Urban Battles Highlight Shortfalls in Soldier Communications

National Defense Magazine
Another article that highlights the fact that we are trying to run before we can walk in the realm of warfare. Soldiers are reduced to shouting to communicate within buildings. Tadiran, Raytheon, ITT & Harris provide radios that attempt to solve this problem. Actually an interim and cheap solution is to use commercial off the shelf [COTS] PMR446 class of walkie-talkies for short range communications. Utilising UHF frequencies, these are more likely to be effective in urban areas as UHF waves pentrate walls better than the usual VHF waves used by military tactical radios. While it lacks frequency hopping and encryption functions, this lack of security is tempered by the fact that such squad/section level communications need not have to be secure. The only potential problem is that these radios would not be integrated into the overall combat radio network.