War Is Boring

In key moments during the U.S. Army’s latest war game for advanced communications gear, the troops’ high-tech new radios failed them.

A loud knocking on the door of the parish house was the only warning of the rebel attack. It was Sept. 17, 2008 in Duru, a farming town of 6,000 people in the remote northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, an area plagued by rebellions. People from outlying farms had seen a band of rebels on the road leading into town. A Duru resident named Roger Kayadunga had raced to the parish house to warn Father Ferruccio Gobbi and the other priests. “They’re coming,” Kayadunga said. “Lots of them.”

Mountainous terrain like that in Afghanistan can block terrestrial radio waves, forcing soldiers to rely on expensive, technically complex satellite radios for their communications. As part of its ongoing next-generation network development, the U.S. Army is turning to a more than century-old technology to boost the reach of ground-based radios.

In Central African Republic, two international aid groups established a radio-based network for tracking rebel groups and alerting people of possible attacks.

The assault on Somalia’s radio stations came from three directions.

On April 3, the Islamic armed group Hizbul Islam threatened to shut down FM radio stations in the areas it controls in the country’s south. The group accused the stations of playing music it deemed “un-Islamic.”

“We don’t own these mountains,” Staff Sergeant Russ Martin said, pointing to the peaks overlooking Forward Operating Base Joyce, in Afghanistan’s remote Kunar province along the Pakistani border. As if to underscore his point, on March 28 enemy fighters targeted a pair of U.S. Army patrols from the 173rd Airborne Brigade, peppering them with Rocket-Propelled Grenades and gunfire and wounding one soldier.