The New York Times has exposed even more communication incompetence. The Russian military is apparently using a great deal of unencrypted VHS and HF radio communication in the field. Ham radio operators around the world have been collecting these voice communications, date/time stamping them, and uploading them to a central database for analysis by anyone who cares to have a look.

VHF signals, btw, do not propagate over the horizon, but sometimes ham radio operators can collect them because lower frequency harmonics of the primary signal "bounce" off atmosphere layers like HF signals do. I used to see this personally when I worked in signals intelligence in the US Air Force.

That was back during the Soviet era, but even in those days, the Soviet military was moving rapidly toward encrypted voice signals, often based on encrypted frequency-hopping algorithms.

We were working as hard as we could to keep up, but we were very afraid that Soviet battlefield voice communications would soon be turned off to us.

I don't have access to U.S. intelligence data anymore, but a recent story in the New York Times, in which they married unencrypted Russian Army voice comms with publicly available satellite and other imagery, shocked me. They were able to piece together tactical battlefield timelines just barely behind realtime. If they could do that with publicly available data, imagine what national intelligence services are doing.

All because the Russians are, jaw-droppingly, relying on unencrypted voice comms for command and control. Nobody can really figure out why they would do that, given they're supposed to have encrypted voice comm systems at their ready disposal.

It must speak to serious lack of logistical and command and control preparedness, which was evidently far worse than anyone thought, evidently including the Kremlin.