Tactical Communications
Tactical Communications is the governed control plane for resilient field communications, running on the same identity, classification and audit chain as the rest of the platform. A radio link inherits the same governance as a database read: who may use it, at what classification, and with every decision recorded.
The reachable slice
Two things are available today: the control plane that manages a resilient network, and the software-defined radio subsystem beneath it, which a deployment elects per topology rather than getting by default.
The tactical control plane
The control plane is the governed management layer over a field network. It is the part that is wired end to end:
- Mesh / MANET routing, neighbour discovery, link-state topology, multi-band route selection, and self-healing as nodes move and links come and go.
- Delay-tolerant networking (DTN), a bundle store with custody transfer and contact-graph routing, so traffic survives an intermittent or disconnected path rather than being dropped.
- Spectrum deconfliction, coordinating who transmits where, so emitters in the same area do not collide.
- Communications-security (COMSEC) inventory and audit, the record of keys and secure-communications state, on the same tamper-evident chain as everything else, with over-the-air rekey and zeroize as governed operations.
- Power and link management, managing link budgets and radio power as first-class, governed settings.
- A station registry, the durable record of the radios themselves, with their presets bound to them.
- Link-quality history and network metrics, so the state of a link is something you can look back over rather than only sample now.
Three of these are worth drawing out, because they are where the governance model does something a radio management system normally does not.
Changing a waveform is a governed decision
An operator can set a station's modulation, forward-error-correction, symbol rate and transmit power, and save named presets to reuse. What makes it different from a settings form is what the apply passes through:
| Control | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Net-potential-gain gate | Consulted on every apply. A high-power tune or a modulation downgrade is treated as a decision with consequences, not a knob |
| Rate limit | Per cell, so an operator cannot whipsaw a station's configuration faster than the band allows. A refusal is typed, not a silent drop |
| Symmetric audit | Emitted on accept and on refusal alike, so the record shows what was attempted as well as what took effect |
The refusals being audited is the part that matters. A configuration history that only records successes cannot tell you that somebody repeatedly tried to push a station to full power and was stopped.
Coalition partners are directory trust edges
A coalition partner is not a list entry. It is a cross-organization trust
edge in the directory, a peers or federates relation, carrying the
partner's directory name and its trust-anchor fingerprint.
Sharing across that edge is filtered per share, by classification, and a filter can be previewed before it is authored, so an operator can see what a partner would actually receive before granting anything. Coalition sharing inherits the platform's identity and classification model rather than re-implementing a parallel one beside it.
The COMSEC chain can be verified off the cell
COMSEC key and secure-communications state lands on the tamper-evident chain, with over-the-air rekey and zeroize as governed operations. Beyond a chain-integrity verdict the cell computes about itself, an operator can export the bytes of the chain and verify them somewhere else.
That distinction is the whole point of a tamper-evident record. A system that only reports its own verdict on its own integrity is asking to be trusted; one that hands over the material for independent checking is not.
One link proven end to end
Beneath the control plane, one signal path is proven end to end by test, and it is the chain to point at when someone asks what has actually been demonstrated: CRC-32 → convolutional forward error correction (FEC) → block interleaving → BPSK. It is measured to recover a burst error that would destroy the payload without interleaving, and to drop rather than deliver a burst beyond interleaver depth. That single protected link is the physical layer available today.
The reachable path, end to end
*Figure: the reachable Tactical Communications path: field traffic flows through the governed control plane and across the protected link proven end to end, with every decision recorded.
Table equivalent
| Element | State | Reachable? | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Field traffic to carry | active subject | Traffic entering the network, governed by identity and classification | |
| Mesh / MANET routing | control plane | Yes | Neighbour discovery, link-state topology, multi-band routing, self-healing |
| Delay-tolerant networking | control plane | Yes | Bundle store, custody transfer, contact-graph routing over intermittent paths |
| Spectrum deconfliction | control plane | Yes | Coordinating emitters so transmissions do not collide |
| COMSEC inventory + audit | verified | Yes | Key and secure-communications state, governed rekey and zeroize, on the audit chain, with the chain exportable for off-cell verification |
| Station registry + presets | control plane | Yes | The durable record of the radios, with presets bound to them |
| Waveform configuration | control plane | Yes | Modulation, FEC, symbol rate and power, gated, rate-limited, and audited on accept and refusal |
| Link-quality history + metrics | control plane | Yes | Link state over time, and aggregate network metrics |
| Coalition partners + share filters | control plane | Yes | Partners as directory trust edges, sharing filtered per share by classification, previewable before authoring |
| Protected link proven end to end | verified | Yes | CRC-32 → conv-FEC → interleave → BPSK; burst recovery pinned by test |
| Tamper-evident record | verified | Yes | Every decision, including refusals, recorded |
| Signal processing: waveforms, coding, DSP, spectrum, cognitive, DTN | SDR subsystem | Behind radio.enabled | 233 CI-verified production exports; off by default, fail-closed, no hardware validation claimed |
The software-defined radio subsystem
Beyond the control plane sits a full software-defined radio stack. It is off by
default: a radio.enabled capability, shipped false, opted into per topology
zone or rack through a signed worker-policy spec, and fail-closed when the
policy cannot be resolved. A cell that does not opt in does not bootstrap any of
it.
Where it is enabled, the platform registers the subsystem as a live member rather than a facade:
| Registered | What it is |
|---|---|
| Hardware abstraction | The radio device registry |
| Spectrum | The spectrum monitor, and an emitter tracker that detects against the local noise floor rather than one number for the band |
| Cognitive | The cognitive-radio engine |
| Delay-tolerant networking | The bundle engine and a contact graph, over durable stores rather than memory |
| Hot analytics and operations | Live analytics stores and an operations digital twin |
| Simulation | A hardware-free link-budget environment: propagation path loss, antenna gain, channel noise floor, jammer interference, mobility and terrain |
The simulation environment is the piece worth understanding, because it is what makes the rest testable without a radio: the physical layer and the spectrum paths are proven against synthetic radio frequency in continuous integration, with no hardware in the loop.
The signal-processing families are broad
The subsystem carries a machine-readable inventory of production exports, and continuous integration imports every entry, so a deletion or a regression to a stub breaks the build rather than rotting quietly. That inventory holds 233 entries:
| Family | Entries | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Waveforms | 87 | Pulse-shaped BPSK, and a parametric M-PSK symbol shaper for M of four and above |
| Channel coding | 72 | CRC, Hamming, BCH at several lengths, convolutional, block interleaving, bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding, hybrid automatic repeat request including incremental redundancy, erasure coding, and adaptive modulation and coding dispatch |
| Digital signal processing | 45 | Including equalizers and timing recovery |
| Spectrum | 21 | Monitoring, emitter tracking, geolocation |
| Security, quality of service, timing | 8 |
Alongside them sit high-frequency skywave, electronic warfare, radio-frequency fingerprint correlation, an electronic order of battle builder, collaborative signals intelligence, and cross-domain correlation.
What is not claimed
The honest ceiling is hardware, not breadth.
- No hardware validation is claimed. The inventory is proven by import and the physical layer is proven against the simulation environment. Nothing here asserts a radio has been driven on a bench or in the field.
- It is off unless a deployment turns it on, per topology, through signed policy. Treat it as a capability a deployment elects rather than as a default.
- Delay-tolerant networking over a radio-only peer uses store-and-forward and is selected automatically for a radio-only reachability class, so a radio-only peer replicates without an operator choosing the transport.
Across the deployment matrix
The reachable slice is designed for exactly the corner it matters most in, a disconnected tactical node. Delay-tolerant networking assumes the link is intermittent; the control plane and the audit chain run on a single cell with no coordinator to phone home to; and COMSEC operations (rekey, zeroize) are governed locally. It holds single-cell and, where cells can reach each other, multi-cell, but its defining case is the sovereign, air-gapped, single-cell field node.
Related topics
- Sensor Intake, governed capture from sensors at the edge, on the same chain.
- Core and edge, the field deployment this capability targets.
- Audit and tamper-evidence the record every control-plane and COMSEC decision lands on.
- The classification ladder the clearance that bounds who may use a link and at what level.