The collaboration, announced Feb. 13, aims to inform the digital pursuits of the Navy and Marine Corps, while also engaging school faculty and students with some of the private sector’s leading scientists and engineers.

“The core of warfighter development at NPS is preparing leaders to solve complex problems,” the school’s president, retired Vice Adm. Ann Rondeau, said in a statement. “This cooperative effort between NPS and Qualcomm Technologies is a great opportunity for our warrior-scholar students and defense-expert faculty to experiment with the latest 5G-enabled technologies and collaboratively explore innovative solutions to the issues faced by our Navy and Marine Corps.”

The partnership is facilitated by what’s known as a cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA, which allows the U.S. government to engage nonfederal entities. Qualcomm is the latest of the school’s industry partners; in May, the Navy cut a deal with Microsoft to see its newest tools before they hit the market.

Focus areas of the newly announced deal reflect the military’s ambitions to spend billions of dollars on seamless connectivity and computer augmented decision-making. The spending comes as the U.S. shifts its gaze away from the Middle East, after years of counterinsurgency campaigns, and toward technologically savvy China and Russia.

At least one Navy official has in the last year described 5G as a “great enabler” that is “more, better, faster.” Fifth-generation wireless technology is expected to provide greater speeds and bandwidth, potentially improving logistics ashore and networking at sea.

Service officials are also leaning into artificial intelligence and autonomy — perhaps best exemplified by Task Force 59, which in December concluded a three-week event dedicated to unmanned systems in Bahrain.

The Navy is “creating a culture that nurtures innovation and drives our competitive advantage,” according to the service’s chief information officer, Aaron Weis. The NPS-Qualcomm partnership is “another step in the right direction,” he added, and “will identify promising emerging commercial technologies so we can rapidly adopt them for full-scale implementation.”

Terms of the joint research deal also include the establishment of an innovation lab at the Naval Postgraduate School campus in Monterey, California.

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro in December teased the creation of another innovation center, concentrating “on the truly transformational technology that we need, not just two years, five years down the road, but 10, 15 years down the road.”

Initial areas of interest, Del Toro said at the time, included AI and machine learning.

The “2023 5G Challenge: Advanced Interoperability” was announced Feb. 2 in collaboration with Department of Commerce, and comes a little less than one year after a similar contest.

Participants who prove they can help accelerate the adoption of secure networks, swappable and compatible parts, and what the competition dubbed “true plug-and-play 5G interoperability” are eligible to win up to $7 million in cash or prizes including lab time.

Applications are due March 1. The competition is expected to last two years.

Fifth-generation wireless technology promises exponentially faster speeds and the ability to accommodate more and more-advanced devices — a windfall for defense, logistics, business, health care and more.

The technology also has its challenges, though: additional pathways for digital intrusions, pricey infrastructure and sluggish uptake, among them. Amanda Toman, a 5G leader at the Pentagon, previously said the sector is “too critical” to “relinquish to countries whose products and technologies are not aligned with our standards of privacy and security.”

“The department is committed to supporting innovation efforts that accelerate the domestic development of 5G and future-G technologies,” Toman said in a statement in April. “We will continue our support of all necessary efforts to unleash innovation while developing secure 5G supply chains.”

The Defense Department secured approximately $338 million for 5G and microelectronics in fiscal 2022. It sought another $250 million for fiscal 2023, which began Oct. 1.

Defense industry players have heeded the department’s call on 5G.

Northrop Grumman and AT&T in January said they successfully relayed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data and video using 5G technologies, a critical step toward advanced networking on the battlefield. In September, Lockheed Martin and Verizon said they were able to securely share and analyze real-time data and other intel captured by a swarm of drones via fifth-generation wireless networks, both private and public. And Viasat in June said it would experiment with 5G as a means to connect Marines and support what are known as expeditionary advanced base operations.

The demonstration, conducted at a previously undisclosed Northrop lab in California, tied together radios with the defense company’s data links, the telecommunications giant’s private 5G services and the Japanese IT firm’s open radio access network, or O-RAN.

The collaboration between all three, Northrop said in a statement Jan. 18, is meant to spur innovation and produce products that can benefit the U.S. Department of Defense, which has for years invested in the fifth generation of wireless technologies as a means to quickly share information, improve logistics, including at so-called smart warehouses, and support operations overseas.

“The phrase we tend to use is right information, right people, right time, right everything,” Tarun Soni, a Northrop fellow and chief engineer for communications and networking, told C4ISRNET. “Obviously, lots of people in industry, including us, are doing lots of things that are 5G.”

Fifth-generation wireless technology promises exponentially faster speeds and the ability to accommodate more and more-advanced devices compared with its predecessors. The technology also has its risks — additional pathways for digital intrusions, for example, and expensive infrastructure costs — and has yet to live up to the hype for many. The slow rollout and embrace of 5G is often blamed on disputes between industry and Congress, namely over the designation of space on public airwaves.

The Defense Department secured approximately $338 million for 5G and microelectronics in fiscal 2022. It sought $250 million for 2023, which began Oct. 1.

Word of the successful demo comes nearly one year after Northrop and AT&T announced they would jointly develop a “digital battle network” utilizing 5G to support the distribution of intel across military services and domains. The companies at the time said the endeavor would help bring to life the Pentagon’s multibillion-dollar Joint All-Domain Command and Control campaign.

“When you do 5G, you really have to learn how to do ecosystems, you have to learn how to do collaborations, partnerships,” Soni said. “There’s the near-term motivation, which is digital transformation in various forms. That includes using 5G on factory floors, et cetera. The harder lift, which is kind of where at least some of my energy is going, is the JADC2 space.”

The JADC2 concept envisions interconnected forces across land, air, sea, space and cyber. This seamless connectivity and constant contact, defense officials say, will help the U.S. maintain an edge on China and Russia.

Northrop and four other companies were in September selected by the Air Force to flesh out the Advanced Battle Management System, the service’s contribution to JADC2. Acting together, they are known as the ABMS Digital Infrastructure Consortium.

“It’s not just about moving packets from point A to point B,” Soni said. “It’s about all the things your cellphone has. If you think about your smartphone, it’s not just moving packets. It’s not just providing transport. It’s providing mobility, it’s providing app stores. It’s providing all kinds of other things.”

Northrop is the fourth largest defense company in the world when ranked by revenue, according to Defense News analysis.

General Dynamics Information Technology, or GDIT, announced the partnership with Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Splunk and T-Mobile on Nov. 10.

The potential of fifth-generation wireless networks, with vastly improved connectivity over 4G, has been promised for years, but 5G that lives up to the hype has yet to arrive for many. The slow rollout is often blamed on squabbles between the industry and Congress over the designation of space on public airwaves. The announcement comes as control of the House is still in the air following midterm elections.

“We share a common vision of how 5G, edge and advanced wireless technologies can transform government operations,” Ben Gianni, GDIT’s senior vice president and chief technology officer, said in a statement. “Forming this coalition will help us bring our collective strengths together to provide technical differentiation and the most beneficial solutions for our government customers.”

5G pledges exponentially faster speeds as well as the capacity to accommodate more and more-advanced devices, which can pay dividends for defense, health care, trade and more. The gear also brings with it a host of concerns, cybersecurity, privacy and price chief among them.

The U.S. Department of Defense, specifically, is interested in 5G as a means to rapidly share information — on and off the battlefield — and improve logistics, like at so-called smart warehouses, where artificial intelligence and remote observation come into play. The department’s 2020 strategy described 5G as “far more disruptive” than its predecessors, noting that high-speed connectivity will “transform the way militaries operate.”

The efforts of the GDIT 5G and Edge Accelerator Coalition stem from the Advanced Wireless Emerge Lab, where work is already underway to identify the best applications for 5G and how related kit can be cost-effectively implemented across federal, state and local agencies.

GDIT in its announcement said it would “design, deploy and maintain secure end-to-end 5G solutions” while leveraging Amazon’s cloud assets. Cisco will chip in computing and data processing capabilities and Dell will furnish software as well as AI-enhanced devices and sensors. Splunk will handle cybersecurity. And T-Mobile will provide bandwidth and expertise.

“In today’s landscape, 5G solutions provide a wealth of benefits for the federal government and we are committed to helping them adopt and maximize these innovative technologies to best achieve their missions,” Bethann Pepoli, a group vice president at Splunk, said in a statement. “Security is a top concern when it comes to implementing these new technologies and we are focused on helping to ensure the government has the correct tools and support to maximize their cybersecurity operations and threat response.”

The Defense Department secured nearly $338 million for 5G and microelectronics in fiscal 2022 and requested $250 million for fiscal 2023.

The department in previous years invested in test beds at a dozen military installations. It is also studying 5G networking for overseas operations at Idaho National Laboratory, a massive Department of Energy nuclear reservation, and over the summer committed $1.77 million to an industry-university research effort known as Open6G.

General Dynamics is the fifth largest defense contractor in the world based on revenue, earning some $30.8 billion in 2021, according to a Defense News analysis.

The importance of GPS as a military tool was underscored by Kremlin media in November as troops were massing along the Ukraine border. After Russia demonstrated it could destroy a satellite in space, a television commentator known to be an unofficial mouthpiece of President Vladimir Putin said the nation could “blind NATO” by shooting down all GPS satellites.

Despite this, Russian interference with GPS in Ukraine has not been nearly as aggressive as many observers had expected.

Experts within the GPS/positioning, navigation, and timing communities have proposed a number of possible reasons for this. Here are the most prevalent, all of which are based entirely on publicly available information:

Russia’s electronic warfare capability isn’t as good as it was thought to be. Russian forces have a fearsome reputation when it comes to electronic warfare. And they go out of their way to reinforce this. At one point, the state-owned news agency Sputnik proclaimed Russian EW capabilities “render aircraft carriers useless.”

The popular wisdom is that they have developed and maintained this capability as a response to superior technology used by Western forces. Electronic warfare can be an inexpensive way to level the playing field.

Since Russian forces have been surprisingly less capable than expected in other aspects of the Ukraine conflict, some think this may be true with their ability to interfere with GPS.

Most observers discount this suggestion, though.

They point out that Russian forces regularly jam GPS signals in northern Norway from locations far across the border. And that in some cases this jamming has been so precise, signals in a nearby frequency band from Russia’s GLONASS satellite navigation system have been unaffected.

Russia has clearly demonstrated impressive abilities to spoof GPS over wide areas. Users in downtown Moscow often find their equipment falsely reporting they are at an airport. The same is true in many coastal areas, the Black Sea and other locations where senior government officials are to be found.

A 2016 Moscow Times headline read “The Kremlin eats GPS for Breakfast.” The general consensus in the community is that there has been a lot of evidence to support that claim.

The question is then, why is the Kremlin only nibbling at GPS in Ukraine?

Russian forces use and need GPS. Proponents of this idea point to downed Russian fighter jets found to have GPS receivers taped to their dashboards.

Signals from Russia’s GLONASS system and terrestrial Chayka electronic navigation system are both available for use in Ukraine. Yet it seems likely there not enough compatible receivers for these systems to equip all Russian forces. As the world’s first global navigation satellite system, GPS receivers have become both plentiful and inexpensive. Cheap GPS receivers and some duct tape seems like an interim solution for some poorly equipped Russians.

Also, GPS signals support a wide variety of infrastructure. Telecommunications, the internet, electrical grids and machine-control systems all rely on GPS for timing. Russian forces may wish to protect Ukraine’s infrastructure for their own benefit and use. Prolonged and widespread attacks on GPS signals could cause serious infrastructure problems with long-term strategic downsides greater than any temporary tactical gains.

High-power, persistent GPS jammers are easily targeted. Any strong and consistent radio frequency transmission can be easily located and attacked. Many militaries have missiles specially designed to home in on and destroy jamming transmitters. Even without such weapons, direction-finding technology can pinpoint a transmitter enabling an artillery attack or an air or ground assault. Russian commanders may be limiting transmission power and time on air to avoid attracting hostile fire.

Ukraine is less impacted. While Ukraine is increasingly receiving and using more Western weapons, many of which use GPS, it also has huge stockpiles of Soviet-era weapons. These don’t rely on GPS and are likely unaffected by most, if not all, forms of electronic warfare. Also, Ukrainian regular and irregular forces are likely less reliant upon sophisticated command, control and communications systems used by larger militaries. Thus, GPS jamming that could hamper normal operations for the U.S. and NATO may have less impact in Ukraine.

Saving the best to use against the U.S. and NATO. Despite the location of the conflict, Ukraine is not the enemy Vladimir Putin is really worried about. His concerns focus on the U.S. and NATO. Deploying Russia’s most sophisticated and powerful electronic weapons in Ukraine would enable adversaries to study technologies and tactics. This would lead to the development of countermeasures and make the weapons less effective in future conflicts.

Better for Russia to keep its best tools and tricks for interfering with GPS in reserve, for use later against larger forces and more important targets.

Dana Goward is president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation and serves on the U.S. National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board.

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Speaking during a C4ISRNET webcast, Kenneth McNeill said an initiative called “Bring Your Own Approved Device” would allow guardsmen to use personal mobile equipment to perform the same functions in the field that they would otherwise carry out at a desktop in their offices.

“In a typical state, all of our guardsmen, unfortunately, they may not have government-furnished devices — mobile cellphones, iPads,” McNeill said. “It cuts down on time when we’re planning for a mobilization.”

The initiative, which is a collaboration with the Department of the Army and the Pentagon’s cybersecurity office, is in its third phase of a pilot program consisting of a yearlong trial with the largest sample size to date. After this trial, if deemed successful, the initiative will be enacted, McNeill said.

Work began on the initiative before the pandemic, which drove a transition to remote work. The realities of the situation forced the Guard to accelerate its efforts.

“This is another tool in the toolkit that will give us an opportunity to allow our workforce, even after the pandemic, to continue to telework and [perform] remote work that is critical in the National Guard,” McNeill said. “I don’t think we’re going back [to] everyone in the office. I think this is the future of how we’re going to operate here in the government and in the Department of Defense.”

While deployed to the streets of Washington, D.C., following the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol, the National Guard employed a similar capability called Commercial Virtual Remote to carry out the mission that was limited in scope and time.

“Now we will have a capability that really links our force, even before they are called up for deployment,” he said. “This will be a game-changer.”

JADC2

McNeill also discussed an addition to the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept being implemented by the DoD that would focus on the needs of the National Guard’s mission set. Called “Project Homeland,” the initiative would apply the same capabilities of JADC2 to the domestic front.

JADC2 is a project by the Department of Defense to connect all the sensors from the individual services and compile data collected into a single information network. Previously, each service had their own tactical networks that were unable to interface with each other.

“JADC2 is a warfighting necessity to keep pace with the volume and complexity of data in modern warfare and to defeat adversaries decisively,” the department said in a statement. “JADC2 enables the Joint Force to ‘sense,’ ‘make sense,’ and ‘act’ on information across the battle-space quickly using automation, artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics, and machine learning to deliver informed solutions via a resilient and robust network environment.”

Project Homeland would apply those same capabilities during domestic deployments across the 54 states and territories National Guard units and their civilian interagency partners as opposed to the military services and their coalition forces.

McNeill spoke to the challenges the National Guard faced during their humanitarian relief operations post Hurricane Katrina. On the ground, the Guard was unable to talk with the local first responders because they did not have cross-banding communication systems.

“We learned from that experience that we’ve got to think out of the box,” McNeill said. “We’ve got to look at capabilities that can talk to first responders and focus on what we do in the homeland.”

Answers and opinions abound. And not a single avenue, it seems, will satisfy every requirement.

Officials spearheading the U.S. Army’s development and deployment of upgraded network tech and tools are pursuing multiple layers, multiple functions and multiple bands, seeking a resilient network for relaying intel that can withstand the challenges of warfare.

Among the many potential solutions is 5G, a generation of wireless offerings that the Department of Defense is attempting to harness and dominate before international challengers can.

“As you start to look at some of the future demands for information, when you get in the future battlespace, 5G is going to have a tremendous opportunity and the ability to transport some of the information at much-quicker pace and at much-higher throughput,” Army Maj. Gen. Robert Collins said April 20 at the C4ISRNET Conference.

Collins is the program executive officer for command, control and communications-tactical. In that role, he oversees the multibillion-dollar development, acquisition and fielding of the hardware and software the Army needs for a hardened, intuitive and mobile network.

Through upgrades rolled out every two years — what’s technically known as a capability set — Collins, his team and his colleagues are pushing military communications into the future. The integration of advanced cellular technology such as 5G, documents show, is expected with Capability Sets ‘25 and ‘27, each a few years down the road.

“I think, once again, that is another area where it’s going to be another layer of connectivity that we can afford and provide,” the general said April 20. “I think it’s going to have a lot of contributions.”

What’s up

Pentagon officials describe 5G communications technology as foundational to all defense modernization programs and as vital to U.S. national and economic security. The military network, more broadly, has been described as the backbone of modernization, as well.

“The future? All about autonomy, robotics and artificial intelligence,” Collins said during a demonstration at Fort Myer, Va., on April 26. “And it takes two things to do that: data and the network.”

In an October 2020 announcement, the Pentagon said it would focus on large-scale experimentation and prototyping of dual-use 5G, the sort of thing that would provide “high speeds and quicker response times, connect many more wireless devices than current wireless technology, and enable leap-ahead capabilities for the U.S. military.” It has since pursued testbeds at a dozen military installations, including sites in California, Georgia and Virginia, and unveiled a multimillion-dollar challenge to hasten the growth and adoption of an open, cooperative ecosystem.

The Defense Department’s 5G strategy, published in 2020, is written with a sense of urgency: The nations “that master advanced communications technologies and ubiquitous connectivity will have a long-term economic and military advantage,” its unclassified, public pages read. Those that don’t — or those hamstrung by the fifth generation’s pitfalls — will fall well behind.

Fifth-generation wireless technology promises exponentially faster speeds and the ability to accommodate more and more-advanced devices compared with its predecessors, like 4G. Deployment in the U.S. began in late 2018.

“There are three features that are especially important for the future. One is super-high speeds, and the second is low latency, and the third is a concept called ‘slicing,’” Martin Cooper, credited with inventing the cellphone during his time at Motorola, said April 27 during a discussion with the Bipartisan Policy Center.

“We don’t need the super speed for watching movies and our normal interaction on the internet. But if you are running a machine where you want to know precisely where that machine is at every given instant, and have that machine react quickly, super-high speeds are important,” said Cooper, who stressed the technology should be used to better society and bridge the digital divide.

Both Collins and Brig. Gen. Jeth Rey, the director of the Army Network Cross-Functional Team, have begun looking into manned-unmanned teaming and robotics utilizing 5G. A great amount of opportunity, Collins said, exists there.

‘A great enabler’

When Rey took the helm at the Network Cross-Functional Team, he was quoted as saying: “The future is about data, and accessing and protecting it across transport-agnostic capabilities.” Jumping from “5G WiFi to terrestrial circuits,” he said, “to satellite-based systems as an automatic transition will give us greater operational flexibility across the board.”

On April 20, Rey again emphasized the value of 5G, especially considering its potential to keep troops safe and on the move.

“Dispersing the formation is going to be critical in the future. You can watch the ongoing operations, we’ll use that as an example,” the general said. “Dispersion of our forces will be important, and I think 5G plays a big role in that. Both terrestrial and at the space layer, I think is going to be key.”

Collins said that sort of advantage has already been observed when it comes to command posts.

“I think we’ve seen some benefit in the terrestrial aspects, certainly as you start to look at our command posts, as we start to distribute our command posts, and where you don’t necessarily have to have all primary elements of the staff physically colocated,” Collins said at the C4ISRNET Conference. “They can distribute out for force protection, and 5G offers a very low latent, high throughput type of capacity.”

The Navy’s chief digital innovation officer, Michael Galbraith, similarly sees 5G as making future operations and capabilities possible. From pier-side links to shipboard communications to logistical feats, there is a breadth of potential applications.

AT&T this year claimed initial success in setting up a 5G network experiment that could make smart warehouses a reality for the Navy, Defense News reported.

“We in the Navy, you know, we work at the edge, have been working at the edge since the 1700s,” Galbraith said April 19 at the Cloudera Government Forum. “In that information domain, there are other network capabilities, and 5G just is, again, a great enabler.”

Hurdles to clear

Embracing 5G is not without risks. The Government Accountability Office in a 2020 report said 5G could introduce new paths for cyberattacks, exacerbate existing privacy concerns and face broader implementation challenges and expensive infrastructure costs.

There have been boisterous debates about what tech can be trusted. Perhaps the most public has been about Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications and electronics Goliath former President Donald Trump and others considered a grave threat to national security.

There are hurdles in the field — or the canopy — as well.

“At the same token, 5G has sensitivities when it comes to foliage, blockage and other activities,” Collins said April 20.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology this year said scientists studied for months how obstacles including trees and shrubs would interfere with 5G.

“The tree study is one of the few out there that looks at the same tree’s effect on a particular signal frequency through different seasons,” Nada Golmie, head of NIST’s wireless networks division in the Communications Technology Laboratory, said in a statement. “We couldn’t only do the survey in the winter, because things would have changed by summer. It turns out that even the shape of leaves affects whether a signal will reflect or get through.”

Overcoming challenges will be critical to the adoption, proliferation and reliable use of the tech.

The Defense Department secured nearly $338 million for 5G and microelectronics in fiscal year 2022. It asked for $250 million in fiscal 2023, according to budget documents.

The department in March also established the 5G and Future-G Cross-Functional Team to lead the way on policy, guidance, research and development, and acquisition. The congressionally mandated outfit will work to ensure U.S. forces can operate anywhere, including where networks are contested and communication is difficult, an increasingly likely scenario given competition against complex rivals like Russia and China.

“Today’s operational requirements call for the acceleration of 5G technology with at-scale prototyping and experimentation,” Amanda Toman, the acting principal director of the Defense Department’s 5G to Future Generation Initiative, said in a statement. “The 5G and Future Generation CFT will play a critical role in advancing the department’s 5G and future-generation capabilities.”

Playing off each other’s expertise — one primarily in defense and aerospace, the other in communications — the companies plan to deliver a “cost-effective, scalable, open-architecture” product to aid Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the Pentagon’s concept for connecting sensors from the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Space Force into a single network.

“Our collaboration with AT&T brings together some of the best capabilities in defense and commercial communications to meet the evolving requirements of JADC2,” Ben Davies, a vice president and general manager for the networked information solutions division at Northrop, said in a statement.

The prospective digital battle network will be born from a new, collaborative research-and-development framework and will be made possible by Northrop’s mission systems and AT&T 5G and other network assets.

Technology prototyping for the effort is expected to be underway within a year.

Northrop CEO Kathy Warden, speaking at the Axios What’s Next Summit this month, likened the network to the “internet of things” but for federal assets and military applications.

“There are all kinds of ways that our government uses technology today to share information and enable assets to work together. We have to think about that being done securely,” she said. “So, it’s not using commercial infrastructure directly, but it’s using the technologies that exist in the commercial world, like 5G.”

The public and private sectors have zeroed in on 5G — and its eventual successors — as a means to more quickly connect and communicate; the fifth generation promises faster speeds, lower latencies and other improvements. The jump in quality from 4G is expected to enhance intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems as well as empower new methods of command and control.

“When we think about today’s environment,” Warden said at the summit, “it’s less about the traditional arms race of the past, and it’s more about the technology race of today and the future.”

Other companies, such as Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Intel and Verizon, are also playing in the 5G military sandbox.

Lockheed in February announced a $19.3 million deal with the Department of Defense to create a 5G communications infrastructure test bed in California for the Marine Corps and others.

Fifth-generation wireless gear is being considered for a range of applications, Michael Galbraith suggested April 19, from pier-side and shipboard links to smart warehouses and other logistical feats.

“Think of a ship, think of a carrier group — we need to work in the run quiet, run deep kind of thing, can’t use SATCOM,” Galbraith said at the Cloudera Government Forum. “I still need to communicate from the first deck to the third deck, I still need to communicate from that carrier to the destroyer, and 5G and other millimeter wave technologies allow that to happen.”

Exactly how 5G, the so-called internet of things and data collection interact with the Navy’s major networks is an “issue that we are actively working on,” Galbraith said. “You hear about Project Overmatch, communication as a service. That is a part of that work that the team that” Rear Adm. Doug Small’s “group is doing. That is vitally important.”

Project Overmatch is the Navy’s clandestine contribution to Joint All-Domain Command and Control, a broader Pentagon effort to better connect sensors and shooters and dissolve communication barriers between the services. Small is the leader of the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, a key JADC2 player.

Small in early April told C4ISRNET his team was “working across systems commands, warfare centers, services and with industry to provide the architecture, or framework, for how the various components are stitched together, including the networks, infrastructure, data architecture, tools and analytics to improve on our decision advantage.”

“Ultimately,” Small said at the time, “this will aid our ability to provide synchronized effects near and far in all domains, ensuring a more lethal and better-connected fleet now and far into the future.”

Fifth-generation wireless technology promises faster speeds, lower latency and other improvements compared with its predecessors. Alone, 5G is “more, better, faster,” Galbraith said. But when synced with other capabilities, he added, the potential really shines.

“We in the Navy, you know, we work at the edge, have been working at the edge since the 1700s,” he said. “In that information domain, there are other network capabilities, and 5G just is, again, a great enabler.”

The Department of Defense has selected a dozen military installations as test beds for 5G, including sites in California, Georgia and Virginia. This month, the department unveiled a multimillion-dollar challenge to accelerate the growth and adoption of a fifth-generation open ecosystem.

AT&T Inc. this year claimed initial success in setting up a 5G network experiment that could realize smart warehouses for the Navy, Defense News reported. The service believes smart warehouses could boost the efficiency and fidelity of its logistics.

“When we first started experimenting and piloting in 5G,” Galbraith said Tuesday, “we looked at what our priorities were.”

The Defense Department received nearly $338 million for 5G and microelectronics in fiscal year 2022. It requested $250 million for fiscal year 2023, budget documents show.