[retrac]

It is not feasible to either fight a war or do basic things like ship food without communications.

During World War II, to coordinate the UK and United States war efforts, at the peak several thousands of teletype channels, were in continuous operation across the Atlantic (something like ~10 kilobytes of text per second) and priority mail shipments by plane (often shrunk to microfiche to reduce weight) were measured in the tonnes per week. The Allies even spent around a billion dollars (inflation-adjusted) to create an implausibly-complicated system [1] to allow encrypted voice communication between high officials over shortwave. Allowing FDR and Churchill to speak real-time, even just for a few minutes a week, was considered just that important. And back then, they were used to doing things with much less coordination from afar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY

[4gotunameagain]

> The SIGSALY terminal was massive, consisting of 40 racks of equipment. It weighed over 50 tons, and used about 30 kW of power, necessitating an air-conditioned room to hold it. Too big and cumbersome for general use, it was only used for the highest level of voice communications.

And now I can whip something similar in one afternoon, and run it on my phone. Nuts.

[aidenn0]

I don't think GP was downplaying the importance of communication for waging a war, I think they were saying civilian internet access would not be feasible during a war.

[kristopolous]

It was more about whether these legitimate concerns deserve to be columned under war planning.

I know military science is its own field with many long running scholarly journals, precisely 0 of which I've read. I fully acknowledge I speak from a point of ignorance, I'm just surprised and would like to know more