Communications Planning for Small Forces

SIG 410 · Signals and Communications · Level 400 (Officer / Staff)

A Royal Army College course in designing, governing, and sustaining the communications of a whole small force.

Course length: 10 hours, studied online and asynchronously at the student's own pace, together with any in-person practical instruction and assessment the course requires.

Foreword

An operator works a radio; a signals NCO runs a section's net; a communications planner designs the system that ties the whole force together and keeps it working when parts of it fail. This is the planner's course. It is written for the officer or senior signaller who must answer a harder question than "can you hear me?": given a commander's needs, a handful of lawful bearers, and a force that may be scattered and far from infrastructure, how do you build communications that are reliable, resilient, secure, and lawful, and that work alongside the civil agencies the Army serves?

The course teaches the force-level view: starting from the commander's requirements; layering complementary bearers, high-frequency radio, line-of-sight voice, off-grid mesh, and the Team Awareness Kit over the internet, so that no single failure is fatal; managing spectrum and licensing lawfully; planning for power loss, lost infrastructure, and disaster with graceful degradation rather than collapse; integrating with emergency services in plain language; managing the information and common operating picture that ride on the network; defending the force's communications from cyber attack; developing and sustaining the communications capability over time; reaching back to higher, national, and partner networks; and governing the whole through orders, standing procedures, and certificate management. It assumes the operator and NCO courses of the Signals speciality.

A small force cannot, and need not, imitate the signals branch of a large army. It can plan modest, well-integrated, lawful communications that punch far above their size. That is what this course teaches.

Who this course is for

This course is for officers, officer candidates, and senior members of the Signals and Communications speciality who will plan or govern communications for a detachment, a task, or the force. It assumes SIG 201, SIG 220, and SIG 310.

What this course covers

How this course fits the catalogue

SIG 410 completes the Signals and Communications speciality, above SIG 201, SIG 220, and SIG 310. It draws on PME 210 · Basic Staff Duties and Written Orders (the signals annex), HCR 220 · Emergency Preparedness and Civil Resilience (continuity), HCR 210 · Aid to the Civil Power and Public Order (working with civil agencies), and the Information Systems and Cyber Security speciality (certificate and key governance). It supports officer and command development.

Licensing requirement

Radio transmission is governed by law. You must hold the licence the band and the jurisdiction require before you transmit; receiving and listening need no licence anywhere. The Royal Army College expects every member who pursues the Signals and Communications speciality to obtain the appropriate amateur radio licence, or the equivalent for their own jurisdiction, and to keep it current. A communications planner builds this in: the plan records which members and bearers are licensed for what, defaults unlicensed members and general training to licence-free or low-power sets, and treats holding the proper licence as part of qualifying an operator.

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