Military Radio Foul-up Wasn’t Like That at All

By HARRY G. SUMMERS JR.

“For every knotty problem,” H. L. Mencken reputedly once said, “there is a simple solution: neat, plausible--and wrong.”

He could have been talking about one of the justifications recently advanced for drastic reform of the military. Quoting congressional sources, it was widely reported that during the 1983 invasion of Grenada, Army units were unable to talk to ships off shore because their radios were incompatible. The solution proposed by the congressional reformers was so obvious--buy compatible radios--that most Americans must wonder why even a private first class, much less a general or an admiral, couldn’t have figured that one out.

Neat and plausible as it sounds, there are two things wrong with the solution:

First, it is based on a false premise. The story of the Army officer “who used his AT&T; calling card to phone his office in North Carolina in an effort to coordinate Navy fire support,” who “was forced to use Ma Bell because the Army units on the ground could not talk to the Navy ships,” made entertaining copy. But what really happened was much less dramatic. A telephone line was used to coordinate fire support, but it was between two points on Grenada, and Ma Bell was not involved.

Second, even if the story were true, the solution is still wrong. If all military radios were on the same channel, the result would not be better communications. It would be gridlock and total lack of communications.

The assignment of airwave communication frequencies is extremely complex. International treaties establish the availability of frequencies among nations. Within the United States, the Federal Communications Commission assigns blocks of frequencies (AM, FM, UHF, VHF and the like) to various users--radio and television stations, citizens’ bands, cordless telephones and the Defense Department. Within the military, a joint frequency manager further allocates frequencies among the various services.

If Congress was shocked to find that the Army and the Navy operate on different frequencies, it would have been horrified to learn that even within the Army an infantry platoon leader’s radio is not compatible with the radios of the artillery battery providing his fire support. That isn’t because the infantry and the artillery don’t talk to each other before they buy radios any more than the problem on Grenada was that “the Army and the Navy don’t talk to each other before they buy radios.” The point in both cases is that they aren’t supposed to be able to talk to each other. If they could, the volume of traffic would drown out any attempt to communicate (a phenomenon that is familiar to any CB user).

To solve this seeming dilemma of preserving the ability to converse within one’s own unit while at the same time providing an ability to talk to other elements or other services, the military routinely sets up a number of radio networks. There is a command-and-control net on which commanders can talk to each other, a fire-support net on which the infantry can talk to the artillery, an air-ground net on which the forward air controllers can talk to the aircraft providing close air support, an Air Naval Gunfire Liaison net on which troops on the ground can talk to the ships at sea, as well as intelligence, logistics and many others.

Battle-tested in World War II, these communications procedures worked well in both the Korean and Vietnam wars. As with our civilian telecommunications networks, glitches sometimes occur. But the system itself is sound. And it is a system that most definitely does not depend on every radio being able to communicate with every other radio.

To return to the Grenada example, Congress was asking the wrong questions. The question was not “Why aren’t Army radios compatible with Navy radios?” The question should have been, “Where was the team whose job it is to coordinate naval-gunfire support?” If they wanted to phrase the question in the future tense, they might have asked: “Has the Navy, in its fascination with sophisticated missile systems on its surface ships, neglected its mission of providing both the capabilities and the means for naval-gunfire support of Army and Marine ground forces?’

As they continue their laudable efforts to improve our defenses, the military reformers would do well to heed the words written a century and a half ago by that master military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz. “Everything in war is very simple,” he wrote, “but the simplest thing is difficult.” Just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean that the military reformers should not press ahead. It does mean that they should begin with an appreciation of the complexities of what they are trying to do.