NC Scout: A Harsh Lesson in Communications Reality

The conflict in Ukraine has been a solid lesson in what not to do in war more often than not. A testbed, so to speak, of new technology altering the way we fight. In spite of this the basic never, ever change and there’s no shortcuts to competency. That competency question has been the linchpin of the fight on both sides for the duration of the war and in particular, communications.

If you listen to the so-called social media influencers, who mostly sat out the Global War On Terror, and in the rare chance they did make it to the dust bowl were well insulated from any danger, communications is a simple affair. The good idea fairies of mesh networking and its retarded offspring, ATAKs, is a plug and play wet dream. It looks cool, after all, and makes combat just like playing Call of Duty. Activision plans on installing the SIGINT exploitation updates in the next version I guess. Of course they’re dead wrong and they deserve open mocking for the cowards they are, but I digress and dozens of cheeto eaters are ready to lend their experience to the contrary. Communications realities in combat are a far cry from what you’re served on Instagram, especially in a large scale combat operation better known as a peer on peer war. Let’s take a look at one such example:

It’s the third year of war and we still don’t have a system of comms where I can hop into a sector and get radio communications without having to spend a week trying to figure out who the fuck programs X Y Z units radios, get permission for it to happen and then find them to do…

— Ryan O’Leary (@RyanO_ChosenCoy) May 22, 2025

Ryan, the commander of one of the international units, is airing out very real frustrations here. Ukraine has made continuous and heavy use of Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) based systems for tactical communications. It provides a relatively turn key solution for communications security while being inexpensive enough to source common, off the shelf (COTS) solutions. It is not perfect, mind you, and I’ve discussed DMR’s potentials for exploitation at length in the past and in The Guerrilla’s Guide to Signals Intelligence. But that said, a better solution by and large doesn’t exist. Mesh networking is a near absolute death sentence for calling in drones with an electronic warfare capability. That’s how all those war porn kill videos get started.

The primary problem presented here is a lack of handoff during what we used to call a battlespace check in. Ryan’s unit wasn’t being briefed on the communications protocols and, to be fair, there’s some very real reasons for that. Fight another man’s war and you’ll realize he doesn’t entirely trust you. But that said in order to prevent fratricide having at least one common traffic or mutual aid channel set is a requirement. It does not appear that’s the case. Either way, this underscores the absolute requirement of front panel programing capability of a radio being used in a tactical role. You may or may not have access to a computer on the fly and from the looks of things they, more often that not, lack that luxury.

This leads me to another humorous point that gets thrown my way from time to time: the over-reliance on the very same programming capability not present here. I wrote The Guerrilla’s Guide to the Baofeng Radio for a specific audience and the roll here being one of them. While its perspective was more aimed at stay behinds and partisan forces, 90% of the book’s principles directly apply here and would (and have, in many cases) changed the communications game for the better in Ukraine. I didn’t write the book for the ham radio crowd and give it a catchy title, it is in fact written for people going into harm’s way with what they’re handed.

Last, and this point needs to be shouted from a mountain on high yet again, is that a LSCO looks absolutely nothing like a guerrilla war or insurgency. Simplicity rules the day as does concealing anything of exploitative value. The more complicated you make a system, the easier it is to break down. Know how to configure your equipment on the fly and get after it.

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