As modern warfare pushes further and further into the digital realm, the Pentagon needs the latest and greatest in wireless technology to support its increasingly complex network needs. But when that technology comes from a sector motivated by profit rather than national security requirements, the Defense Department needs to find a way to take advantage of both worlds.

Military operations rely on secure wireless networks for piloting drones, connecting sensors and communicating, among other things. Today, a commercial market that has poured billions of dollars into research and development means standards-based 5G — or fifth generation — networks are ahead of Defense Department comms in both technical and performance criteria, said Mari Silbey, senior director of partnerships and outreach at technology nonprofit US Ignite.

Previous wireless generations were split across competing standards from different countries, with equipment and carriers largely incompatible with each other. 5G was the first generation to fully consolidate the industry behind a single global standard, and it changed the playing field for the Pentagon, Silbey said in an interview.

Prior to 5G, a fractured market meant there were technology providers who would develop custom equipment for Defense Department-specific needs such as radio and communications systems, Silbey said.

“There wasn’t that pull toward development in one particular direction,” she said. “The market could still accommodate a wide range of approaches to developing communications equipment.” When the move to 5G stitched the fragmented market together, the economics changed.

Even a giant like the Defense Department cannot compete from a global commercial standpoint as a market when the entire commercial industry is standardized to 5G, she said. Technology providers are interested in the biggest market, “and it becomes less interesting or less fruitful for them to go off in entirely different directions.”

So where does that leave the military? Ideally, it would start with a base-level piece of consumer technology and add on to it, “because the economies of scale they get from using commercial technology are so much stronger than they would be if they were starting from scratch based on DoD needs,” she said.

But doing so requires flexibility in commercial technology that isn’t there yet, she added.

While day-to-day 5G needs on military installations can mostly be served with commercial technology, warfighter missions need higher security, higher performance and more flexibility. The military also often operates in a different radio spectrum from the commercial sector, requiring equipment that can operate within specific bands for specific applications, Silbey said.

The Pentagon has recognized its reliance on the commercial sector, establishing the FutureG Office in 2020 to advance and adapt “commercial wireless network technology to deliver asymmetric warfighter advantage and increase U.S. technological leadership,” the office’s website said.

Thomas Rondeau, principal director for the FutureG Office, said the question becomes: “How do you take these technologies that are meant to connect everybody, meant to be discoverable, meant to communicate, and apply them toward true warfighting operations at the tactical edge? Can we do this securely and safely, or when do we have to understand the risk is too great that we have to pull back to very specialized DoD capabilities?”

When it comes to commercial technology, the priorities are just different, Rondeau said during a panel discussion at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Pacific Operational Science and Technology Conference in March.

“Every generation of cell phone has become more secure than the previous one. But they’re looking at securing things mostly for financial reasons. That’s what they do as a marketplace,” he said. “We’re looking at it from those advanced persistent threats, we’re looking at it from nation-state attacks on our systems and information. So, we have to add additional layers of security and understand what that means.”

Additional layers of security are particularly important at the tactical edge, he said, where secure operational communications networks are critical for a combined fighting force inside contested and congested areas.

If the challenge is integrating military-level upgrades into commercial systems, the solution could be open source technology, Rondeau said.

Open source technology is “a game-changer for how telecommunications networks could work and how the United States could provide leadership,” he said. “We’re going to break open these traditional black box radio access networks, we’re going to be able to manipulate the components inside, but we’re going to be able to program and innovate on top of them.”

Radio access networks, also known as RAN, are part of a wireless communications system that connects devices such as mobile phones or computers to the core network — a central conduit that regulates wireless traffic across the internet. Commercial communications companies build “millions of base stations a year” — essentially the heads on cell towers — with established RAN networks, he said.

“They can’t change their manufacturing line for 100 one-offs for the DoD. But if we can program the software inside these systems, we can make them adaptable to DoD needs,” he said.

Silbey described open source technology as a “sandbox … of lots of different functions within a network that you could change the parameters on and see what the impacts are on performance or security.” She also noted a common concern with the technology, namely security. Who is playing in the sandbox? For example, Chinese or Russian hackers could be putting malicious code or spyware into devices.

The FutureG Office is also looking for a way to use the infrastructure the industry has already poured trillions of dollars into, Rondeau said. “How do we as the DoD access the radio access networks that are deployed by our carriers in the United States and international carriers around the world? Can we utilize their infrastructure securely to connect DoD operations?”

They can, he said — by opening it up.

An open radio access network, or O-RAN, while evolving and somewhat undefined, is essentially a network architecture that would allow different vendors to contribute features for different parts of the network.

O-RAN architecture splits the traditional elements of a RAN network into three main components — central unit, distributed unit and radio unit — and connects them with open interfaces. The disaggregation means networks can be built using interchangeable systems.

Typically, most standards used by wireless technology vendors come from a global organization called the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, more commonly known as 3GPP, which is where all 5G development has taken place.

O-RAN, while not a set of standards, has interface specifications set by a coalition of telecom providers and carriers called the O-RAN Alliance. Compliant open interfaces will allow companies to add software modules into network systems that address specific functional needs.

For example, technology providers could design a solution that makes more efficient use of spectrum radios that are already deployed or develop software for sharing spectrum between different users.

“Incumbent radio providers may be developing these solutions today, but O-RAN makes it possible to pull from a larger pool of innovators, and it ensures that network operators aren’t dependent on the product development cycles of two or three large equipment providers,” Silbey said.

The ultimate vision of O-RAN is a plug-and-play situation with different providers “anytime you [have] an interface,” Silbey said — but it’s not there yet.

For the Defense Department, the vision is a combination of plug and play with equipment and open interfaces for which software can be developed, she said. “At a very, very high level, if you think of it as some kind of orchestration system that then enables you to develop software functions that can plug into it, that is the holy grail of what the DoD would like to have, to be able to answer their specific communications needs that are not addressed by commercial technology.”

To arrive there, the Defense Department needs more funding for research, more field testing and a plan for spectrum sharing, Silbey said. Progress and investments are being made, she added.

The 5G Challenge is a collaboration between the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences and the office of the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering to “accelerate the maturity of 5G open interfaces, promoting interoperability among vendor modules and lowering barriers of entry into the 5G marketplace,” according to the challenge website. The 2023 challenge awarded a purse of $7 million in cash and in-kind prizes.

One successful case of dual-use technology was a company called Maxentric that worked with the Defense Department to develop an integrated circuit to power a lighter and less expensive communications system for Army drones. The system included a custom military radio waveform, Silbey said.

National strategies like the Defense Department’s 5G Strategy and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s National Spectrum Strategy recognize the strategic importance of 5G and FutureG capabilities. The fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act included a section calling for “a strategy for deploying to military installations and other facilities of the Department of Defense private wireless networks that are … based on fifth-generation information and communications capabilities and Open Radio Access Network architecture” and “tailored to the mission, security and performance requirements of the respective military installation or other facility.”

If the FutureG Office ultimately reaches its holy grail, breaking open radio access networks would increase supply chain resiliency and diversity and allow innovation in areas traditionally owned by big players, Rondeau said. “So, breaking those open is one approach that we’re trying to increase [in] the innovation cycle.” ND