Comment by IX-103 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IX-103 | Hacker News Reader

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Oh military communications equipment. I can totally see that stuff bugging out if someone looks at it wrong.

I actually worked a bit designing military comms when I was just out of school, but left because the politics was too crazy. Military comms seems to be held back in the 60s where everything had to be built for purpose and it doesn't matter that this radio uses 15 bit bytes and runs on 22 volt power and that radio uses 13 bit bytes and runs on -48 volt power since they were never designed to communicate or exist in the same system. Until a "Grand Program" is started to get them to talk. Then contractors comes out of the woodwork and eventually they come up with a design where the two radios (positioned next to each other) pass "XML" (<bit position:0 value:0\>) over a custom designed third pair of radios and can communicate only a small subset of what either radio was able to express. Of course none of that uses Ethernet or IP or even some standard military connection protocol, because that would make things less efficient and suppliers want the biggest numbers possible so they are competitive.

If we are going to have a technology dependent military and they can't use COTS then they should at least make things modular so learning about one piece of hardware can be applied to other pieces of hardware. And hey, if it's modular then maybe military techs can at least swap modules to fix stuff.

The military isn't all that concerned about a modular enterchangable system that use similar methods between systems.

We have time and available people who are educated, they can learn the some odd 40 systems in 27 weeks (excluding tacSat.)

So all those conveniences, only serve to make it easier for our enemies to understand. Additionally alot of the military communications equipment make use of proprietary hardware that perform functions standard equipment can't and in environmental conditions that would make it impossible for off the shelf equipment.

As for the network over FM they've had that since the late 90s, at the time because of the security and frequency hoping, and it being all done analog, the network could span roughly 15 miles and had a 64kbps backbone.

Just enough to send text file reports over.

But why worry about enemies understanding the radio? I can practically guarantee that the lower classification maintenance books that get "lost" already make it to enemy hands. Plus if we use COTS then looking at anything but the encryption module would tell them little to nothing and allow them to use whatever existing civilian supply chains are available.

Sure there's a time for LPI/LPJ, but short of a war with China I don't really see the need for most forces. Anywhere else we'd have air superiority and jammers are just loud, bright targets.

If you have a LPI/LPJ module you just put in the radio when you need it then it's much easier to keep out of enemy hands.

Then there is the cost of training for all the different radios. Yes, you could put one man or of a squad in training for 6 months ago he knows the basics about every radio there is. Or you could spend a couple weeks teaching everybody how to work a radio. Or you could have a real in depth training so you have a lot of fully qualified repair technicians.

I'm not exactly sure what your talking about for the radio waveform fielded in the late 90s. That's too late for SINGCARS and too early for JTRS waveforms like SRW and WNW. The capability description seems a bit like SRW (though that is frequency hopped, not FM), which was one of the few limited "successes" that came out of JTRS (the design goals were 100x as many members of the network, 10x the range, 10x the backbone capacity, and the ability for software upgrades to make it compatible with any future radio).

I'm at the end of the day you really need to argue this with the military not me.

as far as COTS parts, I mean if you think you can build a radio of that size with its requirements,life span,etc someone probably would have.

they moved to slightly modded radios similar to law enforcement for squad level communications, but I dont see that happening for larger scale systems in the near future.

But the field operation guide doesn't tell you how to open the radio, that is beyond operator (RTO) and field services.

There were at least 11 builtin counter measures, to prevent someone from exploring the guts of the radio, and sure you could see what is in the radio, but once the eproms fried themselves, you would be hard pressed to figure out what was on them.

The manuals that explain those enter workings aren't issued to field units, hence why they have maint. Centers.

Not sure what you mean by too late for SINCGARS, the originals before the half sizes came out, I just as you could load the crypto and hopset from and ANCD, all you need to do was take a dog bone cable and splice and map the wires to a serial cable, and then configure telnet. Then set the proper broadcast mode on the radio.

you could probably find the specifics in a leaked field manual :)

There are a few reasons that military tech turns out this way. The largest I've seen is that the military doesn't actually make any money with it's tech. From a classic business perspective, it's just an end user. There isn't a monetary incentive to remake entire systems to work well together.

Another big reason for the strange and overbearing standards is that there are so many different classified legacy systems that need to function, and no one is really allowed to alter, that newer systems need to be backwards compatible to work with them.

I'm not sure I buy the argument about not making money. Sure there's not a monetary incentive to make the whole system work well together, but that doesn't mean that the military should ignore how failures in their communication infrastructure limit their ability to rapidly respond to threats and coordinate between different forces. Combined arms is a thing a after all, and it sucks when people have to spend time coordinating because targets or enemies show up in some units but not their attached units (or worse show up in different locations on each).

Sure, legacy systems are an issue and compatibility is necessary (especially for systems we need to talk with allies who spends less money upgrading equipment than we do). But that doesn't justify the new things not working together. Is there a reason that we got MADL with the F-35 and IFDL for the F-22 and needed a special program (with unmanned airborne relays) to allow the two to talk? Those are both new systems, there just doesn't seem to be any overall coordination. Heck, to some degree it seems like this inability to interoperate is intentional, as one of the F-35 requirements was that it could receive but not transmit on the existing legacy waveform, Link-16.

I don't mean to be so negative about it. The technology behind modern military radios is incredible and the radios effectively meet the requirements that the military specifies. This allows them to do amazing things. I just think that, particularly for communications, they need to look past the new hotness for something less exciting that both ages better and works well with existing systems.

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