Författare: Tony Ingesson Assistant professor in Political Science Lund

Modern warfare is awash with cutting-edge technology – from AI to drones to hypersonic missiles – yet one technology that is more than a century old is still proving its worth: morse code.

The staccato streams of tones that would be instantly recognisable to a railroad man from more than 150 years ago are still in use by the Russian military in the Ukraine war.

Even today, many people would be able to identify the characteristic sound of morse code, in particular, the widely known pattern three short, three long, three short (… – – – …), forming the emergency signal SOS.

Today morse code messages are being sent from Russian bombers to their control centres, or from ships of the Baltic Fleet to their shore-based headquarters.

The shortwave bands used by amateur radio enthusiasts are similarly filled with the beeps known by enthusiasts as “dits” (.) and “dahs” (-), or as dots and dashes by the wider public. Even spies still tune in to the shortwave bands to listen to clandestine stations broadcasting morse code.

Invented in the 1800s

Why then, is a technology created in the first half of the 1800s still in use today?

First, morse code was envisioned not by an engineer or technological wizard, but by a man who painted portraits for a living. Samuel Morse initially designed what we today would call a teleprinter, a device that receives and prints text on paper.

Morse enlisted the help of the more mechanically inclined Alfred Vail, a machinist, to work out the details. It was the latter who created the dots and dashes to represent the code, and came up with the idea of using sound to convey information.

Initially, the sound was merely intended to be used to test a connection. Before long, Morse and Vail realised that the concept of printing was impractical. By adding sound, however, they had stumbled upon a concept more brilliant and useful than they could imagine.

The sound of morse code.

The remarkable characteristic of morse code is that in sound form, it forms a rhythm. Thus, it shares common ground with music. In fact, it has been noted that people with musical talent are able to start learning morse more quickly.

By stimulating the innate human sense of rhythm, morse code also activates our sense of pattern recognition. This is a skill deeply embedded in our brains, and one that has great potential to decipher messages even if they are incomplete.

An experienced morse code operator can fill in the blanks caused by interference, poor reception, noise or equipment malfunction. In a neurological sense, morse inhabits a very peculiar niche, likened to “reading with the ears” but where transmitting and receiving it resembles the act of speaking more than writing.

The other remarkable aspect of morse code is its technological simplicity. Anyone with basic technological skills can build their own transmitter using standard components.

The signal generated by a morse transmitter is similarly minimalistic, using an extremely narrow bandwidth of only 100-150 hertz (standard voice communications use 2,500-3,000 hertz). This also means that receivers can use very narrow filters and thus remove much of the surrounding noise generated by various forms of interference.

Since it is so effective, morse only needs a minimum of power to travel significant distances. Amateur radio enthusiasts demonstrated in 1956 that as little as 78 milliwatts can be enough power to transmit from Massachusetts to Denmark. This is less than a tenth of what a single LED lightbulb uses. A standard coffee maker preparing most people’s favourite morning brew uses more than a thousand times more power.

morse code.

This combination of technological simplicity and efficiency came in handy during the second world war, when resistance members and Allied commandos used their portable Morse transceivers to maintain contact with London from deep inside German-occupied territory.

This was a very risky enterprise, since the Germans were constantly listening in on the airwaves. Morse code, while being unintelligible to the untrained ear, offers no security in and of itself.

Today, even those without training can use software to decipher the contents of a message sent using morse code. However, any message can be made secure by encrypting it before sending it, as proposed by Vail in 1845.

In fact, one of the most secure forms of encryption, the one-time pad, requires nothing more than pen and paper. In essence, a one-time pad is a random string of characters, at least as long as the message that is going to be encrypted.

The sender uses his or her pad to encrypt, while the recipient uses a copy of the same pad to decode the message (there should be only two copies, and each should be destroyed immediately after use). As long as a pad is never reused, it remains theoretically unbreakable even with the most modern technology (although, truly random sequences of characters are difficult to produce).

While there are more efficient digital modes of communication today, nothing can rival the unsurpassed combination of simplicity and efficiency that has allowed morse code to survive for more than 150 years. Läs mer…

The idea that conscription, defined as the compulsory enlistment of citizens for military service, can increase equality and instil a sense of solidarity that transcends traditional societal divides has echoed throughout history.

Several Nato member countries including Latvia have reintroduced conscription, and others such as Sweden and Estonia have recently extended it to reach more people, as the threat of a possible Russian advance increases.

But what does history show us about how conscription is perceived by the wider public, and its influence on greater equality? The UK, for example, introduced democratic reforms in 1917 in the form of extensions of the vote. This was motivated by the sacrifices of conscripts during the first world war.

The home secretary, George Cave, stated that: “War by all classes of our countrymen has brought us nearer together, has opened men’s eyes, and removed misunderstandings on all sides.”

Conscription as an institution is often associated with the arguably most influential early example of this practice, generally referred to as the levée en masse, implemented by the French revolutionary government to bolster its ranks in the 1790s.

During that desperate time, when the fledgling republic struggled to defend itself against the coalition of countries seeking to end the revolution and restore the Bourbon monarchy, many French citizens not only accepted the necessity of conscription, but in many cases greeted it with enthusiasm.

In revolutionary France, conscription gradually came to replace older systems of compulsory recruitment, where the wealthy could easily purchase “replacements” by paying someone to take another’s place.

This possibility was abolished in 1798, in order to make conscription more equitable, but corruption and favouritism still posed a challenge to the legitimacy of the institution. Medical exemptions and discretion in selection at the local level continued to provide opportunities for, in particular, the wealthy to evade compulsory service.

Read more:
Ukraine war: why many Nato countries are thinking of introducing conscription and the issues that involves

Deferments and exemptions have remained longstanding challenges to the legitimacy of the institution of conscription. Typical examples of exemptions include attending higher education, having dependent children, or medical issues rendering the would-be draftee unfit to serve.

During the Vietnam war, the appeal of the higher education deferment prompted a significant increase in the college enrolment rate in the US between 1965 and 1975. As a result of a deferment for fathers, the fertility rate similarly saw a hike, followed by a dip when it was abolished in 1970.

In order to secure medical exemptions, self-inflicted wounds have been a last resort for some, from the early days in revolutionary France to today’s Russia.

A military exercise is led by the Finnish Navy for the first time since joining Nato. Troops from the Finnish Army and Air Force, the Swedish Navy and several allies all participated.
Vesa Moilanen/Lehtikuva/Sipa/Alamy

In an attempt to enlarge the pool of eligible men, the US Department of Defense in 1966 initiated what has become known as Project 100,000. This represented a lowering of medical and IQ standards for acceptance of draftees, allowing recruitment of a large number of men who would previously have been disqualified.

Thus, the Vietnam war saw the creation of a programme that specifically targeted the poor and underprivileged for recruitment. Record numbers of mostly middle- and upper-class men, including future presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, evaded the draft by going to college and then finding ways to obtain medical exemptions.

Recruiting a ‘disposable infantry’

Today, we see a similar pattern playing out in the Ukraine war. Many Russian men with marketable skills and enough financial resources to leave, fled their country in 2022 in response to its partial mobilisation.

At the same time, the shadowy Wagner Group, a state-funded private military corps, started to expand its recruitment base by enlisting prisoners to fight in Ukraine. Not long after, the practice was copied by the regular Russian forces.

These recruits have been cynically used in the war in Ukraine as “disposable infantry” to probe Ukrainian positions for weaknesses rather than committing more valuable assault troops. By using prisoners and ethnic minorities, the political cost of mobilising young, urban Russians can be avoided.

There are also countries in which conscription is widely accepted and seen as legitimate. In Sweden, conscription was temporarily suspended in 2010, but was reinstated in 2017 in response to the deteriorating regional security situation.

The year before, 72% of Swedes asked in a poll were in favour of conscription. Even Prince Carl Philip Bernadotte, son of Sweden’s king, was drafted and fulfilled his service obligation.

In Finland, another country with a long tradition of conscription, 73% are in favour of compulsory service.

These examples illustrate that conscription can be viewed in different ways. Its legitimacy is closely associated with the legitimacy of the state that is using it, in the eyes of its citizens.

While the appeal of conscription as a tool for providing states with military manpower has waxed and waned many times over the centuries, the current European security situation and the war in Ukraine has shown that it is not likely to disappear. Whether at the end of any war it is seen as having created greater equality, however, is down to how each country implements it. Läs mer…