Here’s one of the crazy stories about what I did in Bosnia:
My Army Staff Sergeant partner was showing me around the MIB compound shortly after arrival for my first day’s work at Butmir. There was a storage area in the top floor of the main building containing among other things, ten brand new high-gain Tac Sat antennas, unopened in the shipping crates. Asked what was up with them, he simply replied: “They don’t work.” More in-briefing included plans for the upcoming week and a road trip ferrying floppy disks around the country by Land Rover, and I already knew what my 1st challenge was going to be.
Inter-service coordination has always been a challenge, but the U.S. sets the example to follow in that military regard, at least as long as I’m the one on the phone. The only reason Tac Sat was not up and running in Bosnia was nobody seemed to be able to figure out how to get crypto and point the antennas. The Army is great at shooting people and blowing stuff up, but satcom was a different story at this location. Their idea of secure comm was us driving floppy disks around with M-16s to protect them. It certainly was one of the more egregious government foibles I’ve disagreed with over the years. Only took about a week to locate the bird (Navy) and get crypto issued out of HQ for the radios.
We spent another week playing around, doing a little training. Started by taking one over behind the gym on the other side of the base and setup one day. I had the Lieutenant transmit a file, making sure not to tell me what was on it and read it back to her ten seconds later over the phone. She said “So you can take those anywhere and do that?” We started taking those antennas with us to the COYS, thankful to leave them and the radios behind, departing with hopefully the last of those HUMINT reports on floppy disks.
Here’s a guy who did some of the real work there before my arrival.
