Panelists argued defense 5G built on 3GPP standards offers speed, scale, and a path to reclaiming contested spectrum
In sum – what we know:
- The economic case – Commercial 3GPP standards offer rapid deployment, economies of scale, and advanced features the DoD would rather borrow than build.
- Reclaiming spectrum – Moving non-tactical comms to commercial vendors lets the military stay in bands carriers invest in, rather than getting priced out.
- A network of networks – The preferred approach pairs 5G/6G with tactical systems and leans on AI to automate today’s slow, predictable manual spectrum assignment.
At the Defense Communications Forum, a panel titled “from harmonizing to optimizing spectrum for defense operations” dug into a shift that’s been building for years. The defense industry is pivoting toward commercial 3GPP standards, and the panelists made a fairly straightforward case for why. Moderated by Ian Fogg, the session brought together Amir Stephenson of Lockheed Martin, Doug Thornton of Battelle Memorial Institute, and Arthur DeLeon, the Department of the Navy’s Strategic Spectrum Planner for the Secretary of the Navy.
The appeal is mostly economics and speed. Commercial cellular networks offer rapid deployment architectures, massive economies of scale, and a steady pipeline of advanced features the Department of Defense would rather borrow than build. Stephenson pointed to the architectural shift in 5G, with virtualization and cloud arriving in mobility, and AI being integrated aggressively into 6G. “To move faster, you got to be able to integrate the best capabilities that are out there,” he said, framing commercial 5G as a complement to tactical radios rather than a replacement for them.
There’s a more pointed reason, too. Commercial carriers aren’t just investing in technology, they’re investing in spectrum, which means the Department of Defense is steadily losing access to it. Thornton’s argument was that transitioning specific non-tactical communications to commercial vendors is one way to claw that access back. “You move to three GPP technologies, you get a lot of benefit of them doing that coordination. You regain access to that spectrum, and you, you get access to those technological, technological building blocks that make things faster and cheaper.” He was clear it’s not all of it, and tactical waveforms still have their place. But the underlying logic is that following commercial investment keeps the military in bands it would otherwise be priced or pushed out of. As Thornton put it, “if you over harmonize and protect spectrum that guarantees you’re also never going to have three GPP technologies in those spectrums, because nobody else will invest in.”
International harmonization and deployment challenges
Spectrum harmonization across allied countries is genuinely hard, and DeLeon didn’t pretend otherwise. The foundation of the problem is that there are 149 distinct national allocation tables, each reflecting how a given country chooses to assign spectrum and provide service. “It’s still the sovereign right of that host nation or that country to implement it based on their need,” he said, which makes any attempt to standardize across borders a negotiation rather than a directive.
The operational consequences are easy to underestimate until you picture the scale. When a naval battle group pulls up alongside an allied nation, it brings a dense stack of emitting systems with it. DeLeon’s analogy was vivid. “When you essentially move essentially a battle group next to another country, which here really is equivalent to moving the city of Boulder, Colorado into close proximity of any nation you’re essentially moving all the radar capabilities, all the safety of life air nautical type components into the close proximity.” Deconflicting those radar systems, including FAA-type capabilities, becomes a shared responsibility between the visiting and host countries.
That’s why harmonization can’t be reduced to a single formula. Stephenson stressed the need for nuanced, manual, risk-based evaluation, because different missions demand different protections. In the radar world alone, L-band early warning systems cover very long ranges, S-band systems trade some of that range for the ability to prosecute a threat, and X-band theater defense bleeds into the FR3 frequencies now being eyed for cellular. “It’s hard to say you could do without one, because they’re serving different missions,” he said. Some systems might tolerate a shared arrangement. Others would struggle to operate effectively in shared capacity at all. The recommendation was to keep defense expertise, government officials, commercial industry, and the national labs at the same table, weighing opportunities against priorities rather than applying a cookie-cutter rule.
Adapting commercial standards for contested environments
The obvious worry with commercial standards is the contested electromagnetic environment, where jamming and interference are deliberate rather than incidental. Tactical networks have been designed around that threat for decades. The panel’s counterintuitive point was that 3GPP cellular isn’t as fragile here as defense engineers tend to assume.
Thornton made the case with a thought experiment. “If I were to tell you that I’m going to hang four or five, six different 72 DBM EIRP radios right next to each other. Are in adjacent bands, put them within one meter from each other. Any DOW person is going to think of the the terrible co site interference environment that’s going to be, but that’s every cell tower.” Dense cellular deployments are already interference-limited, already running beamforming systems that null out interferers. They simply don’t think about it in tactical terms. His advice was to respect those building blocks rather than discard them. “Don’t discard the foundation just because it wasn’t designed with tactical to begin with.”
The flip side is the temptation to over-engineer. Stephenson’s concern was that customizing commercial technology for every corner-case tactical threat eventually destroys the very thing that made it attractive. “If you go too far down a customization approach to deal with corner case threats, my worry is that you then lose the value that attracts you, attracted you to that technology in the first place.” Push customization far enough and you’ve simply built a custom communications system again, with none of the economies of scale.
The preferred answer is a hybrid “network of networks” approach, where 5G and 6G sit alongside purpose-built tactical systems and get used where they make sense. Robustness comes from incremental improvement rather than a clean-sheet rebuild. DeLeon noted that the migration has to be deliberate, eliminating cyber threats and security concerns over time without, in his words, creating “a trillion dollar problem for the federal government.” Stephenson pointed to the cyber best practices folded into the 3GPP standard around Release 15 as the model. Strengthen the standard, standardize the enhancements, and the gains translate into the tactical world without bespoke engineering.
AI and automated spectrum management
Where the panel got genuinely forward-looking was on automation. Today’s spectrum assignment process is manual, slow, and resource-intensive, and that rigidity carries a hidden cost. Static allocation means adversaries already know which device operates in which band. As Thornton put it, “our adversaries have access to that very same information, so they know what those systems are and who’s using what.” A fixed framework is a predictable one.
DeLeon argued that machine learning could break that predictability by learning usage patterns the way a phone learns its owner’s habits. If a network sees heavier video bandwidth demand first thing in the morning, it can learn that pattern and reallocate accordingly, building what he called maneuver space. “We’re all after more bandwidth, but artificial intelligence definitely will provide a solution that builds maneuver space just by taking the manual processes and make them more automated using software.” It’s less about conjuring new spectrum out of thin air and more about using what exists more intelligently.
Stephenson framed the same idea around electromagnetic battle management, a decision engine making near-real-time calls on when to leverage a given waveform and how to configure radios across a shifting environment. Thornton brought it back to the people on the ground. Commercial carriers don’t design networks to stand up and tear down in 30 seconds, but expeditionary forces need exactly that. Get the automation right and soldiers can spin networks up or down quickly in response to localized threats, “and you keep the war fighters engaged in other things besides staring at his computer screen, trying to get things working and communicating.” That’s arguably the most practical promise of the whole discussion. Free operators from manual configuration, and the technology earns its place.
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