Communications, Radar & Electronic Warfare (201.. - Index of

Introduction 9IIIFigure 1.6 A naval force with ships shown in black and the coverage of their surface search radarshown in grey. As long as the ships using the radars can communicate with each other, they work as a radarnetwork with all ships benefitting from the composite coverage.management would have been impossible and thus in general, frequency plans wereworked out well in advance of the beginning of a conflict. This meant the system wasinflexible and depended on correct usage by all operators. Communicationselectronic warfare would have been very difficult to use effectively during theconflict due to the expected speed of development on the battlefield .• The scenario seldom changed over most of the history of the Cold War. Thedevelopment communications and electronic warfare equipment evolved to meetthe perceived needs and from then on, only developed slowly because the originalrequirements remained the same. Much work was done on improving portability andbattery lives and so on, but not to the basic radio requirements.• If the feared conflict had broken out, the military would have had control over civiliansystems, many of which would have been switched off. Thus although militaryspectrum demand would have been very high they would have had all of the usableradio spectrum to themselves. They would not have to co-exist with civilian users.• Much of the radio architecture could be made to be semi-fixed or at least deployableto known and tested wartime locations. These would have been well tested beforetheir selection (at least in theory). Thus, the initial action would have been a sprint todeploy communications nodes to their designated locations, using pre-agreedfrequency plans.• Since it was known that communications were vulnerable to detection, interceptionand jamming as well as hardkill, forces practiced radio communications disruption.Since all NATO planning was for defence purposes, this meant that physical landline