[Fascinating crypto implications. hehehe. --Perry]
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/09/10/stinwenws01007.html
September 10 2000 BRITAIN
Army calls up mobile phones
Jonathon Carr-Brown
SOLDIERS are having to use insecure mobile phones to communicate in
battlefield exercises because, they say, the army's radio communications
system is so unreliable.
Senior commanders be-lieve that the reliability of mobile phones outweighs
the increased risk of conversations being intercepted.
Last week the brigadier commanding Exercise Eagle Strike ordered all his
officers to communicate using mobile phones. The exercise, carried out at
army bases all over the country, was aimed at displaying the speed with
which the new Airborne Assault Brigade could move around a country.
It was deemed so vital that commanders refused to risk a communications
breakdown by using the army's 30-year-old Clansman radio system.
In June, the 1st Battalion the Welsh Guards is understood to have resorted
to mobile phones during exercises on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, after all
their radios broke down.
Clansman should have been replaced six years ago by Bowman, a more secure
data and voice system. But Bowman is now scheduled to enter service around
2004, 20 years after the system was first mooted. Senior officers are
concerned that it might be so late that it will already be obsolete.
Mobiles present security risks because they do not have "over-ride"
frequencies to allow commanders to cut into conversations in emergencies.
They can also be listened to more easily than radios, although Clansman's
antiquated technology makes it almost as vulnerable to interception. Mobiles
can also be tracked easily and are far more expensive to operate.
Although the Ministry of Defence claims mobile phones are never used in
combat areas there have been signs that this rule is not always adhered to.
In Kosovo, British Army commanders borrowed journalists' mobile phones to
speak to Serbian leaders during the conflict, according to confidential
reports, because up to a third of personal radios were broken.
In Sierra Leone in May, three British officers were rescued from pursuit by
rebels after one of them called his wife on his mobile.
A senior army source confirmed these were not isolated incidents: "Our
radios are knackered and the mobiles work."
The MoD said: "It would be wrong to suggest we've become dependent on mobile
phones."
