23.1 Background

Military satellite communications (milsatcoms) have been well established for a number of years, and are major features of the communications systems of the USA, UK, France, NATO and nations of the former Soviet Union. They are significant in terms of both current systems and associated research and development activities: there is little doubt, at least in the UK, that military programmes have helped to maintain the commercial industrial base, and in many ways military systems lead the field in terms of technology development and sophistication. Recent developments in commercial civil programmes, such as Iridium, Teledesic and GlobalStar, have reversed the balance in the spending on satellite communications development between the military and civil sectors, as the commercial investment currently dwarfs the military spending on communications.

This Chapter attempts to outline, from a UK perspective, the features which distinguish milsatcoms from civil systems. Clearly, there are many technical and operational aspects which it is not possible to describe in detail, and the views expressed do not necessarily represent official policy.

A full decade before the advent of the UK milsatcom era, experiments were underway in the UK and US to investigate the feasibility of using the moon to bounce radio signals off for military communications traffic. Using the Moon as a reflector had three major drawbacks:

1. The extended shape of the moon spread the reflected signals out temporally.

2. The topography of the moon's surface induced deep multipath fading.

3. It was only available 12 hours per day.

The...