"Comms-Denied Environmnt" Topic

Captain Patrick Molenda, writing in Proceedings magazine, states that:

While significant advances across the electromagnetic spectrum have indeed transpired, so have the associated vulnerabilities… It's quite possible that the Navy could face an adversary [with] the ability to disrupt critical communications.

Would you like to see game designers provide more emphasis on fighting in a comms-denied environment?

Not sure how that is possible with Modern Naval War Games…

Tactically, comms-denial is a lot harder to achieve than most people think. The initial surprise can give the other guy a couple of minutes of advantage, but it won't last long. With our fast frequency-hopping communications and guidance systems, an enemy jammer must blanket broad spectrums of wavelength, denying those wavelengths to themselves as well. They have to broadcast a signal that is more powerful at the receiver location tan the transmitter you are trying to disrupt. All that makes a jammer very easy to find and target.

You mean like this one?

I do a lot of comms denied environment games. As Mute Bystander points out, it is difficult to do in a traditional tabletop game where each player can just see and otherwise know a lot of the info that good C2 provides.

IIRC, morse code can be pretty hard to jam as well.

Morse is actually really easy to pick out of background noise, and highly resistant to jamming if the receiver's ear training is good. My stepdad is a ham radio operator, and only does CW comms for his contests. He can pick a single signal out of what sounds like a pure-static signal to me that is several thousand people all trying to talk to one person at the same time.

Being well suited for steganography and many transmission media isn't the same thing as being resilient to jamming. It makes the message somewhat resilient to degradation by having a higher acceptable signal to noise ratio. All that means is you have to create more noise, which is not particularly taxing. When you move to signal denial, it is lost like anything else.