From Wired’s Danger Room:

The Harris radios Marines carry in Afghanistan, hooked up to the military’s Joint Tactical Radio System, have a range of under 100 miles. Not bad for when you’re patrolling Anbar or Helmand provinces.

Enter the Distributed Tactical Communications System, a brainchild of the futurists and contrarians at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. The DTCS, as it’s known, would more than double the reach of the Marines’ connectivity, allowing them to communicate from 250 nautical miles, via satellite. And that’s for starters: The Lab says the system has a 30 percent success rate in tests of 700 miles.