The system is called the Arctic Over-The-Horizon Radar (A-OTHR), and the deal is worth some US$1.75 billion to Australia.

Gordon Frazer – Founder and CEO of the Australia-based HF radar technical services company FrazerLab – told Defense News Canada’s decision would fill an urgent need.

“I used to say to people, you could fly a jumbo jet from Beijing to Canberra if it had its transponders off and no one would know,” he said, arguing the same is likely true for Canada.

“Russia could fly a Tu-95 from one of their bases, Engels Air Base or something like that, to Canada and possibly no one would know.”

He added, “That’s why NORAD is so concerned, and why they’ve been pushing so hard to get this sort of technology done.”

Frazer was formerly an engineer involved in Australia’s OTHR program known as the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN).

Expanded surveillance coverage

While NORAD maintains the North Warning System, a line of microwave radars in Canada’s frozen north, Frazer said it would be “almost a trivial problem to defeat it” by flying at low altitude between these known and stationary radar sites.

Instead, because OTHR bounces high-frequency signals off the ionosphere, it can look down on airborne targets — and sometimes even surface vessels — with ease, including aircraft and missiles.

An over-the-horizon radar results in radar coverage stretching far beyond what traditional line-of-sight radars can achieve due to the curvature of the Earth.

With its particular A-OTHR contract, BAE Systems Australia will transfer technology and expertise for Canada to build its own OTHR radar sites to monitor its periphery. Officially, Canberra says JORN can detect targets 3,000 kilometers (1,700 miles) away, but its capability almost certainly reaches far beyond that.

Ottawa stated in a press release: “The signing formalizes Canada’s partnership with Australia and enables the delivery of Australia’s proven OTHR technology in support of Canada’s A-OTHR program. It marks a major milestone in the program, transitioning A-OTHR from the planning phase into delivery phase.”

Natural challenges

Canada has already been researching the application of OTHRs in its north, where environmental and solar conditions are far different than they are in Australia.

Furthermore, significant differences exist between operating OTHRs in equatorial, mid-latitude, high-latitude and polar areas. Frazer pointed out that Canada, despite the “Arctic” in the A-OTHR nomenclature, is actually buying a high-latitude system.

Polar regions present even more complicated challenges for OTHRs due to the Earth’s magnetic field, which creates serious background clutter. In fact, some 40% of Canadian territory lies above the Arctic Circle.

Although it may sound counterintuitive, Frazer said Canada’s A-OTHR radar facilities would be built as far south as possible. This is in order to bounce radar signals off the ionosphere ahead of the zone where the worst distortion occurs.

However, Canada will also have the future opportunity to expand its OTHR network with trans-polar coverage, which would allow it to see deep into Russia.

Positioned thus, the technology could enable NORAD to see Russian strategic bombers taking off or ballistic missiles being launched, for example.

If Canada does seek transpolar radar coverage, it would likely want to place those radar installations as far north as possible, Frazer explained.

Australia has three JORN radar sites, but it is unclear how many sites Canada will establish. In North America, Frazer expects the Pacific west coast will be covered by an American system, the Atlantic east coast will be covered by Canada, and then an additional system can cover the north. If NORAD wants 360-degree coverage, Frazer suggested five or six radar installations would be needed.

Australian expertise

Craig Lockhart, CEO of BAE Systems Australia, said: “Canada’s acquisition of a cutting-edge Australian OTHR system supports the strategic interests of both nations through enhanced detection and tracking of threats to North America, strengthening Five Eyes situational awareness.”

Frazer said Australia developed world-leading OTHR talent “because of multi-generational consistency” in its investment in the technology.

The New Zealand-born engineer pointed out that around 15% of the cost of OTHR technology sits in equipment to inform human operators how to set the radar’s parameters to account for constantly changing atmospheric conditions.

Frazer highlighted that OTHRs are bespoke, national systems built only once per generation. However, he hopes the Canadian deal will benefit both countries.

“I think you’re starting to get the critical mass of being able to keep the technology pipeline from design to sustainment to upgrade to far-reaching tech.”

Because over-the-horizon radar coverage can vary drastically due to solar conditions, other methods help plug surveillance gaps.

Airborne early-warning aircraft, for example, are complementary to OTHR. In May, Canada selected Saab’s GlobalEye as its future airborne early-warning platform.

Canada expects its A-OTHR to reach an initial operational capability by December 2029.

“We’ve been very, very selective on getting not only the right talent, but the right personalities that understand how to go fast,” Guetlein said Tuesday at the Innovate Space Global Economic Summit in Arlington, Virginia. “Not everybody understands what it takes to move at that speed.”

Previously the Space Force’s second in command, Guetlein was confirmed last week for this role, officially assuming the position Monday. As a direct report to Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, he has a slew of authorities designed to speed up decision-making and capability delivery, including the ability to bypass standard competitive hiring procedures that can slow down the process.

Guetlein said he has a long way to go in building his team but has a list of 30 names, identified from across industry and academia that he hopes will join the effort.

Along with filling out his program office, Guetlein is also pulling together a national-level consortium that includes companies, labs and universities to serve both as capability providers and technical advisers for the effort.

Since President Donald Trump announced plans to develop Golden Dome during his first week in office, the Pentagon has been working to identify a path forward – studying capability options, understanding the industry landscape and getting a sense of the feasibility of crafting a layered missile defense capability that brings together ground, air and space sensors and interceptors.

In May, Trump added another challenge to the project, announcing during a televised Oval Office meeting that he expects Golden Dome to be completed by 2028 at a price tag of $175 billion.

“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they’re launched from space. And we will have the best system ever built,” Trump said at the time.

With Guetlein in place and starting to populate the newly established program office, one of his early tasks is to craft a vision for what the Golden Dome architecture will include and deliver it to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth within 60 days.

To further lay the groundwork and provide context for the 60-day study, Guetlein will travel to U.S. Northern Command on Thursday to discuss current gaps in the current homeland defense architecture with its commander Gen. Gregory Guillot and U.S. Space Command head, Gen. Stephen Whiting.

Guetlein said those gaps will help inform the size of the Golden Dome architecture, the scope of his organization and the capabilities needed to counter future threats.

The office is also planning several engagements with companies vying to support the effort, including a long-awaited Missile Defense Agency that was slated to happen in June but was delayed by Guetlein’s confirmation process.

Space Systems Command will also host an industry session focused on options for developing and fielding interceptors that can destroy missile threats from space. That part of the architecture, Guetlein said, presents the greatest technical challenge, noting that while the capabilities exist and have been proven, there are looming questions about the number of interceptors that will be required and at what cost.

“What we have not proven is, first, can I do it economically, and then second, can I do it at scale?” he said. “Can I build enough satellites to get after the threat? Can I expand the industrial base fast enough to build those satellites? Do I have enough raw materials, etc?”

While those questions will likely take some time to answer, Guetlein said a more near-term task will be integrating various systems from across the military services into a common command-and-control architecture. That includes sensors, weapons and communication channels that need to work together, he said.

To get after that challenge, Guetlein plans to schedule incremental demonstrations on a six-month cadence with a goal of delivering capability as soon as possible.

“We are on a short timeline,” he said. “The president gave us three years to deliver this capability and we’re going to deliver in three years. That means we need to move out with a sense of urgency and move out with incremental wins along the way.”

The event — one of the Army’s premier experimentation series — brought together the U.S. military services and international partners like Australia and the United Kingdom to test new software, connectivity tools and user interfaces.

The results were unprecedented, according to Army officials, who said the experiment demonstrated the ability to share vast amounts of data at previously unheard-of rates.

But for all its success, the exercise lacked an important dose of realism: a degraded network.

“We ran it on a network that was essentially pristine and was not representative of what would maybe be in the field, an austere environment,” Joseph Welch, acting deputy to the commanding general of Army Futures Command, told Defense News in a recent interview.

Through a series of experiments this summer and fall known as NetModX, the Army sought to wring out some of those capabilities in conditions that posed a greater challenge to its network operations. This year’s exercise was hosted at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst near New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, where connectivity is easily thwarted by rolling hills and thick tree lines.

Starting in July, the Army’s C5ISR Center — short for command, control, communications, computers, cyber and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — posted up at the base for more than three months. Leading up to the event, the center invited scientists, engineers and industry to propose lab-developed capabilities that they wanted to test in a real-world environment.

Seth Spoenlein, assistant director for systems integration at the C5ISR Center, told Defense News during a visit to NetModX in late September that the experiment has two broad goals: to mature technology — or as he said, “kick the tires” — and see how it performs when integrated with other capabilities. This year, the event featured about 100 technologies from more than 50 organizations, with projects ranging from science and technology efforts that hadn’t seen the outside of a lab to more field-ready systems.

Throughout the demonstrations, Army officials and program managers had a chance to observe the capabilities in action and collect data to inform future requirements and acquisition decisions.

This year’s event showcased technology that could inform the Army’s strategy for Next-Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, one of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s top modernization priorities, Welch said. The service’s fiscal 2025 budget included $2.7 billion for the effort.

The vision for NGC2 is to upgrade everything from user devices and applications to computing infrastructure to the underlying network. Whereas Project Convergence tested the data integration and application layers, Welch said, the experimentation at NetModX focused on how the network and compute aspects support those higher-level functions. It’s also exploring how the entire NGC2 tech stack works together.

“What I see as an outcome of this is, now we are better understanding where those technical challenges are,” he said. “They’re solving some of them right here in the field, but we’re also learning about things we may need to require.”

Network experimentation

During the event, soldiers and representatives from a slew of commercial companies spread out across the base’s Range 86 to experiment with technologies that could allow the Army to shrink the size of its command posts, better manage electronic signatures and navigate its network in less-than-ideal conditions.

In one area, a team from Virginia-based Research Innovations, Inc., served as a red cell, using an advanced edge computing sensor to continuously map electronic signatures, challenging nearby units to reduce their footprint or try to confuse the simulated adversary.

That experimentation could feed into the Army’s Mobile and Survivable Command Post program, or MASCP. The service plans to launch a pilot program in 2025, but for now, it’s using events like NetModX to figure out what user devices, computing infrastructure, software and signature management tools could help make its command posts more nimble.

A team led by RJ Regars, the Army’s project lead for MASCP, installed 22 different technologies into command post vehicles during NetModX — the most it’s integrated to date by far, Regars said.

“Leading up to this, there’s been a lot of work identifying technologies, working with those technologies in the lab, working with these technologies in a standalone fashion with the end goal of getting them all into vehicles and interoperating with them,” he said. “Not everything worked, but a lot did work, and we definitely had a great learning experience from it.”

Elsewhere on Range 86, vehicles equipped with satellite terminals from several different providers allowed the service to see how the network adapts when a connection is interrupted or broken.

The service has struggled with how to move and reroute data within different echelons of its communications, or transport, architecture, said Col. Matt Skaggs, director of tactical application and architecture development for Army Futures Command. At NetModX, the command experimented with capabilities that bring redundancy into its network, allowing it to do that more seamlessly.

“It’s a reactive and redundant network,” he said in an interview. “We call it comms agnostic. If one pathway is blocked, that system will automatically find another pathway.”

Along with testing out the transport architecture, the experiment also helped identify which “bespoke” applications put too much strain on the network.

“We learned that we had to dial back the resource requirements on these web applications and make it thinner so they work on the tactical network,” Skaggs said. “If we hadn’t had this experimentation event, we would have been way further down the acquisition pipeline before we learned these kinds of lessons.”

Building a network baseline

The Army’s experimentation at NetModX is just one piece of its broader NGC2 effort. The service has been on a path toward modernizing its network for the last six years, narrowing its focus last year on an acquisition approach that delivers capabilities iteratively rather than aiming to field a complete package of upgrades all at once.

Skaggs likened the Army’s strategy for NGC2 to laying a new foundation for integrating data. Once that foundation is set, the service can then bring on new applications and tools that build on it.

“We push out a baseline product, the soldiers touch it and use it in their mission command application and we’ll continually modify it,” he said. “So, it’s constantly evolving and constantly getting updated.”

In May, the Army signed off on a “characteristics of need” for NGC2 and on Oct. 1 it issued a request for information to industry. The service plans to feed its learnings from NetModX into its next Project Convergence capstone, which is slated for March 2025. A minimum viable product should be finalized later that year and the service could start fielding NGC2 capabilities as soon as 2026.

An experiment like NetModX is crucial in that process because it puts NGC2 technology in context, allowing the service to consider “the art of the possible” as it writes requirements and issues acquisition plans, Welch said.

“There are a lot of products out there — brochures, slick sheets, endorsements, what have you,” he said. “We’re separating out what really works and what doesn’t.”

Deployed brigades will need to establish their networks quickly, work seamlessly with partner or ally networks and toggle between multiple options — from 5G to low-earth-orbit satellites — to maintain connectivity, officials said.

Some of that is already being done with the rotation of 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, at the Joint Readiness Training Center, or JRTC, at Fort Johnson, Louisiana.

Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, director of the Army Futures Command Cross Functional Team-Network, and Mark Kitz, program executive officer for the Army’s command, control and communications-tactical at Aberdeen Proving Ground, laid out work on both the current and future tactical communications network Wednesday at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association TechNet event in Augusta, Georgia.

Ellis noted the four priorities for the Army’s network — survivability, interoperability, data-enabled and modular — are reflected in current training and experimentation.

The two-star observed this firsthand as deputy chief of staff for U.S. Army Europe and Africa. During his tenure, eight division staffs rotated through the theater to support operations in Ukraine, each bringing their own equipment and communications and configurations and quickly learning what worked.

As conditions changed, so did their approaches.

For example, early in the war, any use of a mobile phone would get the user killed. But now, mobile phones on the correct networks are the only way to “hide” in the electromagnetic spectrum, Ellis said. If a user keys up on any military network, the Russian military will strike nearly instantaneously.

A tool developed through network experimentation in Europe is now being used across the globe, Ellis said. Using radio data over an Internet protocol-style tool built by the 2nd Cavalry Regiment allowed users to speak English into the radio and have it translated to text in the target language on the other end.

Another change, Ellis noted, is that allies are investing in their own networks, defensive communications and protocols. So, instead of allies simply showing up with a device and jacking into the U.S. network, many now want to use their own networks, which requires further coordination.

“We’ve not been able to solve that yet,” Ellis said.

The Army’s C2 Fix program focuses on the current state of Army command and control systems. The Next Generation C2 may modify aspects of future communications architecture, Ellis and Kitz said.

Kitz said the Army expects the industry to have the opportunity to compete for the Next Generation C2 program by early 2026.

The 2nd Brigade rotation involved an air assault from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Fort Johnson, Louisiana, across nearly 500 miles, Kitz said. The unit maintained constant connectivity by using a combination of 5G commercial technology, satellite communication and tactical radios.

Beyond maintaining continuity, commanders are now able to leverage the vast troves of data the C2 program is putting at their fingertips, Kitz said.

This capability allows commanders to pull in live data from their own units along with adversary location, terrain, environment, weather history and doctrinal approach to query data.

“If I commit the reserve, what does this do to me three days from now?” Kitz said as an example. “If I move my fire support coordination line back, what does that do to my consumption rates?”

By running operational models quickly, a commander can more effectively evaluate an approach to mission sets or tactical problems, Kitz said.

“This allows the commander to look at this in real time,” Kitz said.

A basic awareness of the communications landscape is influencing commanders’ decisions, he said. For example, the brigade commander at JRTC brought a “whole bunch of (radio frequency) decoys” to conceal his command post.

Final details for restructuring the battalions came after years of merging job specialties in signal fields.

Army Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff for Army G6, which implements command, control, communications and cyber for the force, shared this update Tuesday at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association TechNet event in Augusta, Georgia.

While details of the restructuring are still being reviewed prior to approval, Morrison said the changes will pull resources to the division level to handle network-centered problems. The move is expected to free up signal soldiers for more unit-level work within the brigades.

As the Army focused its deployments on brigades over the past few decades, the headquarters and supporting units for those brigades ballooned. That meant brigades were both running the fight and trying to analyze what would come next in the battle plan.

But senior leaders, Morrison said, expect a large-scale combat operation to move faster than a brigade can analyze.

“We want brigades moving and fighting,” Morrison said.

The Army announced its big-picture force structure transformation in a February white paper, Army Times previously reported. That outline shows reducing authorized troop levels down to 470,000 within the next five years.

The Army is expected to cut positions to reach that lower number; the service previously sought to fill out a 500,000-soldier Army through a challenging recruiting climate.

Coinciding with the Army’s plans to make those cuts, the service also expects to add up to 7,500 new positions — mostly in air defense jobs and other high priority formations.

As far back as 2019, new tools began reshaping the look and feel of signal battalions. The Army used the 35th Theater Tactical Signal Brigade’s 50th Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced as a prototype unit when it added what was then the new enroute mission command network.

Three years ago, the Army announced its “unified network plan,” which allows users to use either a personal or issued device, such as a smartphone, tablet or laptop, to log into the network anywhere in the world.

Incorporating these developments, Morrison told the audience to envision an entire brigade conducting an air assault to an objective, rolling out a four-vehicle brigade command post, displacing and then reestablishing its communication with a distant headquarters and its local tactical network and then making a call for fire request — all within three minutes.

“That was Saturday at (the Joint Readiness Training Center),” Morrison said.

Under the current signal branch job specialty restructuring, individual core functions — network communications, signal operations support, information technology and satellite communications — will merge into a single job held by a master sergeant by October 2025, the Army said.

In May, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George announced an initiative to lighten and improve the speed of battlefield communications.

Much of those changes would come from what the signal experts in their unit find as they experiment, George said.

“These brigade commanders, battalion commanders, sergeants major, warrant officers that are in the formations, that are technical experts — they are going to have the leeway to decide how we are best organized for the modern battlefield,” George said.

Morrison said that the signal battalions restructuring update will be in the working stage with senior leaders for the next two to three months. He expects an official decision before the end of the calendar year.

The milestone was significant in that it represented a shift in the Defense Department’s approach to connecting military forces across operational domains, known as Combined Joint All Domain-Command and Control, or CJADC2.

Whereas DOD leaders had previously focused — and struggled to show progress — on the ultimate goal of full interoperability, this time they honed in on identifying capabilities to address operators’ most urgent problems and workflows and vetting them through a regular C2 exercise series known as Global Information Dominance Experiments, or GIDE.

Now, the Defense Department’s Chief Data and AI Officer Radha Plumb wants to expand on that work in two ways: targeting more of the department’s C2 capability needs and developing an enduring process through which companies can propose solutions and DOD can evaluate them.

Plumb spoke with reporters July 16 on the sidelines of DOD’s first-ever industry day aimed at helping companies understand its near-term advanced C2 requirements and how they can showcase potential solutions through GIDE.

“We want to bring in more technologists and technology solutions to compete in those venues, so that we can get a better option set of solutions,” she said.

The department to date has conducted 11 GIDE events, each with a particular theme or focus — which is generally classified — connected to a capability gap that the military services and combatant commands have identified. Plumb’s office leads these campaigns, running one every three months.

In the past, the team has reached out to a limited pool of companies to see what solutions they might have to those gaps and then integrated those into the experiments. For example, during its experimentation campaign to validate the CJADC2 baseline capability set last year, the department worked with more than 20 firms.

For future GIDEs — and possibly even the next event in September — Plumb hopes to incorporate tools from a broader set of companies, to potentially include some firms her office engages with during the industry day.

Plumb’s office will use its acquisition hub, called Tradewinds, to communicate its requirements to industry, solicit capabilities and select the most promising to participate in experimentation events.

“If they perform well and they meet a sort of scaled capability need, then we can go through our normal kind of acquisition processes to get broader scaled deployments of them,” she said. “But we’ll also have the prototype vehicle acquisition vehicle to continue that testing and experimentation series.”

Plumb would not discuss what specific GIDE technologies the department will include in its next experimentation set, but operators are generally looking for things like visual interfaces and tools that allow them to integrate data faster and more efficiently to inform decision making.

“We evaluate the technology’s performance both on the overall success of it, but then on whether that candidate technology is the right thing to solve that capability need for the that particular area,” she said.

The experimental applications DOD will end up buying and scaling through this process represent just one category of tools the department wants to integrate into its advanced C2 ecosystem, known as the Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories, or Open DAGIR.

Plumb announced in late May the department will use Open DAGIR to not only vet experimental tools, but to buy data infrastructure as well as more mature, enterprise-level licenses for applications that will be used by a broad swath of DOD users.

“Open DAGIR ensures the Department can leverage the innovative solutions from the world-class software developers in both the traditional and nontraditional industrial base to create capabilities for our warfighters and decision makers,” she said in a May 30 press release. “We aim to give industry front-row access to both our data and our users to develop relevant and timely software for decision advantage.”

The aircraft, a modified Bombardier business jet outfitted with Northrop Grumman’s Battlefield Airborne Communications Node payload, or BACN, is lesser known than the Air Force’s stalwart fleet of bombers, fighters and cargo jets. Now, with U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, the E-11 has taken on a new behind-the-scenes role supporting the multinational mission to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Since March, the 430th Expeditionary Electronic Combat Squadron, the only unit in the Air Force to fly the aircraft, has supported more than 30 of the service’s airdrops in Gaza while operating out of an undisclosed location in U.S. Central Command. Pilots with the squadron who spoke with Air Force Times in an interview declined to discuss specific missions, but offered brief insights into their work in the region.

The Air Force has participated in 40 airdrops alongside coalition partners since March. Those missions were paused for more than a month as Israel’s invasion of the city of Rafah began in early May. The U.S. flew its most recent airdrop June 9.

“The BACN mission provides the Air Force, as well as joint and international partners, line-of-sight and beyond-line-of-sight interoperability, and that’s between dissimilar platforms with varying electronic capabilities,” 430th EECS Commander Lt. Col. R. Clayton “Vector” McCart said. “We capture, translate, combine and, ultimately, relay and extend legacy and modern comms and data links.”

That means flagging potential threats to the cargo aircraft ferrying shipments of food, any course corrections or other important details from mission planners and other troops around the area.

In a region as large as CENTCOM, airdrops can be derailed by a number of variables, from weather to other flight safety issues. The BACN aircraft, which carries two pilots, can quickly relay real-time changes coming from the Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar to mission partners on the front lines.

“We can monitor progress in a way that other platforms may not be able to see … as far as locations of the assets, the weather calls, etc. Weather plays a big factor in the airdrops off the coast of Gaza,” Capt. Britton “Rad” Ellington, an E-11A pilot who previously flew the service’s now-retired E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, or JSTARS, aircraft, said.

With a range of more than 6,900 miles and a typical sortie time of around 10 hours, the aircraft can take over where satellite phones fail, and interpret transmissions between the military’s myriad communications systems that can’t otherwise connect. While AFCENT declined to say how many of the service’s seven E-11As are operating in theater, the 430th acts as a data lilypad for more than 1,000 hours every two weeks.

“We’re just not relegated to an airdrop. For instance, we could do that as a part of a larger expectation from CENTCOM leadership, and just move around the battlespace. … We’re not really tethered to any one location,” McCart said.

The E-11A is in the process of establishing its new home at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, within the 18th Airborne Command and Control Squadron. It’s one of four missions replacing JSTARS planes at Robins over the next several years; the squadron is expected to become fully operational by 2027.

The 430th EECS, which deploys out of the Middle East, and doubles as a training unit, will shift its training mission to Robins.

“Every sortie is a training sortie, in the sense that we learn every day that we fly,” McCart said.

At the TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International in Baltimore, leaders from the Pentagon discussed capabilities for public, private and hybrid networks. Officials acknowledged there’s a natural appetite for the most exclusive, secure networks in the national security space. And sometimes there is no wireless network infrastructure available in remote warfighting locations far from population centers.

So as the services determine appetite for private networks that offer more control over information sharing, the DoD is guiding them to use open radio access networks, or ORAN, said Juan Ramírez, the director of the 5G Cross-Functional Team at DoD.

“I think what industry wants to hear is there’s actually going to be requirements that come out that … necessitate an open RAN architecture,” he said at the conference. “So you’ll start to see those come out in the next couple of years, pending budgets.”

Certainly, private networks aren’t the only way to go. In fact, sometimes that’s not the best solution, said Lt. Col. Benjamin Pimentel, who leads the Camp Pendleton 5G experiment for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.

“Think about when we deploy in a theater,” he said. “A lot of countries that we go to or locations that we go to already have roads and bridges, and it’d be silly to then go and build my own private roads and my own private bridges separate and apart from that to get where I need to go. If those roads and bridges meet my transportation requirement, and they’re not going to fall under the weight of a ‘seven ton,’ we’re going to drive over it.”

But, somewhere like the first island chain, for example, may not have adequate coverage to put up sensors for long-range precision fires. In cases like those, he said, it would make more sense for units to bring private capabilities.

Given China’s rising aggression and U.S. efforts to deter it in the Taiwan Strait, what Pimentel described is the type of environment where current threats seem to colocate.

Regardless, to ensure there is connectivity wherever the need is, Ramirez said the department is looking at ORANs, which allow multiple vendors to operate as one network and provide more flexibility to scale.

ORAN is something the DoD has been pushing aggressively to explore as it simultaneously journeys toward more standard 5G adoption on military installations and “smart bases.”

Ramirez said the department is hopeful it will get additional support from Congress via future defense spending bills that will backup forthcoming requirements with dollars.

The Pentagon’s 2024 budget requested $143 billion in research, developing and testing of emerging technologies including 5G, but also artificial intelligence. Much of the spending in recent years has been for prototyping, and though the Office of the Secretary of Defense has the lion’s share, Ramirez said his office is offering direction to the services for them to budget for 5G.

“We think that pursuing ideas like [ORAN] advanced by the ORAN Alliance all the way to fully open-source code … provides the feature velocity the DoD needs and the ability to innovate quickly,” said Pimentel.

On June 20, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks approved the strategy, and the department announced it on June 25, coinciding with the 2024 TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International in Baltimore.

“Fulcrum describes ‘what’ the DoD must achieve with respect to advancing IT for the warfighter and ‘why’ it matters,” according to a department statement.

The strategy offers specifics on broad, sweeping goals by the Pentagon to communicate faster and more securely with warfighters and allies. To date, the government has issued a number of strategic plans and frameworks to double down on cybersecurity and accelerate the military’s development of tools like AI, but this plan takes that a step further by prioritizing user experience and scalable, agile investments.

“It’s called ‘fulcrum’ because it sits at the nexus between our national security strategy, our strategic management plans — our really ‘big thinking’ strategies,” said Leslie Beavers, principal deputy chief information officer, on Tuesday.

With so many tools coming to market from different vendors and small businesses also hoping to break in, the strategy gives leaders guideposts for how to assess what tools and internal resources are needed.

Critically, it also devotes a category to developing the workforce, specifically by broadening the DoD Cyber Workforce Framework to focus more intently on roles for data, AI and software engineering.

The DoD has long said this is an established need.

“There is a recognized shortage of skilled cyber personnel that could potentially impact operational readiness across the Department and put national security at risk,” according to the department’s 2023 Cyber Workforce Strategy. “Despite the vast expansion of cyber educational and experiential opportunities, the nation’s cyber talent pipeline remains limited.”

As in the private sector, government, too, is struggling with too few tech practitioners that make new cybersecurity practices difficult to implement. At the same time, much of the technical guidance handed down by experts in tech shops is written for the actual programmists, not senior executives, so there needs to be an available reserve of workers, DoD officials said at the conference.

“Leadership is a force multiplier and to outpace [adversaries] we have to maximize the talent from our broad array of partners, and recruit and retain our own talent,” said Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, at the conference.

Finally, the new strategy also seeks to streamline governance and enhance use of data to backup decision-making and identify cost savings to deliver joint warfighting capabilities faster amid high-tempo, multi-domain operations.

“We must challenge legacy approaches and move move toward rapid innovation for them,” said Haugh. “We cannot succeed when our existing processes move slower than the rate of innovation change.”

The Joint Fires Network is a U.S. Indo-Pacific Command initiative to improve coordination between commanders and network any sensor from any platform to feed targeting guidance to any weapon system. Valiant Shield is focused on integrating forces across domains with thousands of U.S. military personnel participating along with 200 ships, aircraft and ground vehicles.

The JFN demonstration during Valiant Shield “integrated technologies with third-party capabilities as part of an enterprise architecture,” Lockheed said in a June 20 statement.

“The exercise showcased the seamless integration of Lockheed Martin’s advanced command and control functions, employing Operational Planning to coordinate real-time decision-making across the theater of operations, with all the Services and operational domains,” it said. “This approach enhanced the agility and responsiveness of joint operations, using live real-time data, and producing joint tasking orders in an operationally relevant environment.”

Lockheed’s digital C2 system combines its fielded battle management, command and control software with other technologies from industry, the company notes.

To participate in Valiant Shield, the company said it made improvements to its C2 Planning Software that included “streamlining operator workflows by making machine interactions intuitive, enabling real-time monitoring, and facilitating seamless integration with other technologies.”

The company also trained operators on high-fidelity mission simulators prior to the exercise to learn how to use the C2 planning system.

Lockheed has now participated in seven exercises to continue to work on refining its digital C2 capabilities, it said.

For example, the company participated in Northern Edge, an experiment in the Indo-Pacific theater that demonstrated synchronization of technology that could feed into the Pentagon’s connect-everything-everywhere campaign called Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2.

The company plans to continue to bring technology to exercises and demonstrations in the Indo-Pacific to help build joint, networked capability.