Comment by charonn0
13 years ago
Upon reflection, I find that it's not at all surprising that IRC is so widely used in the military establishment.
Military operations are, by definition, carried out by different coordinating groups sometimes thousands of miles apart. IRC is ideal for such a task as it provides a conferencing platform that is easy to use, develop, and deploy (in both the software sense and the military sense.)
It's unconcerned with the transport layer, so a wide variety of transport systems (which can include any manner of authentication and security) can be used: from a General or Admiral at a desktop client to drones mid-flight to boots-on-ground soldiers carrying a pocket-sized device. IRC is also a common technique for C&C in certain malware families.
I remember being in irc channels used for organizing tactics and strategies in browsergames. It was widely used for that.