One of the keys to the success of the NATO phonetic alphabet is the disambiguation across various accents. Let's say you're talking with someone who doesn't ha

One of the keys to the success of the NATO phonetic alphabet is the disambiguation across various accents. Let's say you're talking with someone who doesn't have a distinct V or W in their native tongue. Victor pronounced Wictor and Whisky pronounced Visky are sufficiently different from each other. If you're making it up on the fly you could easily pick a word that could be confused for another. Vine/wine, while/vial, etc. The same goes for F/S across links that can't support the higher frequencies and L/R in some Asian languages.