Unbreakable Military Signals: The Untold Story of Secure Military Communications
At Bletchley Park in the 1940s, Alan Turing and colleagues decrypted Enigma messages, providing ULTRA intelligence that aided Allied victory. The United States began launching military communications satellites in the 1960s, and by 1982 the second- and third-generation DSCS satellites offered nuclear-hardened, anti-jamming, high-data-rate links worldwide. In 1976, Diffie–Hellman introduced public-key cryptography, and DES was adopted by the United States in the late 1970s. Link-16, a NATO-standard data link, exchanges encrypted sensor data—such as tracks and coordinates—between aircraft, ships, and ground units in real time. Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, SpaceX Starlink terminals have become a critical backbone