Picture yourself sitting in a tank on a battlefield. You're surrounded by four other tanks and numerous soldiers. Anti-tank planes fly overhead every minute or two. You look closely at your computer as you hear another plane come through. Encryption, here, is probably useless.

While encryption may not be a crucial instrument on the battlefield, encryption technologies serve as a core part of our military strength. The ability to communicate in times of crisis is absolutely critical. More important than simply the ability to communicate is the ability to communicate without being observed. Employing encryption technologies, voice and data communications can be encoded and hidden. What may look to the observer as a standard phone call between two modems over a phone line might actually be an encoded message including instructions and strategic plans.

Encryption played a central, although silent, role in both World Wars. Without the ability to encode messages -- through the Choctaws in World War I and the Navajos in World War II -- German forces would have been able to intercept military plans and respond to them before they ever occurred.

The Enigma illustrates how encryption can become a central part of military strategy. In the case of the Enigma, the failure of encryption in communications allowed the allied forces to subsume the German forces because they were able to find out what Germany was doing before it actually happened.

Currently, encryption is employed heavily, particularly by the United States government. Military operations such as Operation Desert Storm rely on the ability to hide communications in order to maintain coherence over a large distance without giving away military actions.

Military satellites are highly protected through the use of cryptographic communications. This is particularly true with satellites that involve information regarding strategic positioning of troops and weapons. The ultimate purpose is fairly simple: secure transmission of data while minimizing the chance of an enemy deciphering the message in an incident of interception.

While the advent of wireless communication allowed the decentralization of military force, encryption has been the determining factor in the ability of a decentralized force to maintain its strength.