Communication & Warfare

Now known for being more of another haven for reality television and less history, the History Channel can still put out quality content when it wants to. It's just that that content can be hard to find.

Case in point, Tactical to Practical. Although it ran for only three seasons from 2003 to 2005, the show was unique in its premise; every episode dealt with three inventions that were originally meant for the military (the "tactical") and later adapted for civilian use (the "practical"). What's good for the goose is good for the gander, as the saying goes.

One area where the tactical and practical tend to overlap is in communications. If necessity is the mother of invention, then the battlefield is the ultimate laboratory. In our hyper-connected era of 21st-century technology and innovation, we tend to forget that many of the communications devices and protocols we use had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere happened to be one of the few—if not the—only places where the majority of us would never want to set foot on (and if we did, it was either because we wanted to, or we were forced).

Technology evolves, but the warriors don't.

Ancient World

There's a reason movies set in antiquity are given the "sword-and-sandal" moniker—because that was literally all the soldiers of the day were given or could afford (a shield if they were lucky, and a horse if they were really lucky). Communication of the era came in two stages: the message and the runner. Simple and effective, but also prone to disaster because after all, the runner was only human (as the legend goes, the messenger that ran all the way from Marathon to Athens—the full 26 miles—died of a heart attack after he delivered his victory message). The consequences were tripled if the messenger was mounted—now battlefield commanders ran the risk of not only losing the message and the runner, but also the horse. Still, someone had to do it, and woe to he who had the importantly dangerous task of message delivery in Alexander, Hannibal, or Caesar's army.

Interestingly, during his conquest of the Mongolian steppe, it was discovered that Genghis Khan was (arguably) the first to use carrier pigeons to deliver messages from the battlefield—a full 700 years before they were reintroduced in WW1.

Civil War

Although the methods of carnage had advanced by leaps and bounds through the millennia by the time of the Civil War (there are guns this time!), communication hadn't made quite as big of a jump. The majority of orders were still being delivered by word-of-mouth due to necessity, as five to ten percent of Union soldiers couldn't read or write (the number doubled to as much as twenty percent in the Confederacy). An unexpected risk was that unless the orders were also written down, field commanders were liable to mishear, forget, or outright ignore them (during the Battle of Fair Oaks in 1862, Confederate general James Longstreet sent his men down the wrong road in the wrong direction—why this happened is still up for debate).

Because verbal commands could only be carried so far—and distance was heavily dependent on weather, terrain, and evidence of smoke—further attempts at maintaining cohesion on the battlefield came in the form of the battle flag and drum-and-bugle. The battle flag was used to display the unit's location so it could be seen anywhere on the field (it was also not only the highest honor to be the flag-bearer, but also the most dangerous; eight Texas bearers were lost at Antietam, while a North Carolina unit lost 14 at Gettysburg), while the drum-and-bugle would be heard by every soldier above the din of cannon- and musket-fire; the positions were so important that each brigade had between 15 and 40 drum-and-bugle calls.

WWI

Trench warfare had done little to stem the tide of communication (even though runners were still being used in the age of tanks and mustard gas), however the addition of the wireless telegraph and telephone had at least made the act more technologically efficient. During its time in the trenches, the US Army Signal Corps erected 2,000 miles of telegraph and telephone pole lines using 28,000 miles of wire; it also established 134 telegraph offices and 273 telephone exchanges. When the lines became cut or a unit was surrounded (as in the case of the Lost Battalion in the Ardennes Forest in late 1918), homing pigeons were used to get messages back to headquarters with a successful delivery rate of 95%.

WW2

Radio technology had progressed by this point that they were portable enough not only to be disseminated at the platoon level, but that they were compact enough to fit inside tanks (so much so that while every tank had at least one radio, the lead commander's tank had as many as three). While radios were used extensively on the battlefield, television also proved its worth; aside from being used as classroom training aids, portable television feeds by way of antenna radiation or coaxial cable (yes, the same one that's connected to your home TV), allowed for headquarters to see exactly what was going on in the field.

Korea and Vietnam

Because the Korean War occurred five years after the end of World War II, soldiers on the front line were still stuck with outdated equipment; add to that the fact that the terrain was lousy; the climate was finicky at best (but mostly cold); and a good road was hard to find, and it was a wonder that anyone was able to communicate with each other. Once again, the US Army Signal Corps came through with VHF (Very High Frequency) radios to shorten the distances between the lines, while grunts also used low-tech (but ingenious) methods to help get messages across—it wasn't uncommon to see lines of water buffalo-connected telephone wire. Homing pigeons were also used early during the war if radio communication was difficult, but the Korean hawk put at end to that experiment.

With the launch of the first communications satellite in 1958 by the Signal Corps (with help from the Air Force), the Vietnam War was the first war to use "far-reaching" communications—while units were still limited in their ability to talk to each other by the strength of their radios, satellite links were used so command and intelligence officers could see anywhere on the battlefield even if they were hundreds of miles behind the line.

Persian Gulf War

GPS was relatively new in 1990/1991, and the effects were felt particularly harshly in the sands of Iraq. Even though the system's accuracy was reliable within 53 feet, the fact that GPS receiver production was years behind schedule—only 2,000 units were shipped worldwide in August of 1990—meant that field commanders couldn't use it even if they wanted to, so they had to make do with commercial equipment. Ground terminals for communications satellites were also scarce, so it wasn't unusual for commanders to link into the British INMARSAT system using $50,000 satellite phones.

About the Author: Ronald Hamilton, Jr. is a graduate of Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication and Media Studies. When he's not writing for COM-GAP, Ronald is a volunteer with the nonprofit Live Forever Project.