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Defense and industry leaders detail NTN standards progress, tactical use cases, and the security gaps still ahead
The convergence of 5G and non-terrestrial networks (NTN) has moved well past the “interesting concept” phase. At a recent panel at the Defense Communications Forum, leaders from NATO, the US Army, Airbus Defense and Space, and the Mobile Satellite Services Association (MSSA) laid out where integration actually stands today, and what it’s going to take to get from pilots to genuinely mission-ready architecture.
The framing was set early by SIA president Tom Stroup, who moderated the discussion. “Non terrestrial networks are now formally part of the 5G ecosystem enabling coverage, while terrestrial infrastructure alone cannot reach but integration is not just about coverage. It’s about seamless interoperability, dynamic routing security and mission assurance across the entire ground to space continuum.” The real question, as he put it, is no longer if these networks will converge, but how fast and how securely.
According to the panel, the standards work is maturing, real deployments are happening in pockets, and the militaries that have been watching Ukraine closely are now treating cellular communications as something that needs to sit alongside, and eventually replace, legacy tactical radios.
Current progress on standards and adoption
The satellite industry’s relationship with 3GPP has shifted considerably over the past few releases. Amina Boubendir, who leads research and standardization at Airbus Defense and Space, described the change directly. Release 17 has been deployed, while Release 18 is maturing, Release 19 is in development, and Release 20 along with 6G studies are now underway. The point, she said, is that satellite players have historically shipped proprietary solutions, which is fine for closed sectors, but a problem if you actually want mass market scale. Standardization is what unlocks interoperability.
The technology isn’t theoretical, either. Nandan Das of MSSA pointed to what’s already in out today. “In terms of what’s there today, like in my pocket today right now, my Google Pixel phone — that has satellite, SOS right, and that’s happening with MSS spectrum over the United States.” Device-to-device messaging over NB-IoT has been live for over a year, and trials for NB-IoT voice in automotive environments have already been carried out. Release 20 is looking at enhancing NB-IoT to include voice over GEO.
On the defense side, NATO has formalized things considerably faster than many would have expected. John Stephenson, who leads a communications services team at NATO HQ in Brussels, walked through how the NATO Wireless Communications Standardization Project (NWCSP), staffed largely by 3GPP people working pro bono, pushed through an adoption under STANAG 5665, which became the alliance’s “cellular communications for defense” standard. The overarching name was kept deliberately generic so it could carry forward to 6G and beyond without another rename. NWCSP itself sunsets at the start of 2027, but the configuration management work is being picked up by NATO’s Digital Policy Committee.
Technical challenges and interoperability
The standards are one thing, but making them work at the tactical edge is another.
Colonel Jeffrey Couillard, division chief for interoperability and coalition in the Army G6, was direct about the limits. “Some of the challenges, especially in a military environment, are really range and access and maneuverability.” Drop a 5G node in a fixed location and you’ve effectively tethered your forces to it. The army’s PACE plan (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency) currently lists 5G somewhere down the chain. The goal is to push it to Primary, because of what comes with it: rich content, live video feeds, situational awareness pushed out to the forward edge. Today’s tech doesn’t quite get there. 6G over NTN is what’s expected to.
Das flagged a more specific gap that NATO’s standardization work has helped surface. “We recognize that the NTN in three GPP was really dependent on GNSS or GPS as a starting point, and that was in today’s world, increasingly getting challenged due to various reasons, and both adversarial as well as others.” That’s now prompted a study item in 3GPP looking at GNSS-resilient architectures. It’s a good example of holes being discovered outside 3GPP and then fed back in.
Boubendir added a complementary thread on the ground segment. Much of mil-SATCOM and gov-SATCOM still runs on proprietary waveforms, while the mobile industry has long since standardized. Work on virtualizing the ground segment — using edge and cloud compute, plus IEEE’s DIFI for treating downlinked RF as IP or Ethernet over standard transport — is what makes the same services portable as troops or environments change. The waveform question, she said, is one of the concrete places where convergence is being actively studied.
Military and civilian use cases
The use cases panel covered ranged from the obvious to the genuinely interesting. Couillard offered three. The first was a forward-moving formation needing to maintain comms and situational awareness across a moving line. The second was disaster response — picture NORTHCOM and the National Guard responding to a Category 5 hurricane where local cell towers are gone. With non-terrestrial 6G, units can go in, find survivors, geo-locate them, and pull in resources without the usual comms vacuum. The third was large-scale training at sites in California or Louisiana, where vast unconnected terrain currently limits what formations can realistically rehearse.
Stephenson added the maritime case, which he noted is close to his heart as a former Royal Navy communications specialist. A command ship carrying an NTN base station could share situational awareness and maneuvering data across a task group at the speed of relevance. He also tied the use cases back to NATO’s Federated Mission Networking initiative — 41 affiliates including NATO itself, with the mantra of “people, process and technology.” STANAG 5665 is now baked into the FMN spiral specifications, which means affiliates must implement, train, and qualify on it together.
Das raised enhanced MSS services as another category that hasn’t gotten enough airtime. Maritime and airborne communications, including cockpit comms, and maritime safety, have been served for decades by Viasat and Inmarsat through proprietary systems. 5G-based equivalents would be more resilient, more bandwidth-efficient, and built on standards rather than vendor lock-in.
Boubendir rounded it out with the broader civilian envelope. Helicopters, fighter jets, direct-to-device handheld, oil and gas, offshore services, agriculture, and automotive — both for positioning and for in-vehicle communications and infotainment. The list is long, and the common thread is extended coverage that doesn’t require a custom stack per vertical.
Security risks and mitigation strategies
Plugging 5G into the tactical edge brings the platform’s known vulnerabilities along for the ride. Couillard didn’t sugarcoat it. Rogue cell towers, hijacked handsets, and geographical tracking of devices these are all real problems if you’re trying to run a military operation. “We would like to be able to hide in plain sight, and that may be something that we have to work on.” Dynamic spectrum sharing and the ability to pivot quickly across bands are part of the answer. So is being careful about what your devices connect to.
Stephenson framed the same problem in operational terms. Electronic protective measures matter because forces need to “see and not be seen.” It’s something the next iteration of the NATO standard is expected to address as 5665 modernizes.
On the industry side, Das was refreshingly blunt about the limits. “It’s worth remembering that there’s no such thing as perfect security. So there’s always trade offs and trade offs and pros and cons.” That said, 5G’s open-standard nature means a lot of eyes, including academics, PhD students, and industry researchers, are constantly probing for weaknesses — and features like network slicing, NAS encryption, and IMS security are now baked into the protocol stack. MSSA, meanwhile, is working on the bits that sit outside 3GPP’s scope, including feeder link standardization and aggregate interference management across continents and ITU regions, an issue that’s now headed for WRC-27.
Stephenson added that NATO’s industry engagement runs through several channels: the Science and Technology Office’s ongoing studies, the Multinational 5G Project, and the NATO Industry Associations Group (NIAG), which feeds findings back into NATO’s technical specifications.
Boubendir noted that Airbus has long shipped anti-jamming features in its SATCOM products, and is now investing heavily in quantum networks and quantum key distribution. Her broader point was that standardized specifications leave room for implementation choices — which is both a strength and a vulnerability. Security has to be considered down to the hardware level, not bolted on afterwards.
6G and resilience
Asked whether NTN can actually meet the military’s need for resilient comms, Couillard didn’t hesitate. The shift from a two-dimensional network to a 3D architecture spanning ground, air, and space is, in his view, exactly what makes the signal robust regardless of where forces find themselves. It also feeds directly into ISR, pulling and sharing intelligence in near real time.
Stephenson came back to the PACE plan. Adding cellular and NTN doesn’t replace HF, VHF, and UHF — it gives commanders another quiver to the bow. Business-as-usual radios become the backup, and cellular becomes the lead.
Boubendir argued that 6G can’t really be discussed without multi-orbit. Complementary coverage across LEO, MEO, and GEO, paired with direct-to-device across both narrowband and broadband, is where the satellite industry is pushing standardization. The common pinch point, as ever, is spectrum — and that’s where she sees MSSA’s work helping move things along.
As for what success actually looks like a year from now, Stephenson gave the most concrete answer of the panel. STANAG 5665 included in FMN spiral specifications, successful testing at CWIX, successful use at Steadfast Cobalt (NATO’s CIS confirmation event), then Trident Juncture, and finally deployment for operations. “That’s a picture of success for me.”
