The Internet during world war

Valid points, although risks seem to depend on the scale. A worldwide conflict would have different risks than two-state conflict. I don't see any reflection in the article or linked materials on the lessons from Ukraine, and the potential role of satellite internet in bridging localized infrastructure gaps.

The policy suggestions are fine but the reasons are kind of silly.

I've never been in a conflict zone but I'd assume securing food and water is #1. Reliable electricity access might be a distant nice to have and cell phone or wifi signal? I'm guessing that's a no.

Decentralize, increase redundancy, eliminate single points of failure, sure all good.

But if we're really talking about internet like communication during wars then I would assume what we need to talk about is off-grid power generation, packet radio infrastructure build outs, hardened underground storage containers for computing resources, etc. Without those you aren't going to have a phone that turns on or connects to a tower.

Maybe this is a marketing play to sell things we should be doing (like community networks) to people who otherwise wouldn't listen. If that's the approach than best of luck

Fascinating. I think that the capacity of nuclear weapons and MAD decreased the likelihood of future world wars to so low as to be effectively none.

But this article kinda opens the possibility of world war taking place entirely in the data/communications realm.

Your first assumption is wrong. Food and water are necessities, of course, but you can survive without either for days (outside of extreme weather environments) and they're also very portable. Communications are an urgent and ongoing need, for military actors and civilians. Without them you are not only in a bad situation, you have little idea of where to go. Military communications manuals contemplate up to 5 levels of communication for different contexts, from wraparound digital services to smoke signals and the use of secret symbols for identification/navigation.

You are right about communications infrastructure, which is a favored target in any militarized conflict. Mesh networking offers a workaround to communications breakdown, albeit at the cost of bandwidth and deployment effort. LoraWAN devices are quite cheap at the margin (under $10 in bulk) but hardening, powering, and installing them is labor-intensive, to put it mildly.

Eh, somebody has to, or eventually bad things will happen. Impossible to know the statistics of how useful it actually is, but every governments military has entire divisions dedicated to simulating war.

I think one of said divisions are the reason we didn’t end up having a nuclear exchange, as he knew the chips running the computer were pretty old & due for replacement. One day said computer says “enemy nukes incoming” completely out of the blue & with no real ongoing geopolitical tensions… I think his higher ups nearly made the decision to order him to press the red button, but he put his years of knowledge & faith in the fact the computer radar whatever was malfunctioning & nukes hadn’t actually been launched.

He was right. If he hadn’t fantasized about this scenario & known the ins & outs of the technology involved? Well, the world might’ve been fucked decades ago.

I realize what I’ve said isn’t entirely relevant to your reply, but some external perspective never hurts. Make fun of all the people who do have to worry about what might happen in modern war, & they may just become jaded enough to say “fuck it, these people are dicks anyways” & press the red button, knowing they’ll all be disappearing with him.