Electronic Weapons: Risks of Going All Wireless
March 5, 2024: As military units increasingly depend on wireless communications in the combat zone, the Ukraine War is providing examples of how patterns of cell phone use can be mapped and provide targets for guided missile attacks. Military field headquarters have long known that they must restrict their use of wireless devices and, if possible, route communications via wire to a location hundreds of meters from the headquarters. From that remote location wireless transmissions can be made. If the enemy locates the wireless transmission site and attacks it with a missile, casualties and damage are minimized. It’s been known that field headquarters using wireless communications, including cell phones, makes the headquarters a missile magnet. The war in Ukraine confirmed that. The Russians were often the target of these missile magnet attacks because the Ukrainians were more careful with their use of cell phones in the field.
There are some more expensive alternatives. The most obvious one is from an American firm, Lynk Global. This is because in 2020 Lynk announced a major technological breakthrough. They conducted several demonstrations of this before numerous industry experts in which one of three recently launched Lynk LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites successfully enabled an ordinary cell phone in the U.S. to send text messages via that satellite 500 kilometers away to other another cell phone in the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Standard earth-based cell towers have a maximum range of 35 kilometers and there are not enough cell towers to cover the entire planet. Lynk eliminates the problems an estimated 800 million cellphone users have each day in not being able to get a signal. Lynk can also provide cell phone service to over a billion people who live in areas without access to cell phone networks. Lynk is literally a cell tower in space that sends 2G signals to any cellphone below. Lynk initially provided only a global texting service. As satellite technology improved, Lynk voice calls were made available in mid-2023. Lynk does not make ground-based cell towers obsolete because these local cell towers can provide high-speed service needed to access most of what is on the Internet. Other firms have developed satellite-based Internet service, but these require special, but small and inexpensive, equipment to access them. Lynk will work with any of the existing five billion cell phones. Lynk also takes advantage of the fact that most cellphone users prefer to use texting rather than voice calls. Access to the Lynk network is sold separately although more than 30 existing cell phone service providers agreed to offer Lynk service as an optional feature of their networks. For two billion people in remote areas, Lynk provides a reliable and affordable cell phone service.
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