Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?

[Arnold G. Reinhold]

>At 2:10 PM -0500 3/31/03, reusch wrote:

...

>
>Nosing around on the same site, one finds
>"How military radio communications are intercepted"
>http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news071.htm
>
>Searching for SINCGARS indicates that all US military radios have
>encryption capabilities, which can be turned off.  Several, in use,
>key distribution systems are mentioned.  Perhaps these systems or even
>encryption, with infrequently changed keys are, as you suggest, too
>inconvenient to use under the conditions.  -MFR
>

There is a lot of material on SINCGARS available on line via Google. 
This is a low-VHF system used primarily by U.S. ground forces and 
those who want to talk to them.  It offers both frequency hopping and 
Type-1 encryption (at least the newer models) and can also be used in 
single channel, unsecured mode to talk to older VHF-FM radios. 
According to one source, about 164,000 SINCGARS radios have been 
fielded and all older VRC-12 radios should have been replaced by 2001.

The key management systems (nightmare may be a better term) are 
described in considerable detail in 
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/sincgars.htm . It's from 1996 
and makes very interesting reading. For example, radios have to have 
their time set to within 0.4 sec of GMT. It's easy to believe that 
units switch to un-encrypted modes under the stress of battle.

Even tho the radios seem quite versatile, the usage is extremely 
hierarchical.  News reports have stated that one advance in this war 
is that the daily "tasking order" can now be distributed 
electronically.  This probably includes all the material needed to 
set up the SINCGARS (frequency hop list, frequency hopping keys, 
communications security keys, call sign lists, network IDs, etc.). 
That may make things a little better than in 1996.

I went to a lecture at MIT by someone for the US Army talking about 
the "soldier of the future," an integrated body 
armor/backpack/electronics system. I asked about encryption and he 
said it was Army doctrine not to use it at the intra-squad level. 
Key management is one of the issues. That is consistent with the 
number of SINCGARs radios produced. So there should be plenty of open 
voice traffic to analyze.

Arnold Reinhold

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