US military has dozens of options to restore Internet in Egypt-like countries

When countries like Egypt switch off Internet connectivity for their people nations like America have a lot of means to reconnect it again and the US military have a number of options to do it. The only one problem about it is: “It could be considered an act of war,” says John Arquilla, a leading military futurist.

It turns out that the US military has a number of devices, many of which are classified, to restore connectivity to repressed population whose rulers cut them off the rest of the world.

One of the options is the Commando Solo, the Air Force’s airborne broadcasting center. A revamped cargo plane, the Commando Solo beams out psychological operations in AM and FM for radio, and UHF and VHF for TV. Arquilla doesn’t want to go into detail how the classified plane could get a denied internet up and running again, but if it flies over a bandwidth-denied area, suddenly your Wi-Fi bars will go back up to full strength.

Besides, military also use cell towers in the sky. These are aircrafts which serve as communications relays in places like Afghanistan. Some companies are developing upgrades for these systems where a drone will be used to avoid pilot fatigue. Underneath the drones, a radius of a few kilometers on the ground would have 3G coverage.

One more option are small satellite dishes. Small dishes were crucial to getting the internet back running in Haiti after last year’s earthquake. It’s how cameramen in war zones rapidly transmit high quality video from the middle of nowhere.

Even expanding access to the military’s own satellite communications networks is theoretically possible, Arquilla says. But he won’t say more than that: “Let’s just say that’s an area decided at the level of the commander-in-chief.”

Of course, the US military forces can use more conventional tools like jamming a government’s communication frequencies and broadcasting favorable messages. That’s the Commando Solo’s specialty. “Jamming is something we think about in the context of shooting wars,” says Arquilla, but “it may have its place in social revolutions as well.”

The main trouble with all such options is that governments following Egypt’s sample won’t be too happy when foreign forces will interfere to turn the connectivity back on.

That act might not be as provocative as sending in ground troops or dropping bombs. But it’s still an act of what you might call forced online entry — by definition, a hostile one.

In situations like Egypt, siding with an uprising against a longtime ally is a difficult choice, whether analog or digital.

The U.S. military “has a great deal of expertise on rebuilding communications network, but that’s … very different when the government is interested in resisting,” Arquilla says. “This is far less an engineering problem and far more a political one.”