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It's communications, stupid

The poignant note found in the breast pocket of one of the bodies brought up from the ill-fated Russian submarine revealed that at least 23 crew members were alive for some period in one part of the ship.

Yet they were unable to communicate with rescue ships just 100 metres above them on the surface. Communication with the rescuers might have given an outside chance of survival to some of the trapped crew. It might have also thrown light on what exactly caused the accident.

As it is, Western sources claim it was an explosion in the fore part of the vessel caused when an experimental torpedo was being loaded while the Russians insist that the accident was caused due to collision with an unknown submarine.

It is indeed ironic that the Kursk survivors were unable to communicate in this modern era. Communication at sea has improved remarkably during the past century and more so in the past twenty years.

Two hundred years ago when the British Navy soundly defeated the combined French and Spanish fleet off Trafalgar, it took a fast frigate three weeks to bring the news of the spectacular victory tempered with the news of Nelson's death to a waiting Britain.

Today, a mortally wounded Nelson might have pulled out his mobile, dialled his wife in England, or more probably Lady Hamilton in Italy, and whispered, "Darling. I have done my duty" before breathing his last.

Just twenty years ago communicating with ships at sea was a laborious and time consuming business. Today, thanks to satellite communications, sailors at sea can watch Sachin Tendulkar score a century, receive birthday greetings by e-mail or send and receive faxes.

Shipping company headquarters are in instantaneous communication with their wards and have up-to-date information on the positions, fuel, cargo and crew status of the ships. Naval headquarters can talk to commanding officers or fleet commanders by telephone.

With the Global Positioning System and satellites, ships are provided with accurate and up-to-date positions continuously. Indeed, the GPS is in danger of relegating the time honoured sextant to the museum alongside that other eighteenth century relic, the quadrant.

Miniaturisation has resulted in reducing both size and cost and yachts and even small boats can now boast of a satellite communications system. Indeed the GPS has now even been adopted to navigate cars.

Of course, even the most sophisticated machines can make mistakes as a mortified German driver discovered, when his car, being navigated entirely by GPS, missed a bridge and plunged into the river alongside.

The era of instant communications saw its first scoop, when correspondents aboard the British warships during the Falklands war were able to file up-to-date stories of the battles to readers at home, not entirely to the pleasure of the fleet commander, who felt that his every action was being subjected to close and immediate scrutiny.

The ease of communications with ships at sea has other not-too-welcome fallouts. Not many years ago, the captain was out of touch with his superiors once out of sight of land. This required using his discretion and initiative in getting out of tricky situations. Instant communications leads to a tendency on the part of the seniors to back-seat driving, reducing the man on the spot to a pawn on a chessboard. Smart and independent commanders at sea usually put some glitches in the transmitters or receivers to avoid nagging commanders-in chief.

Instantaneous communications, of course, is only half the battle. Communications is after all only a means to achieve the ends. Far more important is the requirement to convey the correct message from the commander to his subordinate and vice versa. More disasters on land and sea have been caused by orders passed wrongly, not passed at all or by the subordinate understanding them incorrectly.

Tennyson immortalised the Light Brigade and its charge during the Battle at Balaclava. Unfortunately, shorn of its glamour, the action which cost a third of the force their lives, was a clear case of bumbling on the part of two incompetent commanders, Lords Lucan and Cardigan, who misunderstood an order from their superior Lord Raglan.

Perched atop his charger, Raglan wanted the Light Brigade to attack and capture some of the Turkish artillery being taken by the Russians to the heights. The fiasco came about as a result of a badly phrased order, scribbled on a piece of paper, to "prevent the enemy carrying away the guns".

Although intended to refer to the Turkish guns captured by Russian forces, the Brigade's commander assumed his target was the Russian guns about a mile away up the valley.

To a question, "Where is the enemy?" the messenger who brought the order, contemptuously pointed in the general direction of the Russian artillery. The two commanders, knowing fully well that this meant certain death, ordered the troops to charge the wrong target and received the full force of the Russian artillery.

At the Battle of Jutland, a catastrophe nearly occurred when the fleet commander's subordinates failed to communicate to him the exact position of the German fleet. Even so, Jellicoe, the commander neatly trapped the Germans by some adroit manoeuvring.

A good commander, who shapes his subordinates into a team, rarely requires any communications at all. At Trafalgar, when he decimated the opposition, Nelson made only two signals. Some thought even that was one too many. When "England expects every man to do his duty" ran up the mast, one captain remarked to his junior, "I wish Nelson would stop making these signals. We all know what to do."

Nelson's other signal in all battles was "Engage the enemy more closely" which was always kept flying throughout the entire engagement.

The failure to communicate correctly has its equivalent even in modern days. If Al Gore loses the US election it will be because a "clever" woman in Florida so designed the ballot paper that many semi-literate and poor voters were confused. Some 19,000 ballots became invalid because a simple message was not conveyed in a proper way.

Communications at sea, of course, has its lighter moments, again caused by the inability to convey a message correctly. An ide of an admiral, arriving at Hong Kong, and wanting to get the laundry washed quickly, made the signal, "Send admiral's woman immediately on board." He made matters worse when he tried to correct his error by sending, "Reference my previous, please insert washer between admiral and woman."

In 1940, when Wrens (the Women's Royal Naval Service) were buying all available serge from the stores, one Commander-in-Chief made the following immortal signal. "Wrens clothing is to be held up until the needs of seagoing personnel have been satisfied." Yes, communications is all about getting the right message across. But who says it can't be done with a bit of humour.

Admiral J G Nadkarni (retd)