Comment by AYBABTME

The main advantages of using IRC over radio comms is that:

* It's way more reliable than radio comms (you don't need to ask people to repeat everything all the time, you read your grids right the first time).

* It's concurrent, you can have multiple units reporting at the same time.

* It's buffered, you can skip stuff and come back to it later.

* It's cheap, anybody can get a window opened on the current ops and see what's going on, without needing all the hardware of a radio.

* It makes the reporting very fast.

* It makes collation/data collection much easier.

* It's scriptable, you can automate the collection of some messages, or the emission of some others.

They got that integrated at pretty much every level, and I think it's one of the most enabling thing available right now for C2C nodes, in many armies (not just US).