LEARNING EVENT 1: REQUIREMENTS FOR IMPROVED COMMUNICATIONS
1. Increased demands.
a. Perhaps the most spectacular evolution in all branches of technology during the last half century has
occurred in the field of communications. Sets and components have shrunk in size and grown in reliability, and
new techniques have made giant strides in terms of distance and quality.
b. At the same time, the demands made on the techniques and capabilities of communications have
increased enormously. Improvements in military transport have given the armed forces the ability to move to
almost any area on the globe in a matter of hours. Techniques of military communications must keep pace with
this mobility by providing reliable communications to these forces wherever they may be located.
c. The need to constantly improve military communications has long been recognized. Unfortunately,
such improvements have often been hampered by crowding of the frequency spectrum, budget limitations, and
the slow pace of certain significant advances in the state-of-the-art itself. Although the communications
facilities of the various military departments have generally been able to support their communications
requirements in the past, the predictable demands of the future require that large-scale improvements be rapidly
made if the requirements of the expanding and changing nature of the Department of Defense (DoD) are to be
met.
2. Traffic growth.
a. Experience has shown that the usage rate of both commercial and military systems increases by
approximately 10 percent per year. It has also been demonstrated that when an improved service is offered, the
traffic tends to increase.
b. New facilities, particularly in the form of long-haul communications, will be made available in the near
future to areas where they are now either inadequate or nonexistent. This new long-haul traffic will constitute
an increasing percentage of the total.
c. The increasing use of data processors and computers, particularly in the military logistic domain, will
result in an increase of machine-to-machine traffic volume. This will open new areas and requirements and
bring additional users into the Defense Communication System (DCS). With the new users, the growth of
traffic from and to all users will also increase.
d. One of the significant examples of this growth is the widespread use of digitized voice transmission.
The principal advantage of this transmission method over the analog method is the security it provides, together
with its ability to regenerate signals on long-distance circuits. However, digitized voice transmission has its
disadvantages as well.
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