During an April visit to Washington, Air Chief Marshal Mike Wigston, the head of the Royal Air Force, sat down with C4ISRNET to discuss some of those investments outlined in the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One item listed in the integrated review was a new intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance satellite constellation. Can you elaborate on what the thinking is there?

Our aim for that program is a [constellation of] responsive launched small satellites, low Earth orbit constellation, where we have the option of selecting the payloads, selecting the role and selecting the position of the satellites, and then launching them and getting them into operation in a very, very short decision action cycle. This is something that is attractive to me as an operational commander. And I think it will have direct utility for the war fighter, that ability to respond to a crisis in a particular part of the world, or perhaps a requirement to add some resilience to another part of the space network. [This design] means we can respond, launch and get something into service very rapidly. And that’s the work that we will be continuing over the next couple of years, for that particular aspect of our space program.

The U.K. government has invested in the company OneWeb. Is that something you think might be a fit for this system?

The U.K.’s investment with OneWeb was a another part of government, so that’s separate from the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence. But there are elements of OneWeb — and all of the similar systems that are being launched into space at the moment — around the command and control, the level of autonomy and autonomous control in those satellite constellations, where there’s huge numbers of small and very small satellites working together. So there are elements of what OneWeb is doing, which are of interest to me, in a similar way to some of the other similar systems that have been launched at the moment. But that’s not something that I’m directly involved with.

The U.K. was involved in the European navigation system known as Galileo but was forced out following Brexit. British official discussed doing a U.K.-only system, but that has been delayed and is seen by some analysts as too expensive. What is the current status of these discussions?

So again, the primary responsibility for that is in another part of government, but of course, the Ministry of Defence is involved because of our interest in, and the importance of, GPS and global positioning. And we’re still analyzing and assessing what the options are, because nobody needs us to build a direct duplication of a system that’s already in place like GPS. But what would be really helpful, as we look at a more challenged, a more competitive [space] and potentially a need for greater resilience in space, is a system that’s complimentary, that might be made in a different model, with a mix of nodes on the network, some of them on the surface of the Earth, some of them in space. There are some options there, and an opportunity to do something different, which is complimentary to GPS, but that adds resilience in a different way. So I’m very keen that we continue to explore that. And it’s certainly something that the U.K. has some world-leading technologies, and we’ve got a lot to offer. And so that will be something that we will continue to work on over the next few years.

The U.S. stood up both a Space Command and a Space Force in the last couple of years. The U.K. is now spinning up its own Space Command. Can you walk us through what that’s going to look like, and what the interaction with its U.S. counterpart might be going forward?

The U.K. Space Command is an opportunity for us to bring together some quite disparate elements — of largely Royal Air Force units — that are operating in space and are closely linked in with U.S. Space Command and the U.S. Space Force already, but we haven’t had a unifying command and control and a unifying organization for them. I think this, at the very outset of the U.K. Space Command, it’s an opportunity for us to bring together everything that we’re doing in space, in the Royal Air Force and in the U.K. Ministry of Defence, bring it all under one organization to make sure that we’re channeling the investment that we’re going to make, that we’re giving the people in that organization the skills and the equipment they need to make sure that we are living up to our ambition and our prime minister’s ambition for the U.K. to take a leading role in Europe in space. And so the Space Command will be that nodal point where we engage with allies, like the United States, that we share information, that we develop new systems, and that we continue to benefit from all of the opportunities that space offers.

Across the board, the commercial sector outspends governments on technology investment, but it’s particularly true with space. You have billions earmarked in the integrated review for space, which is real money, but the reality is that you will need to rely on private sector investment going forward. How do you make that work?

Space is already an enterprise where some of the leading progress that’s being made at the moment is in the commercial sector and private companies making enormous leaps in space technology and what we are doing in space. And so working closely with those will be a key part of the U.K.’s space plan and the U.K.’s role in space. The figures for commercial investment in space, of course they dwarf what we are doing from a military perspective, but our role is significantly different. Because whilst those commercial organizations are investing in space to provide services, to enable things to go faster and further on Earth to enable people’s day-to-day lives, the role of the Royal Air Force, the role of armed forces in space, is fundamentally different. We’re there to understand what some of our potential adversaries, some malign actors, are doing, to understand and to protect what’s our critical national infrastructure in space, and to be ready to defend it. That’s about information sharing, that’s about understanding and having a clear picture of what’s going on in space. And that’s about working with allies so that we’re ready to act when we see something which, you know, crosses the line of unacceptability.

Ratner will be nominated as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific affairs, the White House announced Wednesday. Stacey Dixon, the deputy director for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, will also be nominated as principal deputy director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Ratner worked for Biden in the Senate, and later served as Biden’s deputy national security adviser during the Obama administration; he has been expected to receive a top national security job. He joined the department as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s special assistant on China, and in that capacity has been leading a DoD-wide review on military posture for countering Beijing.

Dixon has held a number of positions in the intelligence community since 2003. She worked on advanced satellite systems for the Central Intelligence Agency’s directorate of science and technology from 2003 to 2007, and then went to work for the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In 2016, Dixon joined IARPA, the intelligence community’s research arm, as their deputy director on a joint duty assignment before being named director in August 2018.

Ratner’s nomination marks the 8th individual named as a nominee for DoD jobs in the last two and half weeks. It comes the same day as Colin Kahl, the administration’s nominee to be undersecretary of defense for policy, moved in the Senate despite Republican opposition.

On April 2, the White House announced Michael Brown, the head of the Defense Innovation Unit, as the nominee for undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer; Ronald Moultrie for the job of undersecretary for intelligence and security, the top civilian intelligence role at the Pentagon; and Mike McCord as the Defense Department’s top financial official. McCord’s nomination was first reported by Defense News.

Then last week, the White House announced Christine Wormuth for Army secretary, the first time a woman has been nominated for that role. Gil Cisneros was nominated to be undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, while Susanna Blume was tapped to head the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office, known as CAPE. Days later, Mara Karlin was selected as the assistant secretary of defense for strategy, plans and capabilities.

Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, the top official on JADC2 for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the C4ISRNet Conference Wednesday that the plan has been reviewed by Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Both leaders gave inputs that should be completed in a few “days,” Crall said, with the document then heading up to Austin for signing out. That document, once finalized, will “codify the lines of effort and really our approach to delivering the capabilities required to JADC2,” Crall noted.

That document will come with an unclassified version, which Crall said would be “pretty satisfying” for those outside the department. He indicated that the only lines of effort that would be left out of the unclassified version relate to the nuclear command and control mission.

“What is classified of course are some of the details surrounding that particular line of effort,” he said. “The other lines of effort that we have listed are pretty open, and I think … the readers will be able to get the full sense of the direction JADC2 is heading, and maybe some of the delivery milestones to look into.”

The strategy will be followed by two further documents that Crall said were “hot on the heels” of the strategy. The first is the gap analysis, or posture review, a document that looks at what needed capabilities are missing for the department — in essence, a to-do list for acquisition and development.

Finally comes the implementation plan, which will lay out “the plan of attack and milestones, the very specific delivery dates, and what type of delivery we’re expecting and when,” Crall said. “So, really the rubber meets the road in that document, and we’ve just now started to identify the leads for those discrete pieces of JADC2 and when those delivery order and timelines will be met. So that’s really where the pressure lies, and I think we’re on a pretty good pace to deliver.”

More broadly, Crall raised two big-picture issues with how industry is pitching him capabilities, laying out a pair of requirements that any industry player hoping to cash in on the JADC2 boom needs to keep front of mind.

The first is that he is dedicated to avoiding “vendor lock,” a situation where one specific company has a monopoly over a key technology. “We’ve got to be careful that whatever solution we have is open,” Crall said, adding that he is “certainly concerned” with getting locked in with one industry player.

The second is for industry players to stop bringing technology that has only been tested in labs, and for companies to start using these capabilities in real-world scenarios before showing up at his door.

“I start my analysis at the tactical edge and work backwards. And many of the things that they look at, you know, that’s at least briefed to me is, it works very well in a robust safe, stable environment. And [industry says] why don’t we go with that, then we’ll work our way toward that tactical edge. Those have been losing propositions for me,” Crall said.

“I want to see this work on a ship. I want to see this work in an austere environment. I want this to work in an area, whatever solution we’re discussing, where the adversary is trying to squeeze me for bandwidth and continuity in that denied or challenging environment. That’s where we live in the war fight.”

The move positions CAES — the 54th largest defense firm in the world, according to the most recent Defense News Top 100 list — to knock down costs and weight for radio frequency parts used in space systems and radars, according to Dave Young, the company’s chief technology officer. The business rebranded to its shortened name last year.

Additive manufacturing, another name for 3D printing, fits in well with the company’s existing portfolio, said Young, who joined CAES in January after stints at Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, where he most recently was vice president of advanced program developments in the space sector.

“I think this is going to be something that the space world will initially be interested in, [but] as you get into the higher technology, like fire-control radars and things like that, electronic warfare systems, there’s going to be a play,” Young said. “And the good news is CAES plays across that realm. So although we’re getting a lot of excitement in the space side, we’re going to see movement across our products in terms of the use of this technology.”

The technology has long been of interest for the defense and aerospace worlds. Objects made with 3D printing can be lighter, tougher and cheaper to produce, as they can be built from the ground up in a way that traditional manufacturing, which is essentially carving shapes out of large blocks of substances, cannot. The technology has proved useful for large pieces of planes, for example, but is less successful when it comes to highly sensitive technologies.

While there have been some experiments with additive manufacturing for radio frequency parts, Young downplayed them, citing the fact that the parts generally must be smoothed out and worked over to get the correct radio frequency tolerances. This ultimately results in a situation where traditional manufacturing is cheaper and easier.

The SWISSto12 process is different, said Emile de Rijk, CEO and co-founder of the Lausanne, Switzerland-based firm. He described a patented, three-step process.

First the company wrote new software for 3D printers that gets parts as closer to radio frequency ready than commercially available 3D-printing software. “They’re not perfect, but they’re different from how they would come out normally,” de Rijk said. “A stronger emphasis has been put on getting higher surface accuracies onto those parts.”

Second, the company developed a chemical etching process where “you dip the parts in a series of baths that rework the surface finish to get them to the next layer of smoothness and accuracy.” And finally, the company finishes the parts with metal plating, usually copper or silver, for situations where “the customer is interested in getting the last little bit of performance out of the product to further improve the [radio frequency] RF performance of those products.”

SWISSto12 has established itself in Europe, and de Rijk said its designs are qualified by major defense firms such as Thales, Airbus, Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries. He added that there are more than 1,000 parts flying on systems in geostationary orbit, as well as on 50 aircraft designs and within the electronic warfare suites on eight battleships. Roughly a third of the company’s revenue comes from commercial space, with the other two-thirds coming from defense.

But the company has not made headway into the U.S. market, which is where the deal with CAES comes in. The agreement means that CAES is the exclusive purveyor of SWISSto12′s capabilities for U.S. prime companies, according to Young. The company defines U.S. firms as those that are certified by American-based companies; so even though the F-35 fighter jet has global customers, it would count for this agreement because Lockheed Martin is based in America.

The agreement is a partnership, not just SWISSto12 giving its designs to Cobham and walking away, de Rijk noted. “We won’t just throw [intellectual property] and technology over the ocean.”

Young predicted that some production for U.S. equipment will start this year, but added that the biggest agreements will take 12-18 months before production — a natural lag given the time frame it takes to design and produce a sensitive space system or high-end radar.

In terms of what parts may come from the team, Young said there is “a very relevant and near-term application for waveguides and interconnects,” key pieces that transfer information from active components to the digital backend.

He also expressed confidence there will be no issue with receiving certification from the Pentagon for defense articles, as the process would be done at the company level.

“The parts we’re talking about are not active. They’re passively transferring data between parts of the satellites, and they’re not generally load-bearing,” Young said. “So certification is pretty easy, as these things go.”

For several days last November, Ādaži Military Base, located outside of Riga, was temporarily turned into a 5G hub. The test involved doing medical training through virtual/augmented reality glasses, as well as training for military personnel via a VR headset, with the VR capability coming from Latvian companies.

The training happened with up to 12 miles (20 kilometers) distance between military units, Jānis Garisons, state secretary for the Latvian Ministry of Defence, told C4ISRNET. It also involved communicating with unmanned aerial vehicles at a distance.

From conception to execution took about three months, according to Ingmārs Pūķis, vice president for marketing and business development at LMT, Latvia’s largest telecommunications provider. The company set up the test bed and worked with the Ministry of Defence on the experiments.

The 5G network is based on Nokia Corp. technology, with Garisons stressing that Chinese firm Huawei Technologies Co., a major security concern for the U.S. military, was never an option considered, as a result of cybersecurity protocols passed by the government last summer requiring that all 5G components used in Latvia be produced in NATO or EU countries.

The two men declined to give a total cost for the effort, but indicated it was dramatically lower than the $600 million cost announced for five U.S. military test sites — unsurprising, given that Latvia’s annual defense budget is about 708 million euros ($830 million at current exchange rates).

The testbed was not the first 5G experiment for the Latvian government, which has mapped out a rough 5G plan for the country through 2024. Previous tests looked at whether a network handoff along the Latvian and Estonian border can be done smoothly and whether cell phones could be linked up to tactical radios to create a wider mesh network, which Pūķis called “somewhat crazy” because of its complexity.

But this was the first time a military base was used as a test site with an eye directly on 5G military capabilities, even if Pūķis described the initial round of tests as experimenting with the “low-hanging fruit” of 5G capabilities.

Garisons sees “three main directions” for 5G development in Latvia: situational awareness and early warning, communications network redundancy, and future technological developments.

Latvia is “a small country and we don’t have a lot of manpower,” Garisons said. “And through those technologies we can achieve, probably, some effects that probably otherwise we would not be able to achieve” against a stronger power.

While Garisons didn’t mention Russia by name, Atlantic Council fellow Ian Brzezinski said it makes “eminent sense” for Latvia to focus on technology like 5G as a counter to its larger neighbor.

“Technology can be a powerful a force multiplier — especially when that technology is ahead of that of the adversary,” Brzezinski said. “A country the size of Latvia bordering on Russia with the current government in Moscow needs that competitive edge.”

Future expansion

Both Latvians acknowledged they would be happy for their nation to become a key part of the NATO development of 5G systems, but discussions at this point are in the early stages.

Canada has forces stationed at Ādaži as part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence, and has expressed interest in looking further at what the Latvian government learned from the test, Garisons said. Additionally, Latvia presented its findings at a late 2020 meeting of NATO’s Communications and Information Agency.

“Latvia has offered their 5G facilities if we want to collaborate in the future,” NATO spokesperson Samantha Ehlinger confirmed to C4ISRNET, but added that the country is one of many NATO members exploring the technology.

“At this stage we are doing this work primarily for NATO’s Consultation, Command and Control (C3) Board Programme of Work, and Allied Command Transformation’s Innovation Programme of Work, but we are interested in collaborating further with Latvia to explore this topic,” Ehlinger said. “Several NATO Nations are exploring the potential to establish a combined effort on military applications of 5G, a multinational project facilitated by the Agency.

The alliance is organizing a 5G session at the upcoming International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS) in May, she added.

Garisons said that there have been initial conversations with the U.S. as well, and noted that Latvia — which, like the other Baltic nations, is always looking for an American military presence — could potentially host exercises not just around 5G but broader military training.

“I think the most interesting thing [would be] actually trying to link to networks on both sides of the Atlantic and actually trying to see: Can you can you actually operate them as one?” noted Pūķis. “Theoretically you maybe could have unit training in virtual reality, being geographically [in] different places. There are a zillion issues to be solved around this, but that would be a beautiful use case.”

“Taking a leadership role in the development and application of such technology is a great way to deepen engagement with key allies like the United States, Germany and others,” Brzezinski said. “5G is a really exciting realm, and Latvia is now leaning forward. What I’d love to see is a core group of NATO allies drive this forward — the U.S., U.K, Germany, Latvia and maybe Poland — you get a core of allies, and they start driving that onto the alliance agenda.”

Brzezinski added a suggestion that a key location, such as Ramstein Air Base in Germany, which hosts NATO’s Allied Air Command as well as American and German air force assets, should be home to a 5G bubble for further experimentation and training.

In the short term, Latvia will continue to further test 5G use for unmanned systems in the coming months. Longer term, the goal is to expand the 5G test site to a larger geographical area, although exactly what that will look like is still being worked out between the MoD and LMT. Pūķis is “hopeful” that will be set up and ready to go before the end of 2021.

“The sooner you do something practical and physical, the better — then you have experience you can build on,” Pūķis said. “Because sometimes when you make super cool, super expensive plans for many years, nothing happens for years and the world moves on. And those who do something faster usually win, rather than those who fantasize about it.”

Adm. Craig Faller, who will retire as the SOUTHCOM chief later this year, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that his command receives less than 1 percent of the Pentagon’s ISR capabilities.

While he acknowledged that every combatant command wants more ISR, Faller said he can only meet 20 percent of his current ISR needs, with the majority of that supplied through a partnership with Customs and Border Patrol, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

That lack of capability “will significantly challenge our ability to understand the threats of all types in the hemisphere. Intelligence drives everything,” Faller told lawmakers. “A significant amount of a movement of transnational criminal organizations, our understanding of what are our competitors are up to — Russia, China, Iran — a lot gets left on the table that is contributing to this violence, that’s driving instability here in the United States and in our partner nations.”

During the hearing, Sens. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., Deb Fischer, R-Neb., Angus King, I-Maine, Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., and Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., each expressed concern over a lack of ISR, which Faller indicated impacts his ability to interdict smugglers of drugs and people, as well as track activity from Cuba and Venezuela.

Inhofe, the top Republican on the committee, described SOUTHCOM’s capabilities as “not adequate,” while King indicated he will push to increase SOUTHCOM’s resourcing during budget negotiations this summer.

“That’s within our control,” King said. “That’s a matter of allocation and resources, and I hope this committee can bring some pressure on the administration to allocate adequate resources for ISR and for interdiction because we’re not even interdicting the drug shipments we know about, let alone finding ones that additional ISR could provide. So that’s something that I hope this committee can work on.”

However, increasing the Defense Department’s budget might be a challenge. The defense budget is expected to be flat, with no growth to account for inflation — a situation the Pentagon previously described as effectively a monetary cut.

After his testimony, Faller visited the Pentagon briefing room and acknowledged the budget realities may provide a challenge. “I’ll just say that prioritization is important and it’s hard, and the Pentagon has a solid process for that, and no one’s ever satisfied, given the global threats and demands on the level of resources to do our job.”

Faller noted that SOUTHCOM is particularly interested in “21st century tradecraft,” or nontraditional ISR — capabilities that are less about aircraft in the sky and more about using software in smarter ways.

When “we think about ISR, we think about big wing stuff — P-8s and big MQ-9 drones. That’s important, but also important that we leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning for all the data that’s out there, that’s available in the open source,” Faller said. “We’ve had a couple pilot programs in the past year that if converted to programs of record or were embraced more broadly show great promise, as we think about data and information to build the kind of all-domain awareness that we need.”

Asked specifically if that means the regional command doesn’t need hardware in the sky, Faller was quick to says physical assets are still important.

“We’ve got to have the right balance going forward, and there is a role for manned platforms and unmanned platforms in addition to using data in the information space. We did get a slight increase [in assets] last year, in response to the transnational criminal organization threat. We think that that modest increase is important to sustain going forward.”

Dan Gelston, who took over CAE’s defense and security business unit in August 2020, told Defense News that his team is also looking to partner with defense primes during the early stages of new competitions, a shift which could require CAE investing in research and engineering efforts.

Over the last two decades, CAE was “very focused” on traditional platforms, particularly planes and unmanned aerial vehicles, Gelston said. Now, he expects the future of the company to involve “a real focus on space and cyber, not only for that customer, but also for CAE. And those are areas that we need to augment our capabilities to make sure that we’re providing the best product, the best service to help our customers.”

The full interview will air as part of CAE’s OneWorld event Feb. 9.

CAE reported just over $1 billion in defense revenues in 2019, which made it the highest-ranked Canadian company on the annual Defense News Top 100 list. Currently, Gelston’s unit makes up about 40 percent of the company’s overall business, but he sees a chance to hit a “much larger” market going forward.

Gelston’s plan includes increasing the “security” part of the company’s “defense and security” portfolio by aggressively pursuing contracts for government agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration. This would competing for what he describes as a “multi-hundred-million dollar opportunity with TSA here in the next few months” for training security forces for airports.

“With space assets ability to target, with cyber assets ability to attack anywhere and everywhere, it’s not just the Pentagon, it’s critical infrastructure, it’s a lot of what we traditionally have separated into DHS. So that security element is crucial,” he said.

“We could really bring a lot of our research and development, our capabilities in machine learning and AI and virtual reality and augmented learning management systems” to DHS, which “you could categorize a little more of a traditional time phased approach to training.”

As the company seeks to expand into the non-defense security realm, Gelston said the company is keeping an eye out for potential merger and acquisition options, saying “I certainly would like to think in the next 18 to 24 months a property would come along, that’s particularly attractive to me.”

2020 was a rocky year for CAE, which was hit particularly hard given its ties to the commercial aviation space. But the company worked quickly to shave costs, and toward the end of the year issued a public offering, with the goal of raising roughly $2 billion Canadian ($1.56 bn American). The plan, as Gelston said, was to have enough “dry powder to make sure that we’re coming out leaning forward out of the COVID crisis. We don’t want to be hunkering down just trying to survive. We want to take advantage of this.”

While not discussing specifics, Gelston emphasized that “I’d love to get a little more robust training capability in the cyber realm… that’s an area that that I can certainly see augmenting with potential acquisition here in the next 18 to 24 months if the right property comes along, I think we would be positioned to potentially pursue that.”

Teaming with defense manufacturers

That focus on new areas doesn’t mean the company is turning away from traditional defense projects, but it does come with a greater focus on teaming up with prime contractors early in the process to offer the DoD and other customers a package solution from the start, as opposed to bidding on training and simulation contracts after a design has been selected.

He pointed to the surprise rapid test-flight of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) demonstrator from last September as an example of how defense acquisition is speeding up.

“Our defense acquisition officials are really looking for skin in the game from industry” early on, he said. “We don’t have the time for the classic cost-plus development work, years and years and multiple phases” of a project.

“No company, even the big OEMs, have unlimited research and development budgets. No company, even Lockheed Martin, has unlimited engineering assets,” he continued. “So if I can partner with these OEMs on these major next generation platforms now and start co developing as they develop the platform, I’m codeveloping the training in the simulation experience, and sharing some of that burden, adding skin into the game for research and development engineering — It’s not just money, it’s also time, and time, arguably right now is our is our biggest enemy — I can really help those OEMs and give them a true discriminator in their offering.”

“And certainly at the end, that international or us customer is going to be much better off as they’ve got a fully baked, fully integrated training and simulation solution with that new platform.”

In addition to looking into NGAD, Gelston said the company plans to pursue nearer-term contracts related to the F-35 joint strike fighter, MQ-9B drone, and the Army’s Future Vertical Lift competition, while also continuing ongoing efforts like its C-130H business, which was awarded in 2018.

The Pentagon’s decision comes despite industry’s concerns about the functionality of a key aviation technology, which led to a Dec. 1 memo from the head of the Federal Aviation Administration and the number two at the Department of Transportation requesting the FCC pause the sale. The letter was sent after an aviation trade group found that 5G operations could cause harmful interference to radar altimeters, which are used by civil, military and commercial airplanes and helicopters to measure the distance between the aircraft and the ground.

But rather than push back at the FCC, Pentagon officials believe their energies are best spent focused on studying how the deployment of 5G networks throughout U.S. metropolitan areas will impact military aircraft and putting in place a strategy to mitigate any safety concerns, said Alan Burke, the Pentagon’s chair for the interagency Aviation Cyber Initiative Task Force.

“The approach should be not on trying to slow down 5G metro deployment, but speeding up development and testing of mitigations that can serve as an interim gap until avionics manufacturers can harden their systems,” Burke said during a Jan. 7 interview.

“The longer-term challenge is going to be making — not just radar altimeters — but avionics systems that are resilient to out-of-band interference, understanding what that interference is and what mitigations are required.”

As part of the Trump administration’s 5G FAST Plan, the FCC hopes to sell more than 5,000 new flexible-use overlay licenses for C-band spectrum in the 3.7–3.98 GHz frequency. The first phase of the auction, which ran from Dec. 8 to Jan. 15, received bids totaling $80.9 billion and has been billed as the highest-grossing auction of its kind in U.S. history.

“The FCC confronted a host of technical, legal, practical, and political challenges in structuring this auction,” outgoing FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement. “It would have been easy to delay. But we rightly pushed ahead and overcame every one of those obstacles. As a result, we significantly advanced United States leadership in 5G and have enabled America’s wireless consumers to more quickly benefit from 5G services.”

But testing has shown that 5G activities in the 3.7-3.98 portion of the band could create “harmful interference” for radar altimeters, which operate in the neighboring 4.2-4.4 GHz portion of the band, according to an October study by RTCA, a trade organization that works with the FAA to develop safety standards.

Although RTCA looked only at radar altimeters on commercial and civil aircraft, military aircraft altimeters operate on the same part of the spectrum and could be similarly vulnerable to interference, Burke said.

Defense Department officials including Burke met with leaders from the FAA, Department of Homeland Security and other stakeholder agencies on Dec. 21 to discuss the issue.

During the meeting, defense officials said representatives from Honeywell — a top supplier of radar altimeters and one of the companies who conducted research for the RTCA report — presented their findings and recommended that further testing be done for military radar altimeters. Honeywell declined to comment for this story.

The immediate problem, Burke said, is that the Defense Department does not yet have a test range capable of evaluating how 5G telecommunications impact military-specific avionic equipment like radar altimeters.

“We’re working to establish a collaborative interagency approach,” Burke said. “And that includes [establishing] a national 5G operational test range. If we wanted to do operational testing of our radar altimeters in a 5G C band environment, we don’t have the capability to do that right now. And so that’s a shortfall that we want to work to address.”

The Pentagon sees that testing as an important bargaining chip for future discussions with the FCC, which has rejected the findings of the RTCA study as being overly stringent and not representative of operational scenarios.

“If we want to improve on our ability to negotiate with the FCC, we have to back it up with facts — facts based on operational testing. I think the operational testing component is very important to improve our ability to make our case,” Burke said. “Simulations aren’t adequate.”

The road ahead

Several organizations are already building 5G test capabilities that could allow the Pentagon to do some level of assessment, including Hill Air Force Base in Utah, Idaho National Laboratory and the University of Utah.

Defense Department leaders hope to work with officials across the government to “identify what effort has the best chance of success” of supporting operational testing. The department would then have to divert funding to speed up the establishment of the range to and to conduct test activities, with the hope of completing an initial assessment in 12 to 18 months, Burke said.

Military aviation officials have told Defense News that the operations of cargo planes and aerial refueling tankers would be the most impacted by 5G interference. Certain mobility planes are approved to make landings during “instrument landing conditions,” or weather scenarios where there is poor visibility and a pilot has to rely on instruments like the radar altimeter instead of visual cues.

But if an aircraft’s altimeter is not working due to interference, that pilot would likely have to land elsewhere.

Most military radar altimeters have built-in protections for high powered microwave and high intensity radiation frequencies, but right now the aviation community does not understand whether those defenses might safeguard against 5G interference, Burke said.

Once the department understands the operational impact of 5G on its aircraft, it may have to take steps to address aviation safety concerns.

Currently, the Pentagon is not discussing the wholesale replacement of its radar altimeters or the movement of devices to another portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, said Burke and Col. Ken Miller, who commands the Air Force Spectrum Management Office.

Instead, the department is looking at options such as designating “airfield operational exclusion zones” that block out 5G interference near airports in metropolitan areas, where interference would be the most dense and potentially harmful.

Another mitigation approach is the use of filters to harden radar altimeters against interference.

“Radar altimeters already have certain filters on them,” Burke said. “It’s unknown how effective they would be at filtering this interference. We haven’t really gone too far down the technical lane here, but we do know that those kind of things are possible.”

However, another senior government official pointed out that such measures could reduce the accuracy of the altimeter.

“If you have a very high precision radar altimeter that’s looking at a very wide bandwidth and has no filter, and you’ve got to add a filter, that adds size, weight [and] power requirements and reduces performance,” the source said.

Further out, the Defense Department will likely need to introduce new industrial standards so that future radar altimeter designs are more tolerant of interference that occurs due to devices operating on a neighboring portion of the electromagnetic spectrum — a situation that is becoming more prevalent with the rise of 5G.

“The paradigm in general is we test the devices to make sure that they’re transmitting in their assigned bands and operating in their assigned bands. What we normally haven’t been testing for is what we call out-of-band interference,” Burke said.

“People are going to have to adapt to that. On the spectrum highway, we want to be able to use all the lanes, and people can’t be bandwidth hogs because of their device designs. They’re going to have to relook at the design of devices to be more spectrum resilient.”

Ellen Lord, who will exit office at noon on Wednesday as the Trump administration comes to a close, told a group of reporters that despite reported pressures and public statements from the president, Trump’s influence on defense acquisition programs was extremely small.

In 2017, Trump claimed that he had personally shaved a billion dollars in costs off the plane, something the White House later walked back to merely “millions” in savings. In the end, Trump’s influence was largely cosmetic, Lord said.

“The president had a lot of interest on a few programs. I don’t think he influenced the programmatics,” Lord said. “What he was interested in was the presidential aircraft. I was in the Oval for a meeting on that. But he, frankly, was focused on performance and the look of the aircraft, the color scheme and so forth.”

Trump’s focus on changing the color scheme for the Air Force One replacement began in 2018 with the president seeking to alter the traditional baby blue color scheme, in use since the administration of John F. Kennedy, with a replacement scheme more in line with the American flag he floated as a proposal.

Lord added that the AF1 replacement program is “executing well,” but deferred to the Air Force for more details.

The JEDI contract, seen as the backbone of the department’s move into cloud computing, has been dogged by allegations of influence by the president. Potentially worth $10 billion over 10 years, the contract was awarded to Microsoft in October 2019. Amazon protested the award in the Court of Federal Claims and won a temporary restraining order in March preventing the DoD and Microsoft from building out the cloud infrastructure after the court decided that Amazon Web Services was likely to show that DoD erred in its technical evaluation.

As part of its protest, Amazon collected a list of statements Trump had made about Bezos or the contract directly. But asked if she saw any presidential influence in the JEDI contract, Lord answered simply, “no,” a rare monosyllabic answer from the outgoing official.

Lord also did not address whether Trump influenced the F-35 in any way. Even before taking office, Trump targeted the stealth fighter in a way highly unusual for a president, tweeting as president-elect that costs on the plane were “out of control.” Trump also began directly calling the then-head of the F-35 program, Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, directly, an unprecedented level of direct contact between a program manager and the commander in chief. And as recently as May, Trump publicly questioned the fighter’s production strategy of having parts made by international partners, a key design on the F-35 program.

Lord was the rare long-serving political appointee at the Trump Pentagon, having joined the department in 2017. A former industry executive, she said that she has no immediate plans for the future aside from “catch up on some sleep and reintroduce myself to family and friends, and then I’ll decide what’s next.”

Andrew Eversden with C4ISRNET contributed to this report.

Flournoy introduced Biden, praising him as a national security thinker and noting the ties between his staff at the White House and CNAS. Biden, in turn, acknowledged the little-kept secret of the defense world: that Flournoy was in line to become the first woman to serve as defense secretary under President Hillary Clinton.

“Well, madam secretary,” Biden said with a laugh as the crowd applauded. “I’m writing a recommendation for her, you know.”

The Clinton administration never materialized, following the election of President Donald Trump. But four years later, president-elect Biden is widely expected to fulfill his promise and tap Flournoy to lead the U.S. military.

Some observers have suggested that if Susan Rice, the former national security adviser to President Barack Obama and a close confidant of Biden, seeks the Pentagon’s top job, she would be heavily considered, but there are few signs she wants that position. Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Iraq War combat veteran, is another name that has been mentioned as a possibility, and other names will inevitably pop up in the coming weeks.

But for months, Flournoy has appeared to be the closest thing to a shoo-in as possible.

“Michèle Flournoy would be a solid choice as defense secretary,” said Kori Schake, a former national security official in the Bush administration, now with the American Enterprise Institute. “She’s a fine leader, knows the building and the issues, has an agenda that’s both congenial for the defense establishment and also likely to improve it.”

Flournoy’s career at the Pentagon launched under the administration of President Bill Clinton, where she served as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction, and then deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. Later, she spent several years at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

The 2007 decision to launch CNAS, a bipartisan think tank focused on the future of national security, raised Flournoy’s visibility in the defense community and led to a role on Obama’s transition team for the Department of Defense. (Editor’s note: the author was part of a 2017 CNAS fellowship program.)

That in turn led to her confirmation in 2009 as undersecretary of defense for policy, seen by many as the third most powerful civilian role in the department. There, she helped craft the plans for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and was seen as a major driver of the counterinsurgency strategy.

Flournoy left the administration in 2012, joining a few corporate boards before returning to CNAS as chief executive officer. In between, she was three times in conversations to take senior Pentagon jobs.

She was seen as the Obama administration’s top pick to replace Chuck Hagel as defense secretary in 2014, but withdrew her name due to family concerns; the job eventually went to Ash Carter. The Clinton speculation followed. In addition, then-incoming Defense Secretary Jim Mattis reached out to her about becoming his deputy at the start of the Trump administration.

Following the outcome of the 2016 election, Flournoy stepped down from running the think tank and launched WestExec Advisors, a strategic risk consultancy group alongside Antony Blinken, a former national security adviser to then-Vice President Biden. Blinken has been a senior adviser to Biden during the presidential campaign and, like Flournoy, is expected to land a top job should Biden win the race, perhaps as Secretary of State or national security adviser.

The WestExec team is rounded out by more than a dozen individuals who held positions at the State Department, the DoD or the National Security Council during the Obama administration. Among them is Ely Ratner, who perhaps best personifies the Flournoy-Biden connection: Ratner was a CNAS fellow who joined the Obama administration, became Biden’s deputy national security adviser, then returned to CNAS as director of studies. He is also expected to take a role in a new Biden administration.

“She leads by taking people on a journey with her rather than giving edicts, but she’s also strong and direct when needed” a source who previously worked under Flournoy told Defense News. “She knows how to lead and communicate in the building: deliver a core message over and over until everybody gets it and starts working to that message.”

Asked how Flournoy would deal with people not falling in line, the former employee said: “People would be too embarrassed to let that happen. No one wants to be the person to let Michèle down.”

This respect from throughout the defense community would likely lead to a fairly smooth confirmation hearing. The toughest questions could come from progressives over her business dealings while at WestExec. A July feature on the firm in The American Prospect cast the group as cashing in on ties formed during government service, although WestExec does not accept funding from foreign governments.

But what would a Flournoy-led Defense Department look like?

Because she has been viewed as a potential secretary for so long, her writing and speeches have received extra scrutiny as a way to draw conclusions about her potential time at the helm.

Generally, the national security community does not expect Flournoy to upend the Pentagon. She has personal relationships with many of the top officials in the department. In addition, her broad approaches to geopolitical issues — including a belief that China represents the biggest long-term security threat to America — fits into the traditional defense orthodoxy.

However, she would look to make changes, as every secretary does. In September, Flournoy sat down with Defense News for an hour-long exclusive interview, covering a range of topics from acquisition policy to her thoughts on North Korea.

Based on that conversation and other speaking engagements in recent months, here are five areas that would serve as priorities:

She wants “big bets” on technology. In several interviews over the past year, Flournoy has talked about needing to invest in “big bets” for future defense technologies. Two areas in which she’s heavily focused: a “network of networks” to ensure reliable command and control even when facing advanced foes, and an increased focus on unmanned systems augmented by artificial intelligence.

If those sound like efforts already well underway at the Pentagon, that’s because they are. Flournoy acknowledged the department has been working on those areas for several years, most notably with its push for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2. (The effort was most recently referred to as JADC2.) But she is less impressed with the funding for those initiatives to date.

“We’re talking the talk, but where is that substantial commitment of multiyear funding? That’s, I think, something we need to work towards,” she said.

To supplement those long-term investments, Flournoy wants more near-term repurposing of available technology. One example she offered is to place Navy long-range munitions onto Air Force bombers.

Notably, she called out by name the work done by the Strategic Capabilities Office — whose mission is to find new applications for existing weaponry — as a model that had some success; it’s possible that office, which lost power inside the department in the last three years, would see a resurgence under her leadership.

But those bets have to come with retiring legacy equipment. Big ideas don’t come cheap, and the consensus in Washington is that defense budgets are going to be flat at best, if not significantly shrink. Hence, Flournoy said, something must go. But this scaling back may not look like attempts to retire whole systems seen in the last decade.

“There are probably very few cases where you’re talking about a whole-scale divestment,” she said. Instead, she explained, the focus should be on when the DoD can decide to stop buying more, and then use those saved funds to invest in future capabilities and to enhance existing capacity.

However, just because a decision might be made to stop buying more of a specific ship or plane, that doesn’t mean the department should get rid of what is already in its inventory. “To me, it’s the kind of ‘knee [of] the curve’ more than whole-sale dramatic cancellations across the board,” Flournoy said.

Divesting anything requires Congress’ approval, a famously difficult task. Flournoy, however, expressed confidence that lawmakers can be convinced an action is a good idea if the department improves its approach by reaching out early and involving members in the discussions from the start.

“We have got to bring people inside the tent,” she said, echoing an idea she published in an April op-ed that called for Congress to get more involved in new technological discussions at an early stage in order to develop buy-in at the start of a prototyping process.

She wants to reset the civilian-military relationship in the building. Flournoy has been vocal since the end of the Obama administration about the balance between the civilian staff in the Office of the Secretary of Defense staff and the uniformed Joint Staff, arguing that it has become off kilter. On paper, OSD is supposed to drive the policy with inputs from the Joint Staff; in reality, there has been a slide toward the Joint Staff pushing policy, which was exacerbated under Mattis, a former Marine Corps general who relied more on the uniformed officials than civilians.

Expect Flournoy to challenge that status quo if she became secretary. When she was undersecretary for policy, she had the backing of then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates to wield the power of her office as needed. Expect her to attempt to empower those in OSD to do the same.

“The key on the civilian side is there’s a huge rebuilding to be done. You’ve got to bring in a really talented team, you’ve got to invest in your human capital and that civilian workforce, and you’ve got to have some stability,” she said. “I do believe that can be corrected with the right vision and leadership.”

More broadly, Flournoy would seek to reestablish the American military’s political neutrality following Trump’s moves to tie himself closely to what he has called “my military.”

“The next president, commander in chief, has to take pains to reset … to ensure that the military is treated and respected as an apolitical institution, that it’s understood that they take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not a particular president, not a particular person, not a particular party,” she said.

Expect a continued hard line on China. Perhaps the most cohesive foreign policy stance across the Trump administration was its focus on China as America’s top competitor. It’s an idea Flournoy has embraced fully for several years, and she has repeatedly talked about the need to deter China from taking action in the Asia-Pacific region.

“We have to have enough of an edge, that first and foremost we can deter China from attacking or endangering our vital interests and our allies. That means resolve,” Flournoy said.

At the same time, she wants a change from the “myopic” way the Trump administration has viewed the Sino-U.S. relationship, with no room for coordination on issues of joint interest. “There are a whole set of threats, whether it’s preventing the next pandemic, or dealing with climate change, or dealing with North Korean nuclear proliferation where, like it or not, we have to deal with China as a partner or we cannot solve the problem,” she said.

She added that America’s best asset in the region is the other nations who can jointly pressure Beijing.

Nuclear modernization plans may change. Flournoy’s desire for a strong deterrent for China includes a nuclear deterrent. But given the costs of the ongoing nuclear modernization strategy, Flournoy wants to consider all options.

“The question in my mind is: Are there ways to modernize the deterrent to keep it safe and effective at lower costs? Are there more cost-effective approaches? And I think that’s probably the kind of core question for the next Nuclear Posture Review. Yes, we need to keep the deterrent safe and effective. There are some key programs like in the submarine area that do need to be recapitalized,” she said, adding that she wants “creative ways that we can approach this” to get costs down.

Flournoy specifically questioned the need for a new nuclear warhead in the earliest stages of development by the Trump administration, calling herself a “skeptic” on the topic.

“I need to be convinced on that because … I’m not sure I buy the strategic rationale for it. And certainly from a cost perspective, is that the highest priority for nuclear modernization? Is that the highest priority when competed against the full range of defense modernization? I’m not sure it passes the test,” she said.

Flournoy also cast strong support for renewing the New START nuclear pact and said that a nuclear weapons budget that cuts across all the services may be something worth pursuing.

Updated 11/9/20 at 8:37 AM EST to clarify that WestExec does not accept funding from government clients.