 Let's talk about radios. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we're gonna talk about radios. If you are like me, chances are you have a radio on your kit, or at least if you don't have one there, you feel guilty for not having one there, and you think, oh, you know, I should get a radio, right? That's kind of been the hotness for the past couple of years, like, you need to have a radio, you know, we need to have radios on our kit. And as I've personally started to try to get into radios more and read a book about it and thought about it, I've come to maybe not some conclusions, but here are my current ongoing thoughts about radios. So first of all, what do we use radios for? I think that's a good question to ask about any piece of gear that you're gonna lug around or put on your kit or put on your gun or whatever. What am I using this for? And with the radio, right, it's pretty self-explanatory, we use radios to communicate with people over distance. It's really that simple, that's what we use radios for. So, from a strategic perspective, radios are essential. From a tactical perspective, they may or may not be helpful, right, so strategy, big picture stuff. When you have big elements, you know, I'm talking like battalions, like 900 plus guys who are trying to coordinate over an area of like two, three miles, radios are pretty important, you need that to be able to have headquarters, talk to different other command elements, and for those command elements, to talk to their lesser command elements, and on we go all the way down. That's very important. Or if you have teams out, this is kind of a more of a tactical perspective, but when you have teams out on patrol, to be able to radio back to the talk, like, hey, we need QRF, or here's our check-in time, or we're doing this or that or the other thing, or we're on track with our mission or not, or we're coming back, or whatever, all the stuff, right? Those are important for element to element communication. The platoon back to the talk, the talk out to the other platoon, the talk up to hire, hire to the talk down to the platoon, right? Like making those big element to element communications and or that strategic perspective, right, to be able to communicate effectively, essential. Can't, I mean, you almost can't do it without it. Yeah, you could run field phone wire or whatever, but it's really, really hard to do this without radios. On a tactical perspective, meaning like within your team, I think that's where things get questionable. Now, is it an absolute waste? No, is it an absolute necessary? I don't think so. There are a couple of different ways to look at this. One, if you're just using radios for inter-team communication, well, then you gotta ask yourself how necessary is that? If you're rolling with a team of four guys, right, basically a fire team, you and three other guys, are you gonna split that element up? I mean, probably not, maybe, but probably not. Now, if you do split it up, because you're gonna leave two guys here and you're gonna send those other two guys 50 yards, 75 yards, 100 yards this way, or whatever, or someone's gonna do an LPOP, if you're ever gonna split, yeah, radios all of a sudden become really important. Don't split your element without radios, otherwise you can't communicate and you can get lost and separated and that's a whole nightmare, okay? So if you're gonna split the team, you do need radios. But, if all four of you are gonna go and you're gonna go on this patrol or whatever, are you really gonna split up? Should you? Probably not, there's only four of you. And you probably shouldn't be outside of visual, verbal communication range anyway. So how important is a radio then? The same thing, if you were to operate an up to like a squad size element, let's say you have two fire teams and a squad leader, right? Do you need a radio? Again, probably not. Are you gonna split those fire teams? You might, but again, probably not. And in that case, if you were to split those fire teams, who needs a radio? The squad leader and the two team leaders, that's it. You need three radios really to effectively split that element. That's really all you would need. Does every guy need a radio? Not really, depending on what it is you're trying to accomplish. I think in general, there are kind of two perspectives we can take with the radio thing. We can take the, what I'm gonna call the police perspective, I'm just making this up. And I call it that because every police officer has a radio. Why does every police officer have a radio? Well, they're an individual element, right? It's either them or them and their partner. And they need to go back to hire, right? They need a radio back for backup or EMS or fire or whatever, that's their communication line. Any good police officer will tell you that their most important tool ever is their radio, right? Hands down the radio because that lets you call in help. So they need a radio because they have to call back to their talk, right? And then they get their QRF or whatever. They get their other help and their reinforcements through the radio. So in that sense, of course, every police officer needs a radio because they're their own element, right? Now, versus like the military kind of deal where only leaders have radios, right? Maybe team leaders, probably squad leaders. You know, when you get to the platoon level, you're gonna have a radio guy whose job is to help us get back to the talk, right? So only leaders and certain personality radio operators are gonna have radios, but it's a limited scope. Not everybody gets a radio, limited scope. Then, you know, you kind of go up to the SF guys and in general, depending on their crew, they roll with their SOPs, blah, blah, blah. They might all have radios, right? I know that was one of the things in the Black Hawk Down novel that the author noted was that all of the SF guys, they all had radios and they had them wired into their headsets and stuff so they could add interteam comms all the time, right? So you might look at that and say, oh, the SF guys have it, I should have it. Maybe, maybe not. Again, what is it that you're trying to accomplish? If you just need inter-squad or inter-team communications, my first question would be, do you really need that? If you're saying, listen, Dylan, we're never gonna split. That's not in our mission set. We're not doing that. Then I would say, what do you need a radio for? If you don't have anybody to call back to, right, and you guys are in it and you're never splitting, what does that radio really gather you or really get you? What does that gain you? The other thing you have to consider with radios is that it's a sensitive item, right? If you're to lose a radio on the field and that were to be discovered by your opposition, that could be problematic for you, right? Well, what can they really find? They can find the frequencies you're using, right? If you program that thing, never program that thing. If you program it, they can find all your programs, right? They're gonna know all your channels, they can know your call signs. There could be a big problem with that. So we don't want to, we don't wanna hand out radios willy-nilly. On top of that, radios can be kind of finicky depending on which one you have. There's gonna be an amount of training there. Maybe it's an hour, maybe it's 15 hours, maybe it's 100 hours. I don't know, I don't know your radio, I don't know your setup, I don't know your SLPs. But there's a training gap there. Is it better for your guys to spend time learning the radio or is it better for them to learn how to do the stuff you need them to do? There are lots of really good fighters who don't bother with the radio. It's complicated, the menus are finicky, I don't understand it, I don't care. Here, radio guy, make it work, give it back to me when it doesn't work and now we're gonna go do stuff, right? You might be one of those people. I tend to be one of those people. Should those people have radios? Should we really be issuing out equipment to people who don't know how to use it or don't know what to do with it? It's a sensitive item, they can't lose it, it requires batteries, it requires upkeep, it requires charging, it requires training to use effectively. Do we need to issue those out to everyone? The answer might be yes, depending on what it is you're trying to do. But I don't think we should believe in this perspective of just everybody gets a radio. We need to give everyone a radio. Why, well, it's important, you know, radio, put a radio on there. Again, I would ask you to go back and consider what is it you're trying to accomplish? I think from the strategic level, element to element communication absolutely need radios. If you're ever gonna split your element, you need a radio to link that split element with the original element. There has to be a radio line between them. That could just be two radios. But you've got to think about where we're going, what we're trying to accomplish, and if the radio is worth the risk, I should just say the work. If it's worth the work in order to get it. Because issuing everybody a radio just because isn't a good idea due to all the risks that I listed. So I would ask you to think about that. Do you and your crew run radios? Do you think that's a good idea? How are you approaching that from a philosophical perspective? I don't really care what brand you're using right now or whatever. I'm asking you to think about from a strategy tactical perspective, how we're thinking about radios and how it fits your mission set. I hope that's helpful and gives you some food for thought. Two brave deeds, and indoor.