How the U.S. Military Uses IRC to Wage War

Perhaps the funniest/scariest snippet of the article is a chat transcript:<p><pre><code> [03:31:27] &#60;2/1BDE_BAE_FSE&#62; IMMEDIATE Fire Mission, POO, Grid 28M MC 13245 24512, Killbox 32AY1SE, POI GRID 28M MC 14212 26114, Killbox 32AY3NE, MAX ORD 8.5K [03:31:28] &#60;CRC_Resolute&#62; 2/1BDE_BAE_FSE, stby wkng [03:31:57] &#60;CRC_Resolute&#62; 2/1BDE_BAE_FSE, Resolute all clear [03:32:04] &#60;2/1BDE_BAE_FSE&#62; c [03:41:23] &#60;2/1BDE_BAE_FSE&#62; EOM [03:41:31] &#60;CRC_Resolute&#62; c </code></pre> It's a like a normal botnet, except it's commanding our troops.<p>I thought it would be cool to do something like this as a hackathon project proof-of-concept; apparently I'm too late. Doing something like this for civil defense purposes would be pretty cool.

Upon reflection, I find that it's not at all surprising that IRC is so widely used in the military establishment.<p>Military operations are, by definition, carried out by different coordinating groups sometimes thousands of miles apart. IRC is ideal for such a task as it provides a conferencing platform that is easy to use, develop, and deploy (in both the software sense and the military sense.)<p>It's unconcerned with the transport layer, so a wide variety of transport systems (which can include any manner of authentication and security) can be used: from a General or Admiral at a desktop client to drones mid-flight to boots-on-ground soldiers carrying a pocket-sized device. IRC is also a common technique for C&#38;C in certain malware families.

The main advantages of using IRC over radio comms is that:<p>* It's way more reliable than radio comms (you don't need to ask people to repeat everything all the time, you read your grids right the first time).<p>* It's concurrent, you can have multiple units reporting at the same time.<p>* It's buffered, you can skip stuff and come back to it later.<p>* It's cheap, anybody can get a window opened on the current ops and see what's going on, without needing all the hardware of a radio.<p>* It makes the reporting very fast.<p>* It makes collation/data collection much easier.<p>* It's scriptable, you can automate the collection of some messages, or the emission of some others.<p>They got that integrated at pretty much every level, and I think it's one of the most enabling thing available right now for C2C nodes, in many armies (not just US).

The creator and developer of mIRC - Khaled Mardam-Bey - is Syrian and Palestinian, I wonder how often his software is used for tactical purposes against those countries?

It surprises me that IRC is used. In part because IRC is old and crufty and, I fear, not very secure. Also because IRC isn't some milspec contract that made some insider hundreds of millions of dollars. It's great to adapt an existing chat technology but it surprises me.<p>I recently read "Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot's Story" and it talks a lot about how UAV pilots hang out in chat rooms sharing intel during operations. Asynchronous text is the perfect medium for this kind of thing; low bandwidth, doesn't require a lot of attention. Just crazy to think it'd be IRC.

From the Manning pretrial:<p><pre><code> Defense (Coombs): D6 machines used primarily for...? Fulton: Analysis. Defense (Coombs): mIRC chat as a baseline? Fulton: Yes. Defense (Coombs): In fact, mIRC chat was installed on your machine as an executable desktop application? Fulton: I think so. </code></pre> I wonder if they have netsplits over there.. gives a whole new meaning to EPIPE (Broken pipe).

The really amusing thing is when they buy huge LCD TVs and projectors to run IRC clients in an operations center.<p>And then call it "mIRC" because that's the crappy Windows client they use.

IRC is great and relaying on such a simple and well understood process is smart. It provides group chat, persistency, and is much clearer than trying to decipher a dozen people talking on a radio frequency.

The SF guys I hung out with had/were using IRC on their laptop back in 2004 to communicate with other elements and their HQ which was God knows where. I was airborne infantry and we had an SF team on our camp, we worked mostly separately but hung out together a lot. After he showed it to me he told me the call signs were never to be repeated. I couldn't remember them if I wanted to. They had the laptop hooked up to sat coms. It was pretty cool for back then.

That my work may be used for highly unethical purposes such as waging war is one reason that makes me think twice before releasing software.

What really saddens me is the high probability that they spend billions of dollars every year to build custom, fancy comm protocols that nobody uses

I wonder if they've compensated the developer of mIRC.

Looks like a LARP channel

Wow, Khaled Mardam Bey (author of mIRC) must be rolling in gigantic piles of US Military cash if they have standardised on it.

And I thought they had real time satellite monitoring with command &#38; conquer like interfaces. I'm so disappointed.

If they fight on IRC... I can win.