A modern force collects sensor data on a scale no one planned for, and most of it must travel over links designed decades ago. Narrow-band tactical radios and legacy satellite channels are still the pipes through which situational awareness flows. The gap between what forces collect and what their networks can carry has become one of the quiet determinants of mission success, and it is widening as the 21st century platforms that generate data, aircraft, drones, ships, and myriad other units, meet the constraints of networks designed in many cases in the 1980s.
How We Got Here
Network-Centric Warfare has been the organizing idea of military communications since the 1990s: connect sensors to shooters to commanders, and information advantage becomes combat advantage. Thirty years on, the concept has largely delivered. Commanders can see the battlespace in something close to real time, and decisions that once took hours now take minutes.
But the concept assumed the network could keep pace with the sensors, and it has not. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Indo-Pacific, where data must cross enormous distances through contested and austere environments to reach dispersed units. The theater that matters most is also the one where bandwidth is scarcest.
The Pipes Did Not Keep Up
The numbers make the point brutally. Link 16, the tactical data link that connects US and NATO aircraft, ships, and ground units, typically moves data at one of three rates: 31.6, 57.6, or 115.2 kilobits per second. A home broadband connection is thousands of times faster. Now set that against the platforms feeding it. The F-35 was conceived as a flying sensor network, with internal avionics that move data at gigabit rates, roughly 1,000 times the speed of the data bus on the fourth-generation fighters it replaces, and a sensor suite that collects far more than any radio can carry off the jet. Among themselves, F-35s share rich, fusion-quality sensor data over MADL; a stealthy directional link built precisely because Link 16 could not do the job. To everything else in the force, the most capable sensor platform ever fielded speaks through a kilobit-class straw. The mismatch between what the jet knows and what it can tell the rest of the force spans several orders of magnitude, and nearly every modern platform, from destroyers to small drones, sits behind some version of the same straw. This is why tactical networks distill everything to terse, formatted track messages; the raw sensor picture simply cannot make the trip.
Radio frequency physics is unforgiving. A narrow-band RF channel carries what it carries, and no amount of demand changes that. Satellite links add latency, packet-size restrictions, and reliability that varies with weather and with adversary interference. On a noisy channel, even minor retransmissions accumulate into gaps in situational awareness, which means a command update or a sensor report arriving late to the person who needed it.
Every one of those transmissions must also survive contact with an adversary. It must resist interception, protect its metadata, and pass cleanly through encryption. The mandate is dual and constant: move more through the same pipe and give away nothing in the process. Any solution must also work across existing RF, satellite, and tactical systems without ripping out hardware, and without adding the latency that real-time operations cannot tolerate.
Making the Pipe Bigger Without Touching the Pipe
The most promising answer is to change how the data itself is represented. Most military traffic consists of frequent, small, highly structured messages: position reports, personnel tracking, and unmanned system telemetry. Transmitted as conventional byte sequences, these messages carry enormous redundancy. Encoded compactly, they shrink dramatically, and the effect is multiplicative. A 128 Kbps link can behave as though it offers roughly four times the bandwidth, with no increase in channel usage or transmission power. Nothing about the waveform changed; the data simply got smaller without adding significant latency.
For operations where many units and platforms transmit simultaneously, this is the difference between a network that saturates and one that breathes. The caveat is latency. Drone coordination, weapons guidance, and battlefield sensor reporting cannot absorb the delay that heavy compression introduces, so encoding must be lightweight enough to run in real time on constrained processors. Done properly, decisions ride on the most current information available even at the edge of a degraded network.
The Security Dividend
Compact data encoding turns out to pay a second dividend. A message that no longer looks like a conventional byte sequence gives an interceptor far less to work with, shrinking the attack surface while remaining fully compatible with the encryption layered on top. Efficiency and security, usually framed as a trade, arrive here as a pair.
The energy arithmetic matters too. Lightweight encoding demands little compute, which means field devices run longer on battery or renewable power. For a dispersed unit at the end of a long logistics tail, that can be the difference between continuous situational awareness and a blind spot.
One Picture Across Many Platforms
A further requirement is diversity. Aircraft, ground vehicles, unmanned systems, satellite relays, and tactical radios each speak their own protocols, and no commander can accept a solution that works on only some of them. Approaches that live in software, agnostic to the communication layer and the platform, let a unified operational picture form across the whole heterogeneous ecosystem without an infrastructure overhaul, and they deploy where maintenance support and spare hardware are luxuries.
AI Raises the Stakes
Artificial intelligence is now woven into military operations, filtering and prioritizing sensor floods no human staff could manage, flagging threats, predicting maintenance failures, and defending networks. Each of these capabilities earns its place. Each is also hungry for data, and that appetite lands on the same constrained links everything else uses. A force cannot field data-hungry tools on starving networks. Expanding effective bandwidth is what makes the AI-enabled battlefield affordable in the only currency that matters at the tactical edge, which is throughput.
In a battlespace increasingly defined by information, the capacity to move data efficiently and securely is a decisive factor in mission success. Commanders who can act on the best available information will outpace those still waiting for it to arrive. In theaters where milliseconds matter, effective data transmission may well be the difference between success and failure.
The author, Charles Yeomans, is the co-founder and CEO of Atombeam. He’s a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer with an AB from Kenyon and an MBA from Stanford.