To be fair, ten years ago in Afghanistan I observed a lot of difficulty with encrypted radios on the US side too. The SATCOM radios on our very expensive aircra

To be fair, ten years ago in Afghanistan I observed a lot of difficulty with encrypted radios on the US side too. The SATCOM radios on our very expensive aircraft seemed to work only a bit more than half the time. Actual military radios are cumbersome and limited, and the keys change constantly, and the keys are a pain to load. Civilian cellphones and cheap walkie-talkies were used for a lot of communications that probably should have been encrypted.