Table of Contents
Why trust, sovereignty, and clear demand signals matter more to defense connectivity than engineering in the 6G era
How do you build a trusted and interoperable defense connectivity ecosystem? The answer, according to a panel at the Defense Communications Forum, has less to do with engineering and more to do with politics, governance, and the willingness of allies to work together on uncomfortable terms.
The discussion, moderated by RCR’s Sean Kinney, brought together Marlan Macklin, Deputy Principal Director for FutureG in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, and Anne Marie Engtoft Meldgaard, Tech Ambassador for Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Between them, they framed where defense connectivity is heading, and what’s standing in the way.
Redefining sovereignty and shifting to political challenges
For years, defense connectivity has been treated as an engineering problem. How do you connect the sensor to the shooter? How do you integrate everything across a multi-domain battlespace? Engtoft Meldgaard argued that framing is now out of date. “I actually think that in 2026 the real challenge here is political,” she said. “It is about, how do we build systems that are adhering to these discussions right now around sovereignty, and how are they sovereign enough to protect national interests while at the same time open enough to really act in lockstep with our allies?”
Part of that shift is in how governments think about the companies they buy from. The old model treated technology providers as vendors of proprietary hardware — you buy it, you own it, end of story. Engtoft Meldgaard pushed for a different word. These are industry partners, not vendors, because the question is no longer just who writes the best code. It’s who can be trusted on supply chain integrity, on the communications, and on the technology itself, and who builds toward coalition strength rather than domestic convenience.
Sovereignty was the thread that kept resurfacing, and it’s a fraught one. Ask the EU and you’ll get 27 different definitions. Engtoft Meldgaard’s framing was sovereignty as freedom of action. Coming from a nation of fewer than six million people, she was blunt about the limits of going it alone. “Sovereignty is not about making it yourself, but it’s about controlling it in a meaningful way.” That means accepting three realities. Some things you will always buy from outside. Some of what you buy, you need to govern far more tightly. And — perhaps most interesting — the sovereignty debate is also a chance to widen the field of players. She pointed to the dual-use defense tech entrepreneurship that’s emerged under extreme pressure in Ukraine and elsewhere, producing capabilities, not least in defense communications, that the West would be foolish not to learn from. The Allied position doesn’t get stronger by leaning on a handful of suppliers.
Establishing trust and leveraging untrustworthy infrastructure
So what does trust actually mean in practical terms? Macklin’s answer was refreshingly unglamorous. “Really when you talk about trust, it’s about assurance, right? And so in practical terms, you know, it’s how we look at the entire life cycle of that given kind of technology.”
That lifecycle view breaks down into a few concrete things. Supply chains that are free from certain levels of influence. Hardware and software that can be verified as free from malicious code or vulnerabilities. Vendors that are transparent and accountable. None of that is going away, and Macklin was clear it would stay top of mind for the foreseeable future.
Interoperability is the other half, and it ties directly to mission effectiveness. The technology matters, but Macklin made the point that interoperability is a skill like any other — you have to get your reps in. He singled out NATO DIABEX, the NATO digital backbone experimentation event hosted by Latvia, as a venue where nations bring new capabilities online and learn how to operate together. The scale of the challenge is hard to overstate. Bring 32 nations to the table with potentially 32 different sets of kit, and you start to understand why repeated, hands-on experimentation isn’t optional.
There’s a tension here that Macklin didn’t try to paper over. The ideal is trustworthy infrastructure end to end. The reality is that an expeditionary force often has to operate through infrastructure it neither built nor controls. “If you need to go into another territory and they’ve got existing infrastructure, they’ve got existing bridges, whether you built them or not, right?” The Ukraine-Russia conflict bears this out, he noted, with both sides continuing to use the existing commercial digital infrastructure that’s there — a testament to that infrastructure’s resilience, even under sustained attack. The lesson is pragmatic. The government has been clear about where it lacks trust, but where untrustworthy infrastructure is the only infrastructure, the job is to understand the risk and leverage it to the maximum extent possible.
6G and private-public partnerships
The conversation closed on 6G and the relationship between government and the private sector that will define it. The standards work happens within 3GPP, led by industry, and the technology will be brought to market commercially. That raises a question for defense. How do you ensure dual-use technologies stay commercially viable while still being built to suit government needs?
Engtoft Meldgaard’s answer kept circling back to procurement. It sounds prosaic next to the strategic talk, but it’s where the rubber meets the road. The point is to give companies the right signals and the right avenues so that building products there’s a market for becomes viable, including for startups that aren’t yet on the commercial scene. In a moment she described as a hybrid war in Europe and a global trust crisis, the structures that build trust between the public and private sides — procurement chief among them — are what let new entrants in and keep allies aligned rather than each going their own way.
Macklin was even more direct about what governments owe industry. “Top of my list is, are we providing a clear demand signal to industry?” The signal needs to be clear and strong, he said, recalling the lingering question of 5G’s killer app and the concerns about how that played out. For 6G, he sees a clear answer in Integrated Sensing and Communications. The number one national security use case for ISAC, in case anyone’s wondering, is to aid in the detection of potential weaponized commercial drones. Beyond the demand signal, he pointed to two more priorities — getting the right frameworks in place to let innovation drive, and standing up public-private initiatives that align commercial business cases with government-specific requirements.
That last point led back to the Okudu Ecosystem Foundation, recently launched in partnership with the Linux Foundation, which Macklin held up as the model. What makes it work is the breadth of who has joined at the premier and other levels. It’s not just the US domestic industrial base. There are partners from across Europe and the Indo-Pacific, aggregating commercial and defense requirements across the trusted ecosystem. It’s a fitting note to end on, because it captures what the whole panel kept returning to. The technology will sort itself out. Whether allies can agree on trust, sovereignty, and a shared demand signal is the harder problem.
