Not allowing front line soldiers to have cellphones is probably a good idea as we have seen demonstrated in Ukraine with electronic warfare and drones
Allow them to have phones, just without a SIM card, install something secure like GrapheneOS
It would be huge liability, Wi-Fi can still be used in signals intelligence, Bluetooth as well. Have a drone go over the field looking for any signals coming out and now you know where the troops are. Plus even without a SIM card, phones will still look at towers for triangulation and GPS purposes, they even try to talk to towers so they can send emergency calls if needed. You would need airplane mode, not just removing the SIM card
Even if you disabled those features, you really want to trust Frontline soldiers, who are bored… To never ever turn the radios on even once?
nah, ammount of people targeting them to install “just a simple application to see if your family is safe” gonna be huge