June 14, 2016: Indian troops in Kashmir have found that Islamic terrorists sneaking across the border from Pakistan have adopted a new technology for avoiding Indian security. The Pakistani innovation is based on existing tech that enables cell phone users to create local (mesh) networks using modified wi-fi electronics increasingly built into cell phones. This is what the Indians discovered when they began finding cell phones on dead (or captured) Islamic terrorists that Indian electronic experts soon identified as equipped to create these local networks in a chain, going back to Pakistan military advisors on the Pakistani side of the border. The Pakistani officers who could now pass on, usually via text messaging, new information on where Indian border guards were operating or where other Islamic terrorist infiltrators had encountered resistance and pulled back or were under fire. None of the Indian electronic monitoring gear could pick up these communications because they were not expecting this sort of thing and their detection systems were not equipped to handle these short range networks.

This mesh tech has been around for a while and the U.S. military has been looking into battlefield use of this type of networking since 2006. This was part of the effort to give American troops the ability to easily create and use mesh networks. This technology (“cognitive radio”) is now being added to many commercial cell phones. What cognitive radio does is enable a cell phone to seek out an unused radio frequencies and use it to communicate with other cellphones up to 4,000 meters away. In effect each soldier, or Islamic terrorist, carrying a CRCP (Cognitive Radio Cell Phone) can automatically set themselves up as nodes of what amounts to a private wi-fi network. These are called mesh networks and until recently commercial cell phones were not equipped as CRCPs because there was no advantage to the cell phone companies. But then the military, and a growing number of civilians began asking for the feature. Together this created a large enough market to justify the expensive of building and selling CRCPs. Turned out there were a lot of cell phone users who often operated in areas where there are no cell phone towers. So local mesh networks made a lot of sense. Many manufacturers are now adding mesh capability to the wi-fi hardware that is now standard on all phones. The Pakistani military apparently passed on CRCP cell phones to the Islamic terrorists they have long supported in northwest Pakistan (near the Indian border).