SDR - Khan BMS Battlefield Management System
What SDR (Software-Defined Radio) actually does on a contested ew mesh link, and why Khan BMS treats it as a formation-level primitive instead of a vendor integration.
Programs of record have spent twelve-year cycles trying to integrate SDR. The adversary's iteration is now monthly. That gap is the real problem SDR has to solve before any of the technical ones matter.
Definitions first. SDR = Software-Defined Radio. Radio whose physical-layer behavior is defined in software, enabling waveform reprogramming. A Software-Defined Radio implements modulation, filtering, and protocol processing in software running over a generic RF front end. SDRs make it possible to load multiple waveforms onto the same hardware and to update behavior in the field, which is the foundation of cognitive radio, EW-resilient meshes, and rapid waveform innovation cycles.
In our reference deployment, SDR runs at the edge with no continuous-uplink assumption. Nodes carry the last lawful SDR state, gossip updates when bandwidth allows, and reconcile via a vector-clock scheme borrowed from distributed-database literature.
SDR is anchored at the Arban — ten nodes under one tactical leader. Small enough to reason about by hand, large enough to absorb the loss of a node without re-planning. Authority for SDR is bounded at this tier; nothing the Arban does can poison its parent.
If SDR matters to your formation, the integration question is not whether to support it. It is how cleanly the rest of your stack survives when it is the only thing still working.