Failure to Communicate

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It's amazing how fast Tesla is adapting and updating their StartLink system
It is a game changer in the war in Ukraine

March 28, 2022: Russian forces invading Ukraine are at a disadvantage for many reasons, including inadequate or absent military radios. While Western military radios have been using frequency hopping and software defined operation since the 1980s, Russian forces were several decades behind. Obsolete Russian military radios were a visible problem during the 2008 invasion of Georgia and the government ordered modern military radios be developed and issued to Russian troops as soon as possible. This didn't begin to happen until 2017. By 2022 there were not enough of the new Azart radios available for all the Russian troops going into Ukraine. There were many units still using the old radios that the Americans, and most Western forces, replaced decades ago.

Azart was an effort to duplicate the U.S. Army SINCGARS series of radios introduced in the 1980s as a solution to jamming of radio transmissions on the battlefield, as well as the risk of the enemy understanding these messages. Russian jamming of tactical radios was a threat throughout the Cold War and SINCGARS was the first successful solution because it used effective frequency hopping (rapidly changing frequencies according to a pre-arranged pattern) when sending and receiving messages. The three radios in the SINCGARS family had a range of 8-35 kilometers. Unfortunately, these are FM (line of sight) radios that lose a lot of their range in hilly or urban terrain. Operators have also found that the range is halved when the frequency hopping was used. When a user finds the signal fading, they will switch to single frequency mode to keep the connection. This allows the enemy to jam the signal, and to listen in. The Russian military radios, especially the new ones, proved unreliable and often unavailable. In Afghanistan NATO forces could use satellite radios as well as FM tactical radios using airborne repeater aircraft.

Russia has none of this for its troops in Ukraine while Ukrainian forces had free access to the high-speed Starlink satellite communications system. This came about early in the war when a Ukrainian communications official asked American entrepreneur Elon Musk if he could supply Ukraine with access to the new Starlink system, which was about to begin worldwide activation after a very successful period of testing and use by journalists. Within a week Musk had trucked in the first truckloads of user kits (a small satellite dish and a "modem" to allow any PC user to connect. Musk repositioned two thousand Starlink satellites (out of 11,000 already up there) over Ukraine and turned them on days after the Ukrainian request. Since then, several thousand user kits have been sent in and Starlink engineers have detected and defeated Russian efforts to disrupt its operation. This neutralized Russian efforts to destroy Ukrainian access to the Internet. Starlink advised Ukrainian users how to use Starlink to avoid the Russians detecting a user and their location for an air or missile attack. During March Starlink added several new features, like the ability to be used in a moving vehicle, using power from a battery or the vehicle electrical system. This enabled Ukrainian forces to use Starlink in combat.

Much more at the link from Strategy Page