry more gadgets and tools, but simultaneously makes the old gadgets lighter.
A typical soldier has more in his first aid pouch (one of those dangling tan things with a zipper) than the platoon medic did in WWII. His rifle is lighter, but it also has an advanced optic and a laser visible through his NVG's. He's carrying a vest with a "bullet proof" plate (very heavy) but under it is a shirt made of light durable technical fabric that wicks moisture away from his skin.
I'm convinced there will never be a day when the infantryman isn't carrying too much weight. There is a limit to how much weight a fit infantryman can carry and still be able to fight and they will always have us carrying stuff up to that limit.
If you don't mind me asking have you experienced any discrimination in tech because of your background or politics? I have friends that served and one of them moved to Dallas from S.V. because the politics there were hostile to vets. Thank you!
I've encountered some hostility when I've said I've been in the Army (I don't volunteer the information out of the blue - people ask me what I did before I did my PhD so I tell them).
As the other person said, some people I've met at conferences have ended the conversation with me or told me they think it's immoral.
One person at a major Ruby conference casually literally asked me if I enjoyed killing babies.
Many people have the craziest ideas of what the military and war is like that have no connection whatsoever to reality. It's scary that civil society understands so little of the military now that it's so small and professional.
> Many people have the craziest ideas of what the military and war is like that have no connection whatsoever to reality. It's scary that civil society understands so little of the military now that it's so small and professional.
I totally believe this, and it makes me very angry.
Volunteer for service, suspend your civil rights, vow to defend the Constitution, develop the technical skills, physical ability, and mental toughness to serve in combat, and lay it all on the line for fellow soldiers -- and return to a universe of people who cannot identify Khandahar on a map, and think they are morally superior... well, I would have issues.
(FWIW I have never served in the military, I don't like the chain of top-level decisions that led to a decade of active military deployment.)
The thing that bugs me is that there's no middle. People appear to either be the type of asshole OP mentioned or they idolize soldiers in an equally terrifying way. I view the military as a job. It's not a job I would want, but there's tons of jobs I don't want. In peace time it's pretty effective at helping people move up the economic ladder. In war time it provides trained killers to take out the bad guys. I don't say that flippantly, that's an important and necessary part of maintaining our civilization. Any beef I might have about things the military might be doing at any given time is better directed at political leadership than the boots on the ground.
Very good point. I think this is objectivization -- exactly the sort of cognitive glitch when I encounter people who look very different from what I am used to.
I like to think that with decades of practice, I can anticipate this reaction, or at least catch myself quickly, or Plan C: apologize. Usually all of the above.
People are not mythological creatures. But getting civil society to stumble along, on a path together, has employed no small amount of storytelling and manipulation.
There’s some moral hazard in treating self-sacrifice-and-killing as merely a job. Idealizing what warriors do on your behalf (imagine it was actually to defend your people not the interests of an empire) is an important way that humans deal with the act of killing. I don’t think you want cold blooded killers who do it for a meager paycheck, as opposed to the glory and heroism of defending others.
No, you do not want to reintegrate a half million cold blooded sociopathic murderers with no regard for human life back into society. No no no. You don’t know what you’re saying.
It is much better for all of us that the ones who we have kill be convinced they’re merely doing it to protect the rest of us. You can mend those hearts. You can’t mend the cold blooded contract killers.
We can't even reintegrate the ones supposedly doing it to protect us. If we, the general population, stopped participating in this delusion that they're protecting us, we'd likely send them out to do less killing in the first place.
Killing for money doesn't require you to be a psychopath, as is evidenced by the countless paid killers in the military and swat teams today.
Interview those paid killers and find out why they do it. If my personal experience as a warrior doesn’t convince you maybe hearing it directly from them will.
If you're suggesting fewer people would sign up to be paid killers if we didn't lavish them with hero worship, then I'm okay with that. In fact, I'll go so far as to state that as an intended consequence. The other, larger component, is that the false dichotomy between hero worship and villainization robs the general public of the ability to rationally consider what our military is doing.
When a lot of more the population served in Vietnam the country turned against the war. Nowadays nobody seems to care that America's longest war continues on.
That's because they're not even remotely comparable things, as you note. Afghanistan is a security operation, not a traditional war. There's no draft, thousands of US soldiers aren't dying in Afghanistan. Even the cost is a modest fraction of the total US military budget.
There were 15 US casualties in Afghanistan in 2017, and 14 in 2016.
I would say my experience has been the reverse. In Texas you can pretty much assume most folks support the troops and veterans. The only "discrimination" I've received as a vet was in SV. I don't know if you'd call it discrimination though, mainly just people disgusted with me (or horrified?) for fighting in "Bush's war".
I had a woman just flat out turn on her heels and walk away from me upon mention of my service (I forget how it was related to the conversation). We were having a professional conversation at a conference. I've gotten looks of disgust from students (I teach various programming classes) when I tie something back to a lesson I learned in the military. Whatever.
That stuff doesn't affect me. It's more a reflection on them than it is me.
That is interesting. A lot of my family served in the military, including both my parents. I was under the impression that there was a complete 180 from the Vietnam era where people blamed draftees for serving. I thought there was enthusiastic support for individual soldiers, but overwhelming condemnation for the quagmire we face in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is crazy to me that people had negative reactions to your military experience. I think it points to a certain stratification of society that people would not have family members or friends in the military to help them empathize.
Silicon Valley, located in the vicinity of San Francisco Bay.
The Bay Area area is noted for anti-military sentiment, especially given the history of UC Berkeley during the time of the Vietnam War. Naturally, some of this spills over into anti-veteran bigotry.
The WWII and Cold War technology arms race (in which Silicon Valley got its start) is intellectually interesting and easily justified by clear existential threats to our civilization, whose emotional content we we weren't around for.
US foreign policy since then has been... murkier. I don't think the Bay Area really has a position on soldiers, so much as it opposes the current and previous few wars.
I personally don't mention my military service at all on resumes or when interviewing. I have no problem talking about it otherwise, but it's simply too easy to be flagged by someone's bias in the hiring process.
The vast majority of people in the vast majority of companies are as reasonable as one would expect another human being to be. But there are some standout experiences I've had. I mean, this is definitely the exception and not the norm, but I was once told that I'm "not the right kind of diversity" by someone who actually worked in a diversity and inclusion working group.
And then some people make some crazy assumptions when I tell them I was in the infantry for many years. I have interestingly been the target of a number of "jokes" about watching Fox News and supporting Trump, even though I'm actually strongly anti-authoritarian to a fault, and I want something like the Nordic model for the United States, and I supported Bernie Sanders in the last election. I just don't talk about politics at work, so people run wild with their assumptions. The hypocrisy runs deeeeep in the urban in-group left, man. I've honestly sometimes had an easier time talking about my time in service at Hippie Hill than I have in some tech companies. Of course this isn't information I'm eager to volunteer, obviously. But the conversation does come up sometimes, unfortunately.
And this doesn't even begin to touch on the totally disconnected delusions some people have about what the world is like in a lot of places on this Earth (and throughout history). We are so lucky to live in the time and place we're living in, the majority of people reading this.
It's interesting that Software Engineers here would discuss about the ethics of building mass surveillance software [1] but have no problem with people fighting in foreign lands to advance the interests of capitalism. Why blame Software Engineers for their role in enforcing the interests of the State when veterans get a free pass? Have we really become that hypocritic?
When you are a soldier you are required to follow your orders, a programmer is totally free to deny any project for personal reasons. The soldier is on some level a policy tool of the state determined by politicians. They can individually disagree but must carry out what the state decides, if the order is illegal they can deny it but the 'big picture' is all set high up.
There's no reason to believe you're talking about the same "Software Engineers" in each case, so questions like this are meaningless and boil down to rhetoric. Different subgroups of people comment on different threads.
I read once where a 70-90 pound kit has been normal since Napoleon's army. Cramming more functionality into fewer cubic centimeters and fewer kilograms doesn't lighten the load, and never has. It hopefully gives the soldier a more functional kit.
According to that, in the 1920s the British Army "discovered that armies in the past had on the average issued the soldier between fifty-five and sixty pounds". Investigations by the British, Germans, Russians, and US into how much infantry should carry throughout the 1900s all end up around the same number of 30% of the soldier's body weight (48lbs) being the ideal load, and that the maximum load a soldier should carry shouldn't exceed 45% of their body weight (72lbs, and will degrade their combat effectiveness for the next few days no matter how physically conditioned the soldier is).
If you take into account that the average American infantryman today is bigger than your average 1920’s soldier then yes this sounds about right. A 200lb soldier is, on average, carrying 80lbs.
This reminds me of the situation with software. When writing a program today, I've got dozens of great tools that I didn't have 10 or 20 years ago, but the flip side is that I've got to learn and use all these new tools.
You could always limit yourself to the old ways, if weight/complexity were your only criterion, but the world moves on, and we're (apparently) not yet hitting the point where piling on more technology doesn't provide an overwhelming advantage.
>I'm convinced there will never be a day when the infantryman isn't carrying too much weight. There is a limit to how much weight a fit infantryman can carry and still be able to fight and they will always have us carrying stuff up to that limit.
That day will be when we have sustainable mechanized body armor. When the suit can carry more than the man wearing it, the man is no longer the bottleneck.
The question will be whether we just send drones at that point.
They will send drones. But they'll also send people in suits too. By the time iron man suits are ubiquitous, the battle space will be 99% drone anyway. But people still need to be there sometimes. So they'll have suits.
Huge argument in favor of interoperability of subsystems: if all the gadgets could recharge one another or had a common battery type, then your spares could be split among gadgets.
Bonus points if other bits of hardware could be shared. Extra bonus points for software interoperability (long shot).
That day will arrive if running becomes more important than the weight of the gear. But, for right now, fighting seems more stationary than ever so mobility isn't as important as medic supplies, communication and weapons. And if there's an empty pocket on the vest, there's a huge military budget that wants to fill it.
“Army was excluding cheaper and more effective options based on other technologies.” - is a key sentence indicating there are middlemen who is being fed here.
The army asked for a radio that could transmit a signal itself. This company offered to build a radio that sends the signal (using radio over ip) to a truck or other radio system that would then transmit the signal. Their radio would not work if there was not another radio locally available to tether it with.
That's not even the same product. Cheaper sure... more effective? I don't know where they got that from. With their system, if you're not in range of the truck, or terrain interferes with the signal to the truck, or the truck gets damaged, you lose all communication.
How far do you think a hand held battery powered radio can transmit it's signal? Unless you are talking about a HF radio using skywave propagation (to include some maths & carefully positioning an antenna that might be several meters long) it won't be very far, especially in a city or rough terrain. The benefit of having a vehicle mounted radio relay system means that it runs on vehicle power (or a generator) and can carry a lot more antennas. Radio retransmission teams who do exactly this with vehicles fitted for this exact purpose are prevalent in the military, most units will have several of these teams/trucks permanently assigned, and if not, their local signal unit can lend them.
I'm not arguing with the rest of your post, I'm sure there is way more fraud, waste and abuse then we can imagine going on. But the laws of physics still apply and if you want transmit a signal far, you need a power source bigger than what people can carry. Even a vehicle mounted and powered radio wouldn't be able to transmit 10-20 miles unless you were sitting on top of a hill in otherwise perfect conditions.
I have a handheld walkie-talkie radio from REI that can transmit 10-20 miles from the top of a hill in not-perfect conditions (and about 1-2 miles in forested terrain), so I think your range estimates are off by an order of magnitude for high-powered transmissions.
Nah, he's pretty on the mark. I'm lucky to make it into the repeater ~15mi down the road from me(50W on both side) because it's not at the top of a mountain. Unless you're talking HF(which he covers) you're basically still constrained by line-of-sight.
More power just pushes you through small objects(trees, buildings, etc) depending on wavelength.
I sense the same can be said about many medical devices.
Firemen came to my house they had a portable digital EKG with 2G data line to push the graph to a doctor remotely. The thing couldn't get cell reception, probably a weak modem/antenna. One of the guy hinted at 5000$ unit cost. In terms of screen + processing + com electronics, it's about 50$. Some MD told me there needs to be some precise analog probes and ADC but I doubt it's in the 1000$ range.
Then there are standard validation costs, which are necessary.
The rest comes from premiums due to the medical market IMO. The companies know very well they can get away with such prices so they do, even though it could be pushed down without altering quality or even decent profit for them.
> Firemen came to my house they had a portable digital EKG with 2G data line to push the graph to a doctor remotely. The thing couldn't get cell reception, probably a weak modem/antenna. One of the guy hinted at 5000$ unit cost.
If only. As someone in Fire/EMS, a moderately equipped LifePak 12/15?
But to also be fair, there's a fair amount going on beyond all that. Defibrillator, including pacing, non invasive measurement of carbon monoxide, certain drugs and chemicals, integrated printer, weather sealed (gotta be able to operate outside in the rain), ruggedized for drops.
Yeah that kind of device, made by Phillips in my case. I don't think it had advanced functions like defib.. it felt barely big enough to be an EKG already but Im the noob. That said 14K is ludicrous.
The fact the mainstream market is able to sell 200€ smartphone with somehow advanced features is also ludicrous in that context. I guess it's just economy of scale power. But I'm convinced we could make the medical market a bit cheaper. It has serious implications on the whole structure. People will be treated differently based on cost. And in my case, that lack of 2G could have been lethal.
I went to a few fablab, these guys are replicating some mundane lab equipment for 1/100 or 1/1000 (can't recall) of the market price. I really liked that mindset.
The thing that makes smartphones so damn cheap is you can sell a couple of hundred million of them every year. It’s the same reason consumer grade GPUs and CPUs completely wiped out SGI, Sun, etc. Those companies weren’t incompetent, it’s just the economies of scale are insane.
> I don't think it had advanced functions like defib.
I can guarantee that it did. It may even have been an AED. Earlier ones didn't actually display an EKG rhythm, but current models can, and run "reasonably" at about $1,000.
If they hooked up either 4 leads or 10 leads to you, then you were getting the full meal deal, so to speak.
And if Silicon Valley brogrammers built it, it would fail about 25% of the time, and catch fire the other 5%. But, hey, the fires would make for a great YouTube video--because the video uploader always works.
Medical has little to do with cost and lots to do with certification and indemnification.
Certification--that defibrillator WILL do what it is supposed to
... or ...
Indemnification--if that defibrillator doesn't do what it is supposed to, somebody is out a lot of money.
The FDA is notably snotty and humorless about wireless, in general.
I am deeply surprised that they would approve something that required a cellular connection to function. I have seen the FDA push back on wireless even when it was completely ancillary to the primary function or when the device had no ability to do anything to anybody.
I would be suspicious that a person did something--accidentally gave permission to the cell connection, for example. This is NOT an indictment of competence. LOTS of shit goes wrong when things are in crisis mode. Devices which are perfectly well designed for calm situations can be totally useless because the interface trips you up when amped on adrenaline.
This was in Europe though. I hear your point, but this was probably a main design decision. It's not a portable EKG for MD, it's for rescuers. They're trained for the average situation but they need a second opinion and the ability to transmit your EKG as-is to an actual doctor is probably very useful. Now the frailty of wireless I understand, but in this case it's a bit absurd. Considering a chart is 1000 x 32bit samples (uncompressed). You could almost tweet that today u_u.
Anyway, I wish I could discuss with people about the possibility of blending both models. I understand the economy of scales, but maybe some partnership between large mainstream electronics could give medical device suppliers special access to some standard, well rounded/tested at cheap prices even at low volume compared to say cellphones.
As someone who has been in the private sector his whole life, and not had much experience with government/military work, it’s always fascinated me how often these projects end up way over budget, way WAY late, and fail to meet every requirement. I’ve always had this morbid curiosity to see first hand how messed up everything has to be at these places in order to fail so badly and so consistently. I’d love to understand how companies can win contract after contract and yet be so bad at delivering. Reading these articles feels like watching car accidents.
I worked on a DARPA contract on military radio technology. I’m not surprised at all why these things go over budget.
Imagine awarding a contract to build a self-driving car. Do you think that contract could be delivered on budget and on time? That’s like every military contract. They’re for bespoke stuff that doesn’t exist in the market. The military looks at what’s out there, adds a bunch of wishlist items, and then puts out a contract for that.
Think about how the private sector develops new products. They don’t award a fixed price contract. They throw a bunch of money at startups. Most of those efforts fail. What is the development cost of every successful product, accounting for those failures? In the military, all the hiccups and restarts and course corrections and dead ends that would kill a startup, and be written off by investors, instead get accounted for in the final cost of the contract.
Unlike self-driving car, radio is a solved problem. Marine and commercial transceivers from Icom and Yaesu are cheap and rugged.
Ham radio operators sometimes even use transceivers build from kits, e.g. Elecraft. Adding encryption should be trivial.
You can't say that "radio is a solved problem" without knowing the military's requirements for these radios.
For example, we were working on radios that could self-organize into networks on frequencies they picked dynamically and keep on the same frequencies while facing a changing RF environment because they were in a convoy driving through the desert with a high powered jammer randomly stomping on everything.
And these aren't fanciful requirements. You're in a country whose government you just toppled--you can't count on the civilian frequency allocations. The military really doesn't want to keep track of every squad's frequency assignment manually. The radios are always on the move, in often challenging terrain (mountains, etc.). The enemy has jammers and countermeasures. Even if not every radio needs every one of these capabilities, the military needs an overall communications architecture that accommodates all of these functions.
Partially solved. Most Ham operators don't have to deal with adversaries. These radios need to stand up to jamming and eavesdropping. They also need to handle a (fairly complex) protocol automatically and in a dynamic configuration. Imagine a cell network with no tower, each phone is capable of becoming the leader. And multiple networks can exist in the same physical space. All traffic has to be encrypted to protect against eavesdropping, and frequency hopping and other techniques have to be incorporated to become jamming resistant.
APRS and packet radio existed since the '90s. They handle routing and multiple participants, and are rather resilient to interference.
There is no encryption and no frequency hopping not because it's difficult to do, but because the goal is to be heard and understood by anyone who listens.
APRS does not have the reliability necessary for commercial use, let alone military use. Packet radio is pretty trivially jammed, handles routing poorly and interference almost not at all.
Encryption is by no means the only additional feature, at least frequency hopping is crucial to avoiding jamming. I can imagine there are other requirements I can't immediately think of.
Doing secure encryption of multicast radio is anything but trivial. You have packet loss, the group is constantly changing and for narrowband technologies you typicaly have small enough MTU that normal cryptographic constructions have larger per-packet overhead than what is left for the useful payload (this is also issue for many long-range IoT radio layers)
Modern radios are software-defined, or at least controlled by a microprocessor, so frequency hopping or even spread spectrum shouldn't be much of a problem.
That's like me going up to a Netflix engineer and saying "why do you get paid so much? You've got the video already, just send it to the device; shouldn't be much of a problem."
Well, the difference would be that I actually built radios, and at least some of them worked. It's really that simple, even without SDR. You already have a microcontroller that reads rotary encoder attached to the tuning knob and changes voltage that goes to the VCO (or divisor in PLL). All you need is to control it from CSPRNG.
You will need to spend some effort on getting synchronization right, but it's a lot less complicated than, say, building a CRUD app.
Congratulations, you made a few working radios with the most basic feature set.
Now make a radio that works in sub-zero and 100+ degree temperatures, survives water, dust, and firearm exposure, being dropped dozens of feet, is resistant to broad-spectrum jamming, can handle secure encrypted communications with a large set of ever-changing participants, has a range of dozens of miles and days of battery life, is of a size and weight portable enough to be carried by a soldier for hours or days alongside their normal gear, and which can be field-repaired by a soldier with a few days of training.
And those are just the high-level requirements. It's a lot more complicated than a CRUD app, which even a non-programmer can do in an hour.
The application portion has a nice explanation on the effects of gun fire on systems. Keep in mind that "gunfire" covers everything from a 9mm handgun to a 30mm Gatling gun.
I was talking about the tactical radios discussed in the article (2km range).
If you want the radio to let you watch video feed from a drone above, show a map with locations of other soldiers, or update Facebook status via satellite link, that may be a bit more work.
Try the following experiment. Take the best 2meter hand held radio to the Dayton hamvention. Pick a simples frequency, talk to your buddies on this frequency. You will hear crosstalk, imd, phantom signals, dropouts. Now take that situation and put it in a hostile, battle situation. Not at all solved.
It's a great example of how trying to design a product that works well for every stakeholder in every scenario leads to a Frankenstein of a product that doesn't work well for anybody. This happens all too often in government (typically military) contracts.
For the requirements, these are written by an office in the military with say a dozen people in it. They will each serve in there for two to ten years then move to someplace completely different. None of them will be experts in radio design. They are going to listen to what their "customers" want, which will be an incrementally better version of what they already have. They are going to listen to what radio salesmen want to sell them. They are going to listen to what some futurist tells them is possible. And then they will write a specification.
The resulting spec may or may not be possible to implement. It may have pairs of requirements which require great cost to implement both, where the sane thing to do would be to relax one slightly, but the spec is cast in stone and that will not happen. It may have specs which could be vastly improved at small cost, but that also will probably not happen.
In industry, ideally, there would be a series of give-and-take rounds between marketing, the product designers, the engineers, and manufacturing which will find the efficient solutions to the conflicts and identify cost effective enhancements. This can't happen in military procurement because to engage in a design process with a company or companies would be unfair to the other bidders. They might engage a company to help them write the requirements, but it would be one which does not bid on the final contract and does not enable the iterative design cycle.
As a procurement system, it can fail spectacularly and is almost guaranteed to preclude optimum solutions, but it also deters cronyism and snake oil peddlers. If it seems like it always fails, remember that you never hear of the contracts which come in on time, on budget, and deliver a usable product.
Strict quoting procedures that don't allow incremental learning while building new things, warring factions continually changing requirements on the client side and unlimited money mean that the projects almost can't be delivered, they are doomed to be overpriced and underdelivered before the development even starts.
Disclaimer: At my previous job, I was several degrees disconnected from SCA/radio contracts (worked on test sets for those radio systems).
Being over budget, late, and not meeting requirements seems to be an infectious quality. However, it's not like many companies are set up to deal with winning these contracts. Do you choose the company that's more likely to have a more complete product but possibly be unable to support it in a couple of years? Or the one that can do decades of support (including replacing obsoleted hardware) but has a reputation for being late, overbudget, and half done?
This is a big issue. There are only a few companies operating in this specific field. You aren't going to find any startups interested in it because making a barebones radio is a multiyear process (to hit all the requirements laid on them from software capabilities to hardware durability).
The established players also have a tendency to layoff or move the experienced engineers after a major update and leave only cheap, inexperienced engineers in their place. So the next big cycle will have mostly people who don't know what they're doing accepting changes that cannot actually be done (in time or budget, if at all) but they don't know better.
I don't think it's "you aren't going to find any startups interested" as much as "you aren't going to find DoD interested in trusting startups to be around". No one gets fired for giving a billion dollar contract to General Dynamics.
I've heard about stories about government agencies and such second hand from family members. To me, it sounds like it breaks down to this because the projects that they are running are not subject to risk of failure. There isn't a small company that is going to absolutely die if a deliverable doesn't meet the market's demands at a certain point in time. Just don't stop throwing money and resources at the project until it is done no matter what.
Government projects are about as efficient as similarly-sized projects in the private sector. You just never hear about private company’s failures because the public has less of a stake in it. Journalists focus on people wasting your money.
The laws requiring publication of bidding documents and damning reports on cost overruns are also mostly specific to public projects. Who knows how much money Apple invested in self-driving technology? Try sending a Freedom of Information Act request to Uber inquiring on their self-driving car efforts.
It is a little more complex. The small company realizing money will run out will start to look at options. The obvious option is cut back requirements/scope until they can get something - anything - on the market to bring in money. If they can slow the rate of losses they might be able to finish eventually. The other option is to show their investors current progress and ask for more money - this is a hard sell but it sometimes works.
In government the first is not allowed - the contract is specified. However you can ask for more and if you have made progress they will sometimes grant you "that little bit more" - remember ultimately they want what you are under contract to make and if you fail they have to start over again with someone else.
As somebody else has remarked, your perception is somewhat skewed by survivorship bias: yes, it seems that these cost overruns are due to a lack of “risk of failure”, but one should really compare it to the overall manner by which capital is allocated and products delivered to market, meaning that one should not be blind to all the startups that get funded and fail to deliver. I'm not saying the two systems are equivalent, but this is the information you must keep in mind to compare them fairly.
Among the quest for the "perfect radio" and making things smaller/lighter/better is the concept of Netted Iridium. Units around the world are often using Netted Iridium as an alternative to traditional radios:
You're absolutely correct (more specifically when it comes to near-peer adversaries). Depending on the threats that we're facing, LEO satellites can be a huge asset even though they're vulnerable.
Military spec radios are an interesting corner of technology. They are one of the things North Korea has exported for money [0]. I expect that radio communications will actually get more important as time goes on, as the potential for intelligent interference and mind games gets better.
Hahahaha Bowman...my god do British soldiers get lumped with totally shit, overly expensive equipment - often made by a British government jobs scheme (sorry I mean defence contractor). The amount of times I've politely smiled when getting a demo of kit like the Bowman, SA80, various rubbish body armour and webbing designs, Snatch Landrovers, etc etc
I'll have you know the SA80 is now pretty decent, granted, it's been redesigned for us by the Germans though ...
A lot of the issue, especially with things like the Snatch, is that they were designed to get around quickly, hence minimal armour, but in modern theatre of war against insurgents planting IED's it breaks down totally.
Same issue with the Eurofighter Typhoon - great A2A, but awful for what's needed now, with is A2G.
I wonder how susceptible these things are to electronic warfware. Complex software-based technology like that seems like a great idea but also like a huge risk. In the civilian sector there is nothing that can't be hacked, I wonder what makes them so confident that they can prevent that in military applications. Otherwise it might just take one good virus to take a whole communication network down.
Then again, with a traditional analogue AM or FM radio it's trivial to triangulate the position (and possibly call in an artillery strike on said coordinates or whatever), as well as jamming it with a narrow-band jammer.
And without some hw/sw assisted crypto, communication becomes a lot slower. Or then you accept that the enemy can and will overhear what you say.
So for better or worse, complex radios based on digital technology is necessary for modern military use.
Though I wonder whether it would be that useful today, with the state of voice recognition and machine translation technology? Just because you throw away those fancy digital radios doesn't mean that your enemy will forgo modern tech. ;)
Most systems for military/aviation use (my experience is more the latter and some the former) get burned into ROM and changing the ROM requires physical access (usually). So most likely a virus or similar could be counteracted with a reboot unless physical access was achieved by the adversary. In which case, they could do anything else to it too.
It doesnt work like that, even GSM "fixed function" DSPs had scratchpad ram area for patches, this is how clever people were able to hack old cellphone hardware for more general purpose usage https://osmocom.org/projects/baseband/wiki/HardwareCalypsoDS...
From a signal standpoint, checkout frequency hopping techniques for jam resistant communications. Specifically, Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS) for VHF nets. Automatic Link Establishment (ALE) provides similar advantages for HF as a byproduct, but it's solving quite a different problem.
and the purpose was to establish merely a financial/technical barrier to entry for potential attackers at a time realtime grabbing/processing more than one megahertz of bw was $$K expensive.
Today $130 gets you 30MHz full duplex radio, $300 60MHz one.
Radio guts, hardware cryptography modules, power amplifiers, and batteries. They've shrunk over time but still aren't small. When I first joined the Marine Corps, we had ground radios for each of the major spectrums: HF, VHF, and UHF (LOS and SATCOM). Now, most of the radios are multi-spectrum (combined): HF/VHF and VHF/UHF/L.
The AN/PRC-117G is an example manpack radio used by the Marine Corps today. We use it for voice and data.
If you're not familiar with radio wave propagation, don't get suckered into thinking hand-held radios can always replace manpack radios or that manpack radios can always replace vehicle radios. The art of radio involves a balance between power, proper antenna use, and terrain. Small, hand-held radios often don't have enough power to transmit a signal the distance you may need it to go in whatever terrain the person is in.
I still don't get it. I mean - when you're talking about power supplies, there are welding power supplies that are light. A power supply is lighter by default these days because they can be made with mosfets instead of big, heavy transformers.
As for hardware cryptography modules - again - you can buy an ARM chip that's the size of your thumbnail that's basically a full blown computer.
I'd be interested to look at the insides of one. I wouldn't be surprised if making them EMP hardened would be a big component of where the bulk comes from.
Switch mode power supplies are small, but the batteries to power them are not.
NSA certified crypto modules aren't in an ARM chip the size of your thumbnail.
a backpack sized radio can also fit a fairly high bandwidth geostationary satellite comm link. There are backpack sized radios which hold a disassembled Ku/Ka-band 1.2 meter sized satellite dish, SSPA (solid state power amplifier), BUC (baseband upconverter) and modem with 1000Base(SX,LX,T) interface. They're not very commonly seen being carried around but it's the sort of thing you might see deployed at a COP (combat outpost) or FOB in a remote part of Afghanistan. Not so much now, since the US doesn't have COPs on top of hills in random parts of Kunar province so much anymore, but they definitely exist.
one of the uses for such is to give a high-resolution video feed to a platoon (or several platoon sized) group, from a drone such as the reaper, for use in their TOC (tactical operations center) of the COP/FOB. And fairly high resolution data uplink from the COP/FOB for things like hilltop mounted infrared cameras feeding data back to a larger base somewhere in the region.
.. and if this thing is done with SDR technology (which apparently was the original aim of the program, don't know if they have backtracked since), presumably the DSP's and FPGA's are going to be larger and significantly more power hungry than bespoke ASIC's.
When you remove the batteries, connectors, rugged case and batteries the newer radios really aren't that large. God damn they're heavy though. So glad I wasn't usually carrying the big ones on patrol. We all used smaller iComs for squad level comms.
Yeah its mostly the battery that hasn't really reduced much in size over years. Most of the other stuff is the display, antenna etc and general "soldier proofing".
We haven't used backpack (rucksack) sized radios for at least a decade. If by backpack you mean a typical hiking backpack you can get at REI, then yes I guess they are backpack sized.
Back in the mid-late 90's I had to travel down to Fort Gordon (? I think?) which was home of the Army Signal Corps to give a training class on using our Single Board Computers to the group that built the man-portable radio simulators.
The old guys there (and they were almost all in their 60's+) built simulators that had to weigh and behave exactly like the actual radios for effective training (except that they didn't actually transmit any signals). The radios were huge. I simply could not imagine having to lug that thing around in the field all day.
I attended the Signal Officer Basic Course (SOBC) at Fort Gordon in 2002. Believe it or not, they didn't even have real radios to train us on at the time. We got a powerpoint presentation, which was pretty much useless.
What communication equipment they did train us on was basically obsolete. "We have to train you on the old stuff because the new training hasn't been approved yet. You probably won't see any of this in the field."
Rugged, overbuild, modular, multi vendor. You end up with 10 pcbs, one per function/module while similar radio on civilian market has pretty much ~3-5 main silicon packages.
Probably not Windows. These radios require a POSIX compliant OS. In the old ones (not the latest spec) the only allowed external calls were to CORBA services and POSIX capabilities. This was to aid portability (discussed in TFA: didn't help because changing capabilities usually required hardware and firmware changes, not just software).
CORBA was the rage back in the 1990s. CORBA, WebObjects, and COM all were part of the push to package services into “replaceable components” (like microservices today).
Can you imagine moving long distances or fighting for your life on uneven terrain with all of that stuff dangling off of you and weighing you down? Also notice that the soldiers behind him have full cargo pockets on their pants.
It's interesting to notice the interplay of how new technology enables the soldier to carry more gadgets and tools, but simultaneously makes the old gadgets lighter.
A typical soldier has more in his first aid pouch (one of those dangling tan things with a zipper) than the platoon medic did in WWII. His rifle is lighter, but it also has an advanced optic and a laser visible through his NVG's. He's carrying a vest with a "bullet proof" plate (very heavy) but under it is a shirt made of light durable technical fabric that wicks moisture away from his skin.
I'm convinced there will never be a day when the infantryman isn't carrying too much weight. There is a limit to how much weight a fit infantryman can carry and still be able to fight and they will always have us carrying stuff up to that limit.