Isn't the solution to use phone and call the other party and agree during the conversation that both will attack?
But how could using a phone (instead of telegram etc.) fundamentally change anything?
But how could using a phone (instead of telegram etc.) fundamentally change anything?
There is one feature of phones that sort-of makes a phone more useful here. You can know whether your 'message' arrived. Because if the other side hung-up then you get a dial tone.
The point is the latency and loss of the message -- for a more red-team angle, suppose someone in the intervening space has captured the communicator and seized their phone?
The story is an allegory (metaphor?) for the inherent unreliability of communications between any given pieces of real-world infrastructure and the problems that arise when that unreliability reaches critical thresholds.