High Frequency Global Communications System

Note: The contents of this page are unencyclopedic and the article needs to be reworked entirely. Sourced from https://x.com/neetintel/status/1747439860321796519

Many explanations of the US military's High Frequency Global Communications System (HFGCS) floating around the internet are simply repeating the same information available 15-20+ years ago. Even though it’s almost 20 years old, Larry Van Horn’s 2006 writeups of the HFGCS are still the core of most info out there. This is mostly because he did a fantastic job, but it's inevitable some of it would go out of date, as nobody's really picked up where he left off or updated that information for the contemporary era. Part of the reason for this is because while the US military used to be more candid about the HFGCS (at one point the HFGCS even had its own website), they began to be less forthcoming about it sometime in the mid-2000s. Nonetheless, its existence is not confidential, and you can still come across occasional mentions of the HFGCS in news stories, non-classified documentation, etc. In fact, exhaustive and contemporary descriptions of the HFGCS, straight from the Department of Defense, are freely available and published annually, but these are buried in budget documents hovering around the 1000 page mark. But these descriptions are definitely worth a read, because some of the contemporary information in them is more accurate than outdated information still floating around.

Note: This next section is overly preoccupied with resolving an ambiguity about whether Offutt AFB is a secondary control station when it definitely is. If there's any ambiguity to discuss in contemporary timing, it would be what exactly the status of RED RIVER and WOLFHOUND are as they kind of sort of but basically don't act like NCSes.

Colloquially, most of the time people talk about the "HFGCS" they are in fact referring to a network of ground stations located across the world which simulcast broadcasts of EAMs and other traffic, provide phone patch services, and can play a role in numerous other activities. Sites like Priyom.org have world maps showing where these stations are; of course, Priyom.org is not entirely entirely correct when it suggests that these stations are all remotely controlled from the Centralized Network Control Station (CNCS) located at Andrews AFB, because it actually isn’t only Andrews AFB – in a 2006 article, Andrews anticipated soon having "another CNCS at Offutt Air Force Base". My own impression based on voices and certain kinds of activity, is there is indeed at least one additional control center. Though it goes unsourced, Wikipedia's current write-up of the HFGCS says the second station is Grand Forks AFB, and any basic web search will find support for this. Grand Forks is not Offutt and it seems unlikely the former would identify as the latter, so there's some clarification needed for what happened here, but it's almost certainly not the case that Andrews AFB is the only control center.

As of January 2024, the current primary frequencies of the HFGCS are 4724, 8992 kHz, 11175 kHz, and 15016 kHz. The HFGCS stations will usually simulcast messages on all of these frequencies at the same time, but not always. Things begin to get a bit confusing here, not just because people will often confuse their own inability to pick up a message on a frequency as that message not broadcasting on that frequency at all, but because there are both times broadcasts are sometimes exclusive to only one or some of the frequencies. The HFGCS has previously seemed to operate on schedules, and might still do.