advent of 5G and the IOT gives naval COMINT practitioners yet more things to worry about. The Drone Menace Navies must also contemplate threats like UAVs laden with explosives – low-cost, high-impact weapons for insurgents to attack naval vessels. On 12 October 2000 the destroyer USS Cole was the victim of a suicide attack in the port of Aden: a boat laden with explosives was detonated on the ship’s port side, killing and injuring 52 sailors. To help counter such asymmetric attacks, UAVs and their operators can be detected via Naval communications intelligence collection must reckon with military and civilian communications technological advancements, now happening at breakneck speed. Communications Intelligence (COMINT) practitioners primarily concern themselves with wavebands of 3MHz-5GHz. It is there the majority of the world’s telecommunications, civilian and military, occur. In the military, COMINT is gathered and exploited to derive information on opposing forces or persons of interest – perhaps including suspected or known criminals or insurgents. COMINT yields information, including location details and, perhaps, information these forces and individuals are sharing via their telecommunications. A frigate equipped with a COMINT system may be able to detect radio emissions from an OPV’s radios. The frigate’s COMINT equipment overlays these signals onto a map – follow the emissions as they move and you follow the ship. This technique is just as applicable to a person of interest using a cellphone on a skiff. As well as helping follow a person or vessel of interest, a naval COMINT system may be able to decrypt their communications and the result exploited for intelligence. Useful details such as orders, intentions and situation reports can be shared with friendly intelligence or forwarded to national intelligence agencies. Communications are integral to naval operations, whether in everyday routine missions or all-out war, a statement supplied by Elbit Systems notes. Gathering COMINT lets navies “track routine activity and identify anomalies and deviations in relation to routine behaviours.” By monitoring the ordinary, navies get “real-time warnings” of “unexpected or hostile activity” 5G Headaches Naval COMINT professionals already monitor a significant swathe of frequencies. As Elbit’s statement notes, “today’s radio communication technologies are advancing in high speed, communication signals are becoming more and more sophisticated, and the amount of information constantly increases”. The HF band, for example, stretches from 3-30MHz: a single HF channel may be 3KHz in width: with the entire HF waveband occupying 29,970KHz the single 3KHz channel represents just 0.01% of the available bandwidth – the electromagnetic equivalent of looking for a specifi leaf in the forest. Looking for microscopically narrow channels is not the only challenge. COMINT professionals must decrypt the communications they detect and record to tease out useful intelligence. Contemporary telecommunications include multiple protocols for handling traffic: they prescribe the way traffic is encoded or modulated, thus enabling it to be carried across the network – an issue clearly illustrated in the cellphone world, which uses 3G, 4G and the upcoming 5G protocols. As the generations succeeded one another, so the capabilities of the latest generation expanded. The COMINT challenge is that all these protocols have to be decrypted: and as Jim Killgallem, President and CEO of COMINT Consulting notes, these protocols are not restricted to those mentioned above. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has allocated several wavebands for use by 5G-enabled devices, enabling more users to be hosted on a wireless network than with existing 4G networks and increasing data handling volumes – perhaps up to 20GB/s. 5G will also be a major catalyst for the forthcoming Internet of Things (IOT) – huge numbers of devices being hosted and sharing their information. The Thomas Withington Talking at the Same Time 44 · MT 2/2022 C4ISR Forum Today’s and tomorrow’s naval COMINT practitioners must deal with an increasingly congested radio spectrum, requiring them to detect and analyse a plethora of signals. (Photo: Thomas Withington)
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