Our Association is a not-for-profit fraternal organization. It's purpose is a) to foster camaraderie among the graduates of Signal Corps Officer Candidate School classes of the World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War eras, b) to organize and offer scholarships and other assistance for the families of Officer and Enlisted OCS cadre who are in need, and c) to archive for posterity the stories and history of all of the Signal Corps OCS Officers who served this great country. We are open to ALL former Army Signal Corps OCS graduates, their families and friends, as well as other officers, enlisted men, those interested in military history, and the general public. Please, come join us. For more information about our Association, to see a list of our Officers and Directors, or for contact details, click on the OCS Association link at left.

Please note: The views and opinions expressed on this website are offered in order to stimulate interest in those who visit it. They are solely the views and expressions of the authors and/or contributors to this website and do not necessarily represent the views of the Army Signal Corps Officer Candidate School Association, its Officers, Directors, members, volunteers, staff, or any other party associated with the Association. If you have any suggestions for improvements to this site, please send them to WebMaster@ArmySignalOCS.com. We are here to serve you.                         

Where Are The Americans When You Need Them!

Go home... no, never mind, come back... no, forget that, go home... on second thought...

Our poor Philippine friends seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place. Most former Signal Officers traveled through the Philippines at one time or another while serving overseas, usually enjoying every minute of their stay. Those who were posted to the Philippines, back during the time when Subic and Clark were operational and both Army, Navy and Air Force bases abounded, laud the experience as being one of their most enjoyable overseas postings ever. The third largest English speaking country in the world, with great weather, a constantly smiling and friendly people, superb beaches, and damned good beer to match, all made being posted there a wonderful place to be.

Then the Philippine people… as the people of every country eventually get around to doing… began to ask themselves if they were in fact an independent nation or just an appendage of the United States… and things began to change.

The groundswell of public feeling over the issue reached its crescendo in the mid 80’s, with the Filipino people demanding that all foreign forces be excised from the country, and that the Philippines, both as a nation and as a people, begin to stand on its own two feet and stop depending for security on the largesse of a colonial master. Considering that the U.S. was the only country with foreign forces in the Philippines, it was clear who the talk applied to.

To be fair to the Filipinos, there was no anger or animosity on their part towards America or Americans. The people of the Philippines have always held a special place in their heart for Americans. Ask any Filipino why their culture and disposition is so unique, why they are so friendly, so quick to smile, so much in love with life, and so fascinated by larger than life personalities, and they will readily tell you that it’s because they “suffer” from 500 years of Spanish and 50 years of Hollywood’s influence. Meaning of course that the unique form of national bipolar disorder the Filipinos live with comes from the special topping that America’s 50 years of rule (that began in 1898) had when it was laid over the earlier 500 years of Spanish governance. What do you expect from this, they will ask you, of course we are a confused people when it comes to knowing who we are. We are a mixture of native Malayo-Polynesian, Spanish and American culture.

More to the point, it wasn’t that they didn’t want American soldiers around anymore, it’s just that they wanted their own country to be respected by neighboring countries as a strong nation in its own right, and that wasn’t going to happen as long as U.S. forces populated the Philippine islands and Philippine forces were nowhere to be seen.

As both a vestige of colonialism and an affront to Philippine sovereignty, the U.S. was told to leave by the end of 1992, and while we pleaded and tried our best to coerce the Philippine government into letting us stay, as we all know, eventually Subic, Clark and every other U.S. military post was emptied of U.S. troops. So while the special, reciprocal love affair continued between Americans and Filipinos, military relations cooled.

Having spent considerable time in and out of the Philippines since the early 1980s this author has had the chance to observe a strange scenario evolve—between the Philippines and China. In the early '80s China was just beginning its rapid rise to becoming an economic powerhouse. In keeping with its economic muscle, as the years rolled on China began to exert its strength in other areas as well. In particular it began sending its formerly brown water navy out ever deeper into the South China Sea… poking around the Paracel and Spratly Islands, as well as Scarborough and Mischief Reef. Often it landed P.R.C. soldiers on these tiny 3 to 5 feet high islands, and even in some cases began building huts and buildings on them.

The Philippine government, claiming ownership of these islands, angrily demanded that the Chinese navy vacate the area. China replied that it too claimed the islands, and that besides, the buildings being built on them were not meant to assert sovereignty so much as to provide a safe haven for the poor, wayward Chinese fishermen caught in the local storms. The Philippines shot back that since it owned the islands, Chinese fishermen had no right to be there in the first place.

Other countries like Vietnam and Taiwan also claimed some of the islands. In 1988 China and Vietnam clashed over who held the right to fish at Johnson Reef, in the Spratlys. Vietnam came out the loser with several boats sunk and 70 sailors killed. In 1995 China occupied the Mischief Reef, claimed by the Philippines. The Philippines sent its navy and tossed the Chinese fishermen out, destroying Chinese navigation markers in the process. But the Chinese just came back again. 

Continued from left column... 

Why does the public have to know how our technology... more specifically how today's emerging technologies... affect warfare? Because the depth and breadth of pain the American public feels in any new war effort will be in direct proportion to the ability of the war fighters, on both sides, to leverage the technology they have access to to their benefit. Simply put: no pain, and the American public will let the military fight a war forever, until everyone is satisfied that it has been won the way it should be; too much pain in too short a time, and the American public will demand that the war be put to an end quickly and everyone brought home, regardless of whether we are winning or not. And just to be clear, in this case pain does not just mean the loss of America’s sons and daughters in combat. It also means the kind of damage to America’s national pride and image that a poorly conducted war effort can bring (think: Abu Ghraib).

Continuing with our thinking: in our view, more than any other force, the availability or lack of availability of technology has a dramatic impact on how a war is fought, who comes out on top, how long a war must go on before someone does come out on top, and how effective post-war governing leaders will be in helping their country return to peace. One need only look at the impact of drones on Afghanistan to see what we mean re. technology shaping war.

When Afghanistan first got underway effective drone technology was in its infancy, with many military leaders seeing it more as a defocusing video side game than a useful piece of armament to have in their basket of tricks. Now, 11 years later, drones have become more relevant to the war effort than ISAF itself. The same might be said for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the myriad other social network platforms that let the enemy get their word out in ways that Ho Chi Min could have only dreamed of. Think back to the viral way in which the Abu Ghraib photos spread around the world in less than an hour, or the burning of the Korans in Afghanistan led to over 3 million tweets in 24 hours, and you will see our point. Technology has a great impact on warfare, even non kinetic technology. [1]

Technology, more than any other outside force, shapes warfare. In trying to figure out how effective America will be in fighting any war then, one must take into effect how well we use technology … both kinetic and non-kinetic… to fight a war, as well as how well our enemy uses it.

Bear in mind here that when speaking of technology we are not talking of the old traditional forms of technology such as those used for communication interception and the like. Those forms have been around since the very first recorded war ever fought—between Sumer (in modern Iraq) and Elam (a region that is now part of Iran) in 2700 BC. Instead we are talking about emerging technologies, of the kind mentioned earlier. These emerging technologies… like those used in drones, or those used by Bradley Manning to leak military secrets to WikiLeaks, are what we are speaking of. Emerging technologies… the kind that not only shape how a war is fought, but are also shaped by it.

Note again the last part of the previous sentence. Strange though it may seem, the unique thing about technology is that while it has a dramatic impact on a warfare, conversely it is war itself that shapes technology. One more time: war itself shapes technology, not warfare. Clarifying this point then; among the three—technology, warfare and war—technology shapes warfare but not war, while on the other hand war shapes technology but not warfare.

If this is true, then we can also say that military technology is not deterministic. In other words, just because a particular military technology was instrumental in winning a war in the past, you can’t assume that the inevitable consequence of an improvement to this antecedent form of technology will cause the state of affairs today to result in another win. Military technology in and of itself is not deterministic. Rather, it opens doors as to what can be. Because of this, emerging technologies that are based on successful antecedents will not open any more doors for the managers of war than a form of technology that has not yet proven itself useful or successful. Regardless of a technology's past history and evolution, there is no way to determine whether it will intrinsically spawn a successful form of usage when applied in a wartime environment. What does determine the success of a technology is how many of the doors that technology opens man decides to walk through. Thus, the more doors a technology opens to possible means and methods of use, the greater the availability of and larger number of paths there will be to wartime success.

The relevance of all of this to our discussion of the impact of technology on war is that not knowing where emerging technologies have their greatest impact can be dangerous to a war leader; dangerous to the point of making it possible to lose a war if one is not careful.

One can see a bit of this happening in the use of drones in Afghanistan. Clearly, military leaders now know that a) the plan is that everyone be out of Afghanistan and home by 2014, b) with only two years to go, the last thing the American public will stomach is a large loss of life at this stage of the war, so if the desire is to wrap it up quickly you might as well scratch combat operations off the list, c) in a couple of years there won’t be anyone left in Afghanistan to fight this war with, and d) in spite of all of this, and regardless of whether we are there or not, the war will go on for at least another 7 – 10 years anyway, and likely result in something future historians will classify as another “Vietnam style defeat” for America.

With this in mind, how can anyone blame today’s military leaders from turning to drones as their surrogate fighting force? After all, pretty soon it'll be all they have left.

This latter point aside, whether they are blamed or not, unfortunately, drones—or any other form or combination of emerging technologies for that matter—won’t help our commanders win the war in Afghanistan. Depending on technology to solve what couldn’t be solved with boots on the ground creates in a leader a false chimera not worthy of his carrying the title Combat Commander.

Why? Because technology shapes warfare, not war, and especially not its outcome. War, on the other hand, as we said above, shapes technology.

The important point here is to distinguish between war and warfare, and the impact technology has on both of these. 

LOOK AT THIS!

We’ve added something special to our PX page this month. It’s a book by Candidate Donald Mehl, Class 44-35. About to be 90 years young on his next birthday, Don recently sent us a bunch of neat pictures of his time in the Army. He also took the time to tell us about a book he wrote on his wartime assignment setting up and operating the Top Secret SIGSALY and SIGTOT communication systems (also known as Green Hornet due to the background masking noise it made), so advanced in their form of cryptography and encryption that while the system was built for use in WWII it was kept secret until 1976. Don told us that as civilians he and his staff got letters from the War Department reminding them that they were still covered under the law and not to reveal what they knew about the technology or its application. When the technology itself was finally declassified under the freedom of information act, most of the people who knew of the system were not around to tell the world about it. So Don took on the task and wrote this 201 page hard cover book called Top Secret Communications of WWII. It’s a great read and an absolute must for anyone who thinks of themselves as being informed on the Signal Corp’s history, WWII, electronics, communications, cryptology, or encryption… or just has an interest in reading a few of the never told stories and vignettes of President Roosevelt, Churchill and the other leaders that marshaled WWII to success and depended on this system to do so.

You can buy a copy of Don’s book on our PX page, and best of all, with Don’s gracious help your payment will be tax deductable as in this case we are donating our profits from the sale of Don’s book to our scholarship program.

We have reproduced a review of the book published a while ago in CRYPTOLOGIA magazine. CRYPTOLOGIA is a scholarly journal. The review itself was written by  Dr. Louis Kruh, its editor at the time. Please take a few moments to read the review; you’ll find it absolutely mesmerizing and informative… so much so that you can imagine how good the book itself must be. Click here to read the review . Click on the PX button in the left column to buy a copy. And click here to read Don Mehl’s bio and enjoy a few rare and exceptional pictures of places seldom seen in the WWII photo albums we come across.

Our sincere thanks to Don for allowing us to tell you of SIGSALY, SIGTOT and Green Hornet. In our view Don and the men who served with him in the 805th Signal Service Company are members in noble standing of America's greatest generation, having had the direct impact they did on the success of WWII.  

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