The Joint Program Executive Office Joint Tactical Radio Systems (JPEO-JTRS) is developing the Rifleman Radio as part of an effort to bring secure, networking capabilities to the intra-squad level.

The Rifleman Radio is interoperable, software programmable and upgradable and employs the Soldier Radio Waveform. It is ruggedized and light, includes a convenient push-to-talk, and a hands-free headset. The system is self-networking and will expand and contract as radios are added or subtracted from the net. Recently tests of the new radio were conducted at Fort Bliss, Texas with the 1st Armored Division.

Right now, the individual Soldiers and their squad leaders are the biggest have-nots within the communications arena, said Maj. Tracy Mann, of the TRADOC Capability Manager for Tactical Radios. This capability will allow squad leaders and team leaders to talk directly to their subordinates, and their subordinate leaders to be able to command and control their individual squad and platoon battle troops.

By employing a National Security Agency Type 2 certification, the Rifleman Radio can offer controlled but unclassified communications a Soldier can employ without requiring security clearances. This solves one radio problem for infantry units, which are comprised mostly of troops who are not cleared. The NSA Type 2 encryption bars classified information from being passed during transmissions and makes secure information more difficult for enemies to intercept. With these factors in place, the Rifleman Radio will not only deliver 10 to 100 times the bandwidth to the tactical edge, but at the same time, make sharing information more secure for the Soldier.

In addition to voice communication, the Rifleman radio also supplies a commander with a GPS picture of his squad members through a Position Location Information, or PLI, display. At Fort Bliss, the 1st Armored Division used the GPS features of the Rifleman Radio in a shoot-house situation. Squad leaders positioned outside of a darkened room were able to locate and identify the positions of each member of their team through the PLI.

The Rifleman Radio is being developed as a stand alone system, but will integrate into the Ground Soldier System Ensemble platform providing mission planning, execution, and situational awareness capabilities to squad team leaders and above. The Rifleman Radio will also be interoperable with the other suite of JTRS products being developed including the Ground Mobile Radio and HMS Manpack radio, to provide the needed connectivity to higher echelon command elements.

– Soldier Systems

The future is now.

Or maybe a year to 18 months from now.

That’s about how long it would take L3 Communications to prep and demonstrate extending Future Combat Systems capabilities to the Army’s Cold War generation systems.

FCS envisions all battlespace intel — drawn from satellites, electronic warfare aircraft and other signal intelligence platforms — feeding all targeting data to its signals intelligence ground station called Prophet, a trio of vehicles linked to a Humvee-based command station. The data is crunched or fused at Prophet, creating an accurate and complete picture of the battlespace and targets that then can be dispatched to a combat unit or vehicle.

But FCS as envisioned extends to just a relative handful — maybe 15 to 17 — of the Army’s 70-plus brigades.

Left out of the vision will be the Army’s M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, says Mark Landrith, director of combat systems for L3’s ComCept division.

What L3 proposes is bridging the older platforms with the FCS, so that every Army brigade will have the same kind of capabilities.

Landrith said a demonstration could be readied anywhere from 12 to 18 months from now if the Army wanted a test. He said a limited demonstration might transmit data from an RC-135V/W Rivet Joint surveillance to the Prophet system, and from there to whatever vehicle was selected for the test.

The demonstration would cost in the area of about $1 million, he estimated.

– Bryant Jordan

Hezbollah is incapable of penetrating and exploiting the Israeli army’s tactical radio systems as it claimed it did during the recent fighting in Lebanon, say senior U.S. electronics industry officials.
Even so, the militant Islamic organization is parlaying the results of a relatively common signals intelligence capability for analyzing communications traffic and intercepting cell-phone calls into a major psychological warfare victory, say U.S. officials. The success has been so complete that both Israel Defense Force (IDF) and U.S. Army users of advanced encrypted, frequency-hopping radios have raised doubts about the security of their communications.
“What they’re really doing is a very good psychological operation,” says a senior information operations specialist and industry executive. “One of the things you want to do is instill doubt. Hezbollah makes the pronouncement that they can read encrypted radios. They wanted the IDF troops to believe they weren’t as invulnerable as they thought… They scored big time.”

“What was more relevant was monitoring cell phones,” [a] signals intelligence specialist tells the magazine, echoing what we said here when the Newsday story broke.

“Everybody out there has a cell phone. You see any picture of troops on the street in Baghdad and they’ve got a Blackberry or a cell phone. That’s what is monitored… With something like a police radio scanner, if you’re in the right frequency, you can listen to a cell phone.”

Except… it’s not that simple. The Northeast Intelligence Network got a hold of some IDF pictures, showing a Hezbollah hideout with equipment that’s a whole lot more sophisticated than police scanners.
So what really happened? Many Defense Tech readers — guys who know a thing or two about secure communications — believe that Hezbollah never actually decrypted Israel’s communications, which rely on “spread-spectrum” (bouncing from one frequency to the next) technologies. They didn’t have to, as Nicholas Weaver noted:

Just some high speed triangulation of spread-spectrum sources (which actually, the spread-spectrum nature probably helps, just a bunch of antennas looking at ONE frequency with high-precision timing, and take advantage that it “hops on, hops off” cleanly to get start-end time for each signal source) can give you a huge amount of information as to where the communicating enemy is.

Av Week’s specialist basically draws the same conclusion.

“It’s not the hopping but the encryption that’s very difficult, if not impossible, to break,” the specialist says. “What they did is use direction finding [DF] to locate frequency hoppers. In fact, they’re easier to DF than conventional signals because you have more shots at it. With a commercially available system, you can probably find at least one of the frequencies.”

Using technology most likely supplied by Iran, special Hezbollah teams monitored the constantly changing radio frequencies of Israeli troops on the ground. That gave guerrillas a picture of Israeli movements, casualty reports and supply routes. It also allowed Hezbollah anti-tank units to more effectively target advancing Israeli armor, according to the officials…
The Israeli military refused to comment on whether its radio communications were compromised, citing security concerns. But a former Israeli general, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Hezbollah’s ability to secretly hack into military transmissions had “disastrous” consequences for the Israeli offensive…
Like most modern militaries, Israeli forces use a practice known as “frequency-hopping” — rapidly switching among dozens of frequencies per second — to prevent radio messages from being jammed or intercepted. It also uses encryption devices to make it difficult for enemy forces to decipher transmissions even if they are intercepted. The Israelis mostly rely on a U.S.-designed communication system called the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System…
With frequency-hopping and encryption, most radio communications become very difficult to hack. But troops in the battlefield sometimes make mistakes in following secure radio procedures and can give an enemy a way to break into the frequency-hopping patterns. That might have happened during some battles between Israel and Hezbollah, according to the Lebanese official. Hezbollah teams likely also had sophisticated reconnaissance devices that could intercept radio signals even while they were frequency-hopping.
During one raid in southern Lebanon, Israeli special forces said they found a Hezbollah office equipped with jamming and eavesdropping devices.

It was my impression that this kind of signal interception was really, really hard to do — especially for an irregular force like Hezbollah. I know there are some radio and commsec gurus who read the site regularly. Weigh in here, guys.
Or maybe the article itself contains the seed of what actually happened. “Besides radio transmissions, the official said Hezbollah also monitored cell phone calls among Israeli troops,” Newsday notes. A raided Hezbollah base had list of “cell phone numbers for Israeli commanders.“
Cells are, of course, way easier to intercept. “Israeli forces were under strict orders not to divulge sensitive information over the phone.” But maybe they talked anyway. Maybe they thought Hezbollah would never be sophisticated enough to grab their calls.
UPDATE 3:25 PM: Weeks ago, the Times of London and Asia Times had hints of this.

Apparently using techniques learnt from their paymasters in Iran, they were even able to crack the codes and follow the fast-changing frequencies of Israeli radio communications, intercepting reports of the casualties they had inflicted again and again. This enabled them to dominate the media war by announcing Israeli fatalities first.
They monitored our secure radio communications in the most professional way, one Israeli officer admitted. When we lose a man, the fighting unit immediately gives the location and the number back to headquarters. What Hezbollah did was to monitor our radio and immediately send it to their Al-Manar TV, which broadcast it almost live, long before the official Israeli radio.

(Big ups: JQP, /.)

Blue-green light’s frequency is best at penetrating through this turbidity, given the mix of sizes in microns of the particles and other stuff that prevents seawater from being transparent. (Of course, some areas such as the Bahamas are famous for the clarity of their water, but this is very much the exception, not the rule, globally speaking.) This same turbidity is essential to giving submarines their invisibility while submerged, so it’s a double edged sword.