The Defense Department office in charge of researching and developing next-generation wireless capabilities has multiple projects underway to give warfighters access to 5G-enabled communications — from improving surveillance at bases in Africa to testing the technology with NATO allies.
Since it was transferred to the DOD Chief Information Office in 2023, the FutureG office at the Pentagon has been working to expand the scale of previous efforts to research and test 5G and future-generation wireless network capabilities. As the office eyes 5G deployment, Tom Rondeau, principal director for FutureG at the Pentagon, emphasized that taking capabilities developed through research-and-development efforts and conducting live experiments is key to successful implementation.
“It’s all about the reps and the experience of getting this stuff out of the lab and into the real world, understanding the limitations, understanding the difficulties of these radio systems,” Rondeau told DefenseScoop on Wednesday during an interview at NDIA’s Emerging Technologies for Defense Conference and Exhibition.
The Pentagon has held a number of next-generation communications experiments in the past. In 2020, the department awarded contracts to multiple vendors to set up 5G and FutureG testbed projects at different military bases across the U.S., each of which evaluated a different way warfighters can leverage the technology, such as with smart warehouses and spectrum sharing.
The office also established open radio access network (O-RAN) technology pilots in 2023 at other installations, with the goal of working with companies to understand how to implement open networks and open software approaches to wireless communications.
By the end of this year, Rondeau said the FutureG office has plans to add 5G capabilities on force protection surveillance towers at three bases in the U.S. Africa Command located in eastern Africa. Made by defense tech company Anduril and funded by the Pentagon, the towers were built using tactical radios and don’t have inherent 5G capability, meaning they have lower data rates, resolution and frame rates, he noted.
Speaking of the collaboration, Rondeau said: “That was working with Anduril and saying, ‘This is why it’s important to go 5G because of these additional features.’”
“Over the past year, we’ve actually been funding the performers to upgrade them to where we now have high-definition video at high frame rates coming through,” he added. “This can be the difference between identifying somebody holding a baby and holding an AK-47.”
The standalone, self-powered towers provide full-peripheral coverage of the bases, and AFRICOM will also soon be deploying an unmanned aerial vehicle to extend the range of their situational awareness beyond the fixed site, Rondeau said.
The FutureG office will also be involved in a multinational 5G experiment at Camp Adazi in Latvia with NATO partners this fall, Rondeau said. One of the largest ranges in the Baltics, Adazi has already been upgraded with 5G technologies by the Latvia Mobile Telecom to test the technology for military applications, and thereby advancing the overall market for 5G, he explained.
“We’ve now got Latvia, Estonia, U.S. forces of course, Spain, Norway and Sweden — as well as the Michigan Air National Guard — that are all part of this experiment we’re going to be conducting,” Rondeau said. “Let’s take this stuff into the real world. Let’s take it into a range where there’s kinetic operations that are happening all around there. That’s going to teach us a lot about the value proposition of these technologies,”
He added that the experiment should result in “a miniature version” of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2). The Pentagon-wide initiative looks to connect data streams from across U.S. military services and international allies and partners to enable better and faster decision-making.
Although it’s not directly involved in the effort right now, the FutureG office still talks to department officials leading CJADC2 intermittently, Rondeau said.
“Working with NATO and with the Joint Staff on this, we’re showing that interoperability at the network layer is done,” he noted. “With 5G as the core network, with high-capacity and improved security features that we’ve been working on, all of that is now possible.”
The goal for forthcoming exercises will be providing interoperability at the data layer and ensuring that stakeholders are integrating with the new data layers developed by the Joint Staff and the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, he added.
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