Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Big Article on the History of Military Comms from LA Times

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 08:05:49 -0400

[email-masked] wrote:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-war-warphones13apr13,1,2451365.story

WAR WITH IRAQ

Combat in the Time of Small Phones

A new array of gear has transformed battlefield communications

By James S. Granelli
Times Staff Writer

April 13, 2003

As an Army private in World War II, Clifford Long landed in the initial
waves of four key
Pacific Island invasions, but he wasn't there to shoot at the enemy.

Instead, Long and fellow radiomen in the Signal Corps lugged telephone
lines,
switchboards, batteries and other heavy, bulky gear to shore. Then they
rolled out trunk
lines to command posts and local lines to the troops so officers could
relay tactical
information as quickly as soldiers advanced under the leadership of
Douglas MacArthur.

"I always worked with Gen. MacArthur, and he always softened up the
beach for us" with
long-range bombing, recalled Long, 79, a retired New York City deputy
fire chief living in
Englewood, Fla.

Through millennia of warfare, field communications have been crucial to
directing assaults,
coordinating attacks and simply calling for help. And spurred by the
likes of AT&T Corp.,
Motorola Inc. and General Dynamics Corp., no aspect of war has changed
as dramatically.

Today in Iraq, the array of gear that strained the backs of Long and his
men in the Pacific
can fit into a squad leader's pocket. Dispatches that once traveled
along copper lines -- or,
before that, by horseback -- are encrypted and bounce off satellites to
transmit detailed
graphics, video and data, as well as voice.

Mobile satellite stations fit in Humvees, and command post centers,
where computer
monitors display up-to-date maps of U.S. forces, real-time video and
photos taken by
unmanned planes, can be taken down and moved within hours as the front
advances.

"We had none of this in Desert Storm," said Marine Col. Nick Petronzio
from a command
post in Iraq, referring to the 1991 campaign to liberate Kuwait. The
information transmitted
to his post ends up on computers on a U-shaped desk called the "Killing
U," where strategy
is plotted.

Tomorrow's technology: combat gear that integrates a complete
communications system --
voice, data and video through microphone headsets, hand-held computers
and monitors hanging from helmets.

"We have thermal sights on rifles that can see through smoke and fog and
we have laser targeting on rifles, but
they're not yet in a system that is integrated with other
communications," said Susan Pasternack, manager of
General Dynamics' strategic business integration unit.

General Dynamics won a $60-million military contract two months ago to
start creating an integrated Land
Warrior package that would give every soldier communications gear that
includes personal electronics and global
navigation. Commanders not only would know where every soldier is but
also would be able to see what the
soldiers see through their rifle sights or other hand-held devices.

That's a far cry from what was available 85 years ago, when AT&T workers
were drafted into the American
Expeditionary Force to string copper wire throughout France so
commanders could keep in touch with troops
fighting World War I, the so-called war to end all wars.

Slow-moving trench warfare gave the Signal Corps time to hang wires from
trees and poles to the front,
connecting them to the crank-box telephones and telegraph machines of
the day. "French lines were overtaxed
and not up to the standards expected for our needs," said AT&T historian
Sheldon Hochheiser.

'Hello Girls' and Pigeons

The Signal Corps also asked AT&T for operators to run the system. "There
still were no dials on telephones,"
Hochheiser noted. Because the military lines connected to France's
civilian network, the 213 women sent as
operators -- they were called the "Hello Girls" -- had to be bilingual.

World War I troops also relied on another system: carrier pigeons in the
Signal Corps' 600-bird Pigeon Service.
One of its members, Cher Ami, earned the French Croix de Guerre medal.
Although shot through the breast by
enemy fire, the bird returned to his loft with a message from the 77th
Infantry Division's Lost Battalion, which had
become isolated behind German lines. Cher Ami's effort led to the rescue
of 194 men.

As radio broadcasting and two-way radio technology evolved in the 1920s,
the military did little at first to
upgrade battlefield communications.

"America demobilized after World War I to an extent not seen at any
point after World War II," Hochheiser said.
"The military wasn't doing much in the 1920s and '30s, so we weren't
doing much with the military. The country
slipped back into isolationism."

In the next global war, the U.S. entered the conflict in 1941 with much
of the same wired communications it relied
on in the last, though this time it added heavy Teletype machines and
wireless radio phones to the battlefield mix.

On Basilan Island, off Mindanao in the Philippines, Long and his crew
got a lesson in age-old wartime
communications. As troops moved inland about 100 yards from the beach,
they heard a group of natives
approaching from the jungle playing fife, drum and bugle -- sending
messages as the British did in the
Revolutionary War.

"Maybe 60, 70 Filipinos came out to tell us how many Japanese were on
the island, and they said they would get
them if we could give them some guns," Long said.

While Signal Corps crews were hooking up combat phones on Pacific
islands, Tech. Sgt. Bill DeYoung, with his
Teletype machine boxed in a wooden crate on a truck, was racing through
France with Gen. George S. Patton.
The troops were moving so fast, he recalled, that Signal Corps linesmen
laying wires along the road for phones
and Teletype couldn't keep up.

"We used radiophones and messengers in jeeps to communicate with the
command post," said DeYoung, 84, a
retired electrician living in Grand Rapids, Mich. "The radiophone was a
little different. We could use voice over it
but didn't because it wasn't secure. Messages could be intercepted. We
used Morse code."

Patton and his troops finally stalled in Verdun because they had nearly
run out of gasoline; in a sign of the crucial
nature of field communications, the gas that was available was saved for
generators powering the Teletype
machine.

World War II witnessed a number of technological inventions and military
adaptations of commercial products.

Chicago manufacturer Paul V. Galvin, visiting troops overseas, saw the
trouble they had communicating from the
front lines. His Galvin Manufacturing Co. already was producing wireless
car radios branded as Motorola -- a
combination of the words "motorcar" and "Victrola," the popular
phonograph.

The company, renamed Motorola after the war, created for soldiers the
first hand-held two-way radio: the
5-pound Handie-Talkie, which like all amplitude modulation, or AM, sets
suffered from static and interference.

In 1942, the company started producing 135,000 portable FM
walkie-talkies, 35-pound logs that soldiers lugged
in backpacks. The frequency modulation models could carry voice more
clearly and much farther than AM --
usually five miles but sometimes as far as 20 miles.

Cell-Phone Forerunner

Walkie-talkies were the forerunners of cellular telephones, pagers and
modems and helped turn Motorola into
one of the world's largest makers of cell phone handsets and equipment.

Motorola also became a major contractor for military and space
communications, with government sales reaching
25% of total revenue by 1954. Galvin and his heirs, however, always
viewed federal contracts as a non-core
small business conducted for the good of the country. Motorola sold the
3,000- employee operation 18 months
ago to General Dynamics for $825 million.

The United States entered the Korean War with much of the same sort of
equipment the military used in World
War II, but soldiers found that wired telephone circuits were
impractical. Rugged hills hampered relay teams, and
relay trucks were targets of guerrilla warfare and sabotage.

For the first time, the wireless radio became a key communications
device, thanks in part to a new technology
called very high frequency. The VHF radio was more dependable than wired
phones, but the Signal Corps
continued to lay copper down for the preferred -- and more secure --
telephone system.

The enemy "are shooting all over, and those crazy Signal Joes are going
on laying lines like nothin's happening,"
according to one infantryman quoted in two military reports.

With the dawn of the Space Age in the late 1950s, the Signal Corps began
experimenting with satellite
communications. The corps found that voice and Teletype signals could be
sent to an orbiting satellite, which
could receive them and send them back.

But that didn't help the troops much in the 1960s and '70s in Vietnam,
where the communications infrastructure
was inadequate at best and in many places nonexistent.

Dan Hassett, trained to use hand-cranked field phones, went to Vietnam
in 1967 as a telephone lineman instead
and saved himself a lot of backache: The radiophone used in combat then
weighed about 30 pounds and was
carried in a backpack, he remembered.

As a lineman, though, he faced enemy fire, especially during the 1968
Tet Offensive that reached Long Binh, the
U.S. military's biggest base.

"One guy was on a phone pole when a rocket came in, and a piece of
shrapnel creased his forehead," said
Hassett, now an Army spokesman at Ft. Hood, Texas.

The Signal Corps relied on modern microwave technology to build a
large-capacity communications system in
Vietnam for voice and data to be carried over several hundred miles, a
greater distance than ever before.

The military and private companies, meantime, worked to make combat
communications equipment more mobile
and less tethered to wires. By 1991, during Desert Storm, the Signal
Corps was using satellite communications
for the first time. There was a downside: Voice and data going over air
waves could be intercepted.

Modern Technology

When he was shot down over Bosnia in 1995 and given up for dead, Air
Force Capt. Scott O'Grady used a
search-and- rescue phone that was part of his flight gear to send
messages to rescuers. The transmissions also
gave out his location, and he had to be wary of Serbs picking up the
signal.

Today, such phone messages are encrypted and allow a downed pilot to
send both his location and text
messages such as "Injured. No enemy nearby," said Arne Olson, a General
Dynamics product manager.

Coding technology nowadays not only encrypts voice and data messages but
also scrambles the wavelengths that
the messages travel, which makes it nearly impossible for enemies to
decipher them.

Satellite phones are the primary mode of communications in the Iraq war,
and they have gone mobile with dishes
and other equipment stashed in trucks to move as quickly as the troops
moved into Baghdad.

The new system also has changed the command post, noted Mendel Solomon,
a retired colonel who is director
of special programs for General Dynamics. In Vietnam, he said, the posts
had plenty of voice radios delivering
information from the field to personnel who took notes on yellow legal
pads.

"There was a lot of hubbub, a lot of commotion, a lot of shouting across
the command post as people passed
along messages," Solomon said. "Today, the command posts we're building
for the Army and the Marines are
totally different.

"Instead of these remote devices and legal pads, people are sitting with
laptops -- all connected for e-mail with
access to the Internet. When they need to talk on the radio, they may
activate it on their laptop screen. And
instead of talking into a handset, they're talking into a headset."