I understand that I am some random guy on the internet, but I've also spent a lot of time in Afghanistan (weird coincidence here, believe me or don't believe me) implementing two way satellite systems, and still work professionally in expensive two way satellite systems. I also happen to be a person who's been doing network engineering for ISPs since 1996-1997 or thereabouts, and currently has business cards that read "Senior Network Engineer" on them. I'm not willing to give up anonymity here, but ask a specific two way satellite technology question and I'll be more than happy to answer.

As a note there were lots of people buying and installing cheap COTS 1.2-1.8 meter size ku band vsat terminals at all sorts of military sites in Afghanistan for MWR purposes, it's not rocket science or really hard to do at all. This stuff was, and is, all kept air gapped and separated from anything that is a real DoD or ISAF/RS network. These were networks for peoples' own personal recreational internet and entertainment in their rest time. You absolutely would see weird latency, jitter, packet loss behavior on those.