Document created: 29 December 03
Air University Review, July-August 1973

Modern Communications,
A Wise Investment

Major General Paul R. Stoney

The importance of the close relationship between command and control and its supporting communications has been recognized in Air Force doctrine for so long that it has become axiomatic. So long, in fact, that in our decision-making process we automatically assume that responsive, reliable communications will be available whenever and wherever needed. Until now, this has been a reasonable assumption because as long as even the most stringent command and control needs could be met with a dedicated teletype or telephone circuit or single-sideband radio there was no real problem. This type of support was economical and technologically simple.

But the heretofore reasonable assumption that our communication services will be adequate to meet tomorrow’s requirements may no longer be so reasonable. High-frequency radio and teletype already fall far short of answering present demands, not just for command and control but for everyday management as well. And our customers are increasing their use of our services at a truly alarming rate. We will find ourselves in serious trouble unless we recognize the staggering implications of these demands and move quickly to accommodate to them. Although I am only one of four military service communicators, I feel the rising impact of this problem more acutely than my counterparts because the Air Force Communications Service (hence the Air Force) provides well over half the Defense Communications System services. I am unable to foresee how the Air Force will produce the additional resources called for in current defense planning. The implications are of such significance that a general awareness of the problem by Air Force senior officers is essential.

Our communications resources might be illustrated by a candle burning at both ends. Inflation and the dollar squeeze are melting away our resources at one end while increasing customer demands are using up our capabilities at the other. Command and control is no longer a relatively simple matter of HF radio and teletype; today it requires computers, high-speed data transmission, and secure voice networks. We are bombarded with urgent demands for such expensive services that we can no longer afford to provide commanders with exclusive systems, however desirable they might be. These persistent demands are consuming our present capability faster than we can expand to meet them. And while our resources candle is fast burning away, Air Force Communications Service is being ordered to reduce manpower, to trim operations and maintenance costs, to curtail technical training, and to withdraw from our isolated mountaintop radio stations all over the world. This is not new to us; the appropriations laws for the past several years have been consistently critical of rising communications expenditures. Although we have managed to cope to some degree with tightening budgetary limitations, we have been laboring under a strain that is fast approaching the breaking point. The time is now upon us when AFCS will no longer be able to carry the load being placed upon our resources by the insistent, multiplying customer demands.

One major fact that accounts for the increasing demand for our services is that communications and automatic data processing equipment are replacing people and even entire intermediate management levels and headquarters. It is easy to understand that considerable savings accrue to the command which eliminates a whole management level within its organization by automating; what is not so easily seen is the opposite effect: the increase in the communications budget necessary to finance this new capability.

No one would deny that the advent of computers and the development of jet air transport contributed markedly to the elimination of our overseas supply depots over a decade ago. Unfortunately, it is less easily seen that the Automatic Digital Network (AUTODIN) and high-speed data circuits play an equally important role. It is my purpose here to demonstrate that savings elsewhere in a command’s budget are necessarily countered to some extent by an increase in communications costs.

Upon examination of pertinent trend relationships, it is apparent that the demands being placed on our communications services are not proportional to changes in the total Air Force population. The USAF strength has declined about 30 percent in the last nine years, but data traffic in the AUTODIN system, for example, is five times greater today than in 1967. There are many more transoceanic circuits operating today than four years ago. It is important to realize that AFCS reacts more to demands placed upon the total communications environment than it does to organizational trends in the Air Force itself. The overwhelming fact is that the military machine today is almost totally dependent upon communications for command and control as well as day-to-day management. A very high price must be paid for tightly centralized control of a global military force, and the time has come for us to understand this.

An important point: just talking about more communications does not tell the whole story. Far more critical to the eventual solution of this problem is recognition of a need for a new kind of communications, digital systems.

Man has always lived in an analog world, a world of sight and sound through the medium of sine waves. But we have now emerged into the space age, in which we must communicate with digital expressions. As is well known, digital communications is not a new concept or a revolutionary technique. Earlier military communications systems—telegraph, Morse code, heliograph, teletype—were digital. These are all forms of electronic transmission whereby information is sent by an “on” or “off” signal impulse, or, as in the case of the digital computer, a “one” or a “zero.” We communicate digitally today over our worldwide analog structure by inefficient conversion techniques.

Much of the basic management structure of our modern Air Force is dependent upon computers and automated communications (our personnel, finance, and supply systems, to name a few). Certainly there is no turning back now. For obvious military reasons we must secure our communications. Because digits are the language of computers, because they are easier to encrypt, and because they are simpler to package, sort, and switch, digital techniques are the most practical means available to meet the growing communications demand. For reasons too technical to explain here, greater volumes of communications traffic can be handled best if everything is converted to digital form. But it is at this point that laws of physics come to bear: digital systems are vulnerable; they will not tolerate noise.

There are immutable rules of science that govern men in nearly every field of endeavor. Aviators are bound by the lift/drag formula, missilemen by thrust/weight. A communicator’s first law is signal/noise. My problem, in a word, is noise, ordinary (and sometimes not so ordinary) sound. A crashing thunderbolt is the most dramatic example of noise. But noise comes from many sources, from solar flares to automobile ignition. Much of the noise I must contend with is generated right in our own radio and electronic equipment. In many respects my problem is more difficult to overcome than the aviator’s or the missileman’s because their elements remain comparatively constant whereas the electronic noise level in our society is steadily rising. Thus my problem is ever changing.

The best way to describe the effects of noise on the digital world is to show how it affects our present analog systems. Every day each of us encounters and overcomes noise, or static, on our telephone (analog system). We shout, or repeat ourselves, or use the marvelous computer between our ears to sort the message from the noise. The error rejection ability of the human brain is fundamental to the success of analog communications. There are, of course, certain electronic techniques for correcting or compensating for some kinds of noise-induced errors, but they are not nearly so efficient as the human brain, and far more expensive.

As long as the human brain remains an integral part of the system, we will be able to detect and correct error. We can continue trying to keep garbled teletype messages out of everybody’s reading files, but we cannot catch them all; the recipient must perform the simple if annoying task of sifting “signal” out of “noise.” As long as the transmission speed is slow and the human being is a link in the chain, we can live with the errors induced by noise in our systems.

However, it will not be that easy when we increase the speed of digital transmission, which we must do in the future. A teletype carries data at a rate of 75 bits, or separate impulses, per second. A secure voice network pulses at 2400 bits of data per second, and the human being is no longer in the chain. Since noise is totally disruptive of digital systems, a noise-induced pulse is transmitted and recorded as a valid message by the computer. Sometimes this can be more than a mere error. Last year an automobile struck a power line pole several miles from one of our switching centers, and the resulting electrical “spike” shot so much noise into the computer that the entire memory bank had to be reloaded. That switch being out of service for several hours cost both us and our customers plenty.

When an Air Force commander outlines a general automation requirement, usually he has little idea of the specific impact it will have on communications. For example, one stated requirement for general voice communications stipulated: establish all calls in five seconds or less; encrypt all voice traffic; guarantee full audio understanding, to include recognition of the individual voices; be able to conference up to 30 parties at a time. The only way we can provide these services will be to speed up the data bit rate to the absolute maximum capability of the present system.

Of course our AUTOVON service today falls far short of these goals, but we are working hard to achieve them—and many others—by seeking new and better ways to extend the limits of our system capabilities while at the same time improving the quality of our communications. It is going to require a great deal of money, because the vast majority of the present equipment inventory was designed to operate in the analog world, and it cannot do the digital job we are demanding of it without extraordinary effort and expenditure.

Our training programs, our tech data, our test equipment—all are proving grossly inadequate. We are being forced to rewrite the book. We are revising maintenance procedures and conducting our own training to develop the specialists this unique job requires. In 1972, AFLC bought us millions of dollars’ worth of special test equipment heretofore not needed outside of the depot. And all this was necessary just to keep our present equipment running at the peak performance demanded for digital traffic. It is a very difficult and expensive job that requires top professional talent. Already, 25 percent of the 1600 communications-electronics officers in AFCS are electrical engineers. All of this is barely keeping our heads above water. We are going to need considerably more in the future than just more test equipment and more engineers.

The increasing reliance of the Air Force on vital automated communications lifelines is forcing us to set very high goals. Our assignment is clear: we must be able to send one million bits of data over a 12,000-mile circuit and misplace no more than one bit. During the Vietnam war we learned how to send recon photos halfway around the world in near real time; now we are being asked to do it even faster, with better resolution, and in living color. The technology is available, but, again, it will cost.

Just how much it is going to cost can be projected. A recent DOD-wide forecast of demands for voice communications suggests there will be a relatively moderate increase through 1985. However, it is not the need for more voice communications but the monumental task of handling high-speed data that is giving us our biggest headache. This is predicted to multiply to over fifty times today’s volume, i.e., to three trillion bits per day.

There are three approaches toward meeting this goal. One is to get the maximum performance from our present equipment and manpower resources. We have already been doing this, and we are now beginning to lose ground with the demands. The second way is to lease more hardware and services from commercial companies. However, that would mean a direct, out-of-pocket, rising, and continuing O&M cost, and we have already been ordered to reduce our commercial leases by ten percent this fiscal year. Such specific restrictions against leased communications demonstrate that there needs to be a better understanding of the Air Force’s very great dependence on commercial communications for command of our forces. It is difficult to see how we can approve millions of dollars for sophisticated automated command and control and management systems and then argue about the communications necessary to hook them up. Certainly the next generation of computers will be nearly ineffectual unless they are connected into high-speed communications networks.

I have mentioned two approaches that we might take toward preparing for the future. But since we already are getting the most out of what we have now, and since there will be continuing pressure to hold leased costs at present or lower levels, there is only one alternative left: we must operate under a carefully designed long-range plan to replace much of our present analog communications equipment with specifically designed digital hardware.

In research and development, this will cost just about double the amount we spend today. Worse, communications-electronics procurement costs only five years from now must be five times greater than the current level. But this does not tell the whole story because it is only for strategic communications. Tactical communications are converting to all-digital, too. Office of the Secretary of Defense has established the Tri-Service Tactical Communications Office to plan our joint tactical communications systems for the future, and those costs have yet to be projected.

Will these additional funds materialize? I certainly hope so, because, as a result of the influence of many economic factors, we have decided to put most of our eggs in one basket. We in the Air Force have committed ourselves to centralized control of globally dispersed forces through automation and high-speed data communications. By making this commitment, we have also grossly overtaxed our present resources and necessitated the projection of an investment program far beyond our present communications spending levels.

Where our communications needs fall in order of importance compared to new Air Force weapon systems I will not speculate. However, I do argue that whatever weapon systems emerge in the coming years, they cannot operate without appropriate and adequate communications systems to provide their command and control.

We have reached a major milestone in the evolution of communications in the Air Force. We have more demands than we have capability. A monumental decision is before us, which is actually more a question of when than if. There is no choice; the Air Force must accommodate to the pressure of the growing critical needs for high-speed digital communications. We must only decide when we will begin and how we will go about doing it.

The picture is not so bleak if viewed from the right perspective: we can and should regard much of the increasing communications costs as a wise investment. However, if we fail to perceive the extent to which the Air Force depends on communications to do its job, and if Air Force Communications Service fails to continue to provide those communications, then our command and control capability will be sorely limited. We cannot afford not to afford the best possible communications.

Hq Air Force Communications Service