Anyway, the military broadcasts a light? What's going on there?
From what I can gather a network of radio stations has pooled news bulletins and the organisation behind it provides this 'obit light' in it's members radio studios that signify someone important has died and to prepare for a bulletin, upcoming news programming will follow a certain format and the output should be changed to suit the mood.
Looks like it's a bit of a legacy thing. They also mention a serial channel that has a 'Major Story Alarm' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Radio_News#Serial_...
It'd be interesting to see how it works/worked from tech point of view - perhaps some kind of long wave radio signal on the frequency that the news broadcast is sent from?
But yeah, doesn't look like a military thing or that it holds any authority