All Circuits Are Busy...

Unless you've been living under a rock you've seen the cryptic posts being put out by the White House's official social media channels. Its created quite a stir for obvious reasons. The jarring distorted effects coupled with an imminent escalation of the Iran War is a bit...concerning. The conspiracy theorists are running wild, in no small part the true believers in the 'Q' nonsense. But the reality is these are in fact ominous times and yes, there's a high chance the war will come home in more ways that one. That includes a disruption to conventional communications. 

SWEAT-MC, CARVER and You

The modern reality of American life is that we're tethered to our phones non-stop. We can't seem to break free of the mentality that we need a phone to do even basic tasks and this thinking has permeated even the tactical space among thinkers who definitely should know better. Countless times I've been asked mind-blowingly stupid things like "without my phone, how will I be able to land navigate?" and "I need this for team awareness!" during the Scout and Recce Courses. No, no you don't. If you lack the basic awareness to know where the hell you are on a paper map in a relatively small space (let's say one or two grid squares) then you have no business doing all the things. Emissions control (EMCON) aside, its just dumb. But I digress, one day the magic hand box might not work.

And that day might be sooner than you think. We never addressed the fact that bad people crossed our borders unabated and are still roaming among us. Recognizing that fact we have to also assume, if we assume anything, that they have at least some level of unconventional warfare training. A lot of noise has been made about so-called Iranian sleeper cells in the US, but the reality is that we face underground actors from a lot more places than just Iran, all with an axe to grind with the American people. 

Two acronyms we use when planning unconventional warfare activities are SWEAT-MC and CARVER. SWEAT-MC [Sewer, Water, Electricity, Academics, Transportation, Medical, and Communications] is an infrastructure assessment of a location. I used to refer to this as the seven pillars of civilization. Remove one, watch stability crumble. On my second deployment to Iraq we worked with Civil Affairs and the State Department to address this concept, for all the good it did in the end. CARVER stands for Criticality, Accessibility, Recognizability, Vulnerability, Effect, and Recouperability. We use this with a matrix grid to score potential SWEAT-MC targets. Violence doesn't occur in a vacuum, there has to be an objective whether the target realizes it or not. 

Cellular Fragility

Back when Boko Haram was getting cranked up in Nigeria they were on my radar before they became famous. While doing a rotation at one of the schools for ground intelligence operations we were tasked with continental briefings every morning. Africa was my assigned area and the Nigerian state media was disproportionately reporting on cell phone towers being attacked in the northern regions. Boko Haram largely didn't claim responsibility initially, drawing in security forces to make the repairs as a way to sap the resources of the Lagos government. That was an action indicator - while Boko Haram had been a thing since the early 2000s, they were ready to graduate to the next phase of regional destabilization. Unfortunately I wasn't wrong, they began attacking Churches, culminating in the infamous Christian girls' school kidnapping. 

Could bad actors pull something like that off in the US? Well, we do a pretty bang up job of that on a daily basis, but joking aside the infrastructure that most likely brings you this blog is pretty fragile and regularly goes down. The general public places a heavy emphasis on cyber attacks (because the media thinks they sound scary) but the reality is the weak point is and always will be the hardware itself. As we jump higher and higher in frequency (heading toward 6GHz, aka 6G) the frequency range limits itself to extreme line of sight. Its a difficult problem to solve, especially providing service in rural areas. 

What Concerns Me Most

Going back to my core cultural criticism above, bad thinking and the demand for ever higher bandwidth permeates emergency communications too. This has led to many areas forgoing conventional radio infrastructure altogether in lieu of cellular-based means usually in the 4G legacy network. An interruption in this system would disrupt the T, M, and C of SWEAT-MC and certainly score high in the Criticality scale. I'd love to be able to say we have redundancy everywhere but the chasing of buzzwords for dollars let that ship sail sometime back. My big fear is that we solved ourselves right into a problem. 

Worse yet is the fact you probably won't know about a physical attack once its underway. Few outside of the network control system will. All you (and most others) will really know is that you don't have cell service. And as we found out recently in Nepal, that might just be enough to get the kids motivated in the wrong direction. 

Parallel Infrastructure

So what do you do? The best thing you can do is be as ready as you can. You don't have all the answers and you're definitely not the main character in this movie. The reality is you have a duty to keep your wits about you and be an asset when called upon. A big part of that is finding ways to establish parallel infrastructure. That starts with reducing your overall reliance on phones and that's a mindset issue. 

The second step is recognizing that communications as an operating concept falls into one of the three categories I identified in the Guerrilla's Guide to the Baofeng Radio [Sustainment / Infrastructure, Tactical, Clandestine / Strategic]. You need to recognize the distinctions between each of these roles, with a layered communications plan addressing each of those areas as the mission requires. It should go without saying you need to be realistic about your goals as well. Bullshitters try to sell you on buzzwords like 'range'. Professionals talk about creating a network. For sustainment communications I'm a strong proponent of simplicity above all first and foremost. That'd be an analog radio with a big ol' battery. You guessed it, the AR-152. 

The second layer of that plan is internet connectivity. I don't envision a time where we'll be totally absent the internet. Outages, sure. But a total internet failure? Not so much. That infrastructure is mutually exclusive from cellular networks, by the way, despite most people conceptualizing them as being one in the same. They're not. My personal use is, without a doubt, Starlink. Living where I do there's limited connectivity access as is, and Starlink just a few years ago became a revolutionary tool for simply providing usable internet in extremely rural and remote locations. But its proving moment was the ubiquity during the Hurricane Helene relief effort. There were two communications tools that became the heroes and that was the Baofeng radio and Starlink. 

Can you go more sophisticated? Sure. Just know with increasing layers of complexity, no matter how cool it might look for a photo op, the more points of failure its going to have. And if the operators can't troubleshoot the basic functions on the fly, you're setting yourself up for problems. 90% of communications problems are user error, by the way. 

So whatever they've got cooked up in America's future is anyone's guess but the storm clouds are certainly gathering. Keep a level head, gain some knowledge in the process, and practice what you preach. It'll matter, I promise. Be the Asset. -NCS