The sine qua non of leadership, from squad level to strategic command. Gen Omar Bradley famously declared: ‘Congress makes a man a general, but communications make him a commander.’ If you cannot communicate, you cannot command in any save a symbolic sense. The simplest and certainly the oldest military communications are hand signals, which have the virtue of being silent and brief and the slight disadvantage that if any conventions are employed, it is essential that both the sender and the receiver of the signal know precisely what it means. The ‘out of air’ signal for scuba-divers (a finger drawn vigorously across the throat) might be interpreted by the uninitiated as a statement of menacing intent, causing the receiver of the signal to flee rather than provide assistance to the sender.
Direct verbal commands are next, when the enemy is aware of your presence or the need for stealth is no longer pressing. Those amused by the characteristically shrieked orders given on the parade ground should remember that these were once given amid the roar of musketry and artillery: thus the piercing tone, usually accompanied by hand signals. To reach further than the voice can carry, distinctive commands were given by drums, or in more detail with brass instruments, ranging from the booming Roman tuba to the high-pitched hunting horn used by some British paratroopers at Arnhem. An entire lexicon of commands developed for trumpets or bugles, many still in use.
Over slightly further range, fire by night and smoke by day was used by God to command the Israelites, and by mortal generals such as Hannibal. This medium has the obvious disadvantage that the messages thus sent advise the enemy if not of your intentions, at least of your presence. Within sight range, the use of signal flags was not confined to the navies of the world, although they developed it furthest. By the use of smaller vessels spaced out to act as repeaters, there was almost no limit to the distance a signal might be sent, given clear weather, in the Nelson navy. The 1855 international code of signals for maritime use contained 70, 000 signals using only eighteen flags. Revised in 1932 and 1969, it is still in use today. Visibility was always the main drawback to this medium, accentuated when steam propulsion permitted ships to ignore wind direction so that flag hoists might be end-on to those supposed to read them. The failure of Vice Adm Beatty's signal staff to communicate his intentions correctly led to the failure to close on German battlecruisers at the Dogger Bank, and to near disaster at Jutland.
Still subject to the vagaries of weather was the semaphore, invented in 1794 by Claude Chappe and promptly adopted by both the British and the French, who built repeater towers along their respective coasts. The electrical telegraph was invented in 1837 by the American Samuel Morse. The British first used it for military purposes during the Crimean war, while during the Indian Mutiny isolated British forces kept in touch with one another using the commercial telegraph system. This was dependent on a reliable source of electricity and could, of course, be interrupted very easily by cutting the wires (or, much later, ‘tapped’ into by the enemy). The telegraph was used extensively during the American civil, Austro-Prussian, and Franco-Prussian wars, mainly for long-distance communications. The need to use it tactically was not yet pressing, since the battles of these wars were still within the limits of what a commander might hope to control with dispatch riders.
In the absence of the necessary infrastructure, the heliograph, invented by Henry Mance in 1858, was a device for reflecting the sun with mirrors to send messages in Morse using shutters. Only the code was modern: Alexander ‘the Great’ is known to have used a polished shield to send signals. Again utterly weather-dependent, it was a system more suited for wars fought where the sun could be counted upon to shine, thus of little application in northern climes. It was used extensively by the British in India, by Kitchener in the Second Boer War, and by the US army in the Plains Indians wars.
Flag, semaphore, and electrical or heliographic Morse signalling were all susceptible to interception by the enemy and thus dependent on codes and ciphers. But these could only provide secure communications for the briefest of periods until the enemy captured either the code book or someone who would volunteer the information. That every cipher can be broken is a lesson hard-pressed military commanders often forget, notably the imperial Japanese forces, the Wehrmacht, and the Royal Navy during WW II.
Albert James Myer, a US army doctor, first conceived of the idea of a separate, trained, professional military signal service. While serving as a medical officer in Texas during 1856, he proposed that the US army use his visual ‘wigwag’ communications system. When the army adopted his system in June 1860, the US army Signal Corps was born with Myer as the first and only signal officer. Maj Myer first used his visual signalling system while on active service in New Mexico during the 1860-1 Navajo expedition. Using flags for daytime signalling and a torch at night, wigwag was employed during the American civil war. In most European armies, communications were the responsibility of the engineers and not until 1899 did the Germans organize telegraph units which became a separate branch of their army. The Royal Corps of Signals was not organized until after WW I, more than fifty years after the creation of the US army Signal Corps.
The telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, but the first serviceable field telephone was not manufactured until the late 1880s and was not used militarily until the Spanish-American war. Cable reels and carrying packs were developed for laying wire, and these are still in use today. The field telephone became an essential signalling system for all armies participating in WW I, which also saw extensive use of pyrotechnic signals for communications between infantry and artillery. Even the ancient standby of the carrier pigeon was resorted to by both sides.
Wireless radio permitted commands to be given over gradually increasing ranges until today it is technically possible, using satellite communications, for someone thousands of miles away to give orders to the smallest military units. These are encrypted to a level consistent with the ‘shelf life’ of the orders being given; mere scrambling may be enough for a message that is to be acted upon immediately. Ease of detailed, relatively secure communication is not an unmixed blessing as it requires politicians and senior officers to respect subsidiarity and limit themselves to commands appropriate to their rank and their ability to perceive factors that may not be apparent to their juniors. Without this self-discipline, ‘order, counter-order, disorder’ can occur, as illustrated by the hugely resented generals in Vietnam who attempted to micro-manage small unit engagements from observer aircraft.
During the Gulf war, the US army, with Mobile Subscriber Equipment (MSE) for ‘Corps and Below’ forces and TRI-TAC signal equipment for ‘Echelon Above Corps’, was linked with the British Ptarmigan and French RITA systems in the largest automatic switched military communications network ever set up. Multi-channel satellite communications were the major success story in this operation due to the distances required to communicate and for command and control. Military communications during the more recent NATO intervention in the Balkans encountered extreme topographic conditions which limited the use of line of sight communications and made satellite and electronic mail indispensable. Video teleconferencing (VTC) became the key to mutual understanding among commanders from disparate nations and military traditions, and was available 24 hours a day in some key locations. We do, after all, speak with gestures and body language as well as words, and this is the first time the full panoply of human communications has been employed among officers who badly need to have a ‘feel’ for what each other are like as men, across the divide of mere words.
In terms of its social and political implications, very possibly the most revolutionary communications development of all time originally came of a military requirement. During 1969, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration developed the ARPA Net to link research laboratories around the USA in the event of nuclear attack. This is the basis for the Internet system we know today.
Troops have traditionally been encouraged to roar when closing with the enemy, particularly to increase shock when springing an ambush. This is an often overlooked form of military communication: with the enemy. While it is always advantageous to know what your opponent is doing, sometimes it is important to ensure that he knows what you are doing, as for example when moving troops during a ceasefire or, most commonly, when trying to surrender. Despite pleas from his staff, Adm Togo continued to fire on Russian warships that had lowered their flags at Tsushima until they also stopped and swung their guns fore and aft, according to international convention. The sending of ‘signals’ by the best and the brightest in Washington to the merely battle-hardened North Vietnamese has become a paradigm of how tricky this can be: when Washington thought it was signalling restraint from a position of overwhelming military strength, it was read, correctly, as an indication of lack of resolve betraying underlying political weakness. The acronym KISS (keep it simple, stupid) is particularly applicable to communications across cultural divides.
Bibliography
- Raines, Rebecca Robbins, Getting the Message Through: A Branch History of the US Army Signal Corps (Washington, 1996).
- Scheips, Paul J. (ed.), Military Signals Communications,
2 vols. (New York, 1980). - Woods, David L., A History of Tactical Communications Techniques (Orlando, Fla., 1965)
— Danny M. Johnson/Richard Holmes
