CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. – An AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar spun on its trailer on a shrubby hilltop earlier this month, sending contact tracks through encryptors to a small 5G router tied into a cellular network to support air defense.
“The fact that we’re running an active radar and a 5G network in the same band – side by side – and that they are not interfering with each other… is phenomenal,” said Lt. Col. Benjamin Pimentel, who as the Marine Corps lead for warfighter engagement is leading a 5G experiment in Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations for the Department of Defense’s FutureG Office.
The G/ATOR crew tasked with air defense for the ongoing division-level exercise “notched out a couple of frequency bands for us to be able to work, but we’re sitting in the same band,” Pimentel said, and without interference to radar that can happen when co-located with 5G. “They’re getting all the tracks we need, and we’re communicating.”
Satellite links and radar provide secure air defense and surveillance capabilities in a maritime fight, but those are less assured for U.S. forces in an Indo-Pacific maritime conflict grappling with satellite gaps and facing high-tech threats from peer enemies. So cellular technology – namely 5G and the next-generation FutureG – is seen as solutions for secure, mobile 5G networks that disparate operational forces deployed across islands can use in an EABO environment.
But while ubiquitous in the commercial mobile industry, 5G poses challenges for the military.
“A great thing about commercial cellular is it’s standardized for interoperability. When you go to another country and turn on your phone, it works,” Pimentel said. But it’s not yet fully developed for how the military would use it operationally, he said, and challenges remain in integration and standards, particularly those critical to the military such as handling classified information.
The three-year, DOD-supported 5G tech demonstration wrapping up this month focused on units in the EABO environment. Over a two-day field demo that included support for the 1st Marine Division-led Steel Knight exercise, teams explored 5G technologies for different uses and a range of EABO missions, including perimeter security, forward arming and refueling for aircraft, and long-range precision fires.
The goal of the demonstration and continuing experimentation ultimately is about linking operational units – front-line and stand-in forces inside the threat zones, for example – across the joint force with reliable, advanced communications and networks in the sensored battlespace. That’s the intent of the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control plan for a unified network that enables warfighters to sense, make sense and act. One goal is to develop deployable, mobile 5G networks for smaller operational units and formations.
“We’ve got it to be able to talk. If you can’t talk, you can’t operate, and it destroys the JADC2 concepts,” said 1st Lt. Sam Wehner, a communications officer with Marine Wing Communications Squadron 38, based at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego, Calif. “If you’re wanting any sensor and any shooter, you need to be able to talk between them and have some type of translation that happens.”
The Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Enterprise’s FutureG Office initially awarded some $600 million in 2020 to 15 prime contractors for work at five military installations. The Pentagon later announced seven installations for the Tranche 2 or second round of 5G testing, with the EABO project at Camp Pendleton focusing on “wireless connectivity” for forward operating bases and tactical operations centers. The 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, based at Miramar MCAS, has been the demo’s sponsor and a big proponent of 5G technology to support JADC2 and Project Dynamis, the Marine Corps’ contribution to DOD’s modernization plan for a single joint network.
The 5G advantage
Globally, militaries are tapping 5G for much higher bandwidth and better throughput, opening the door for 5G-enabled phones and tablets, unmanned aerial vehicles and full-motion video across the networks. It’s “something our current tactical networks would really struggle with. It’s too data-heavy,” said Scot Hoesly, MCTSSA’s program manager for the Camp Pendleton Tactical 5G experiment.
Military networks must be secure and resistant to jamming, and hardened and ruggedized for the military, Hoesly said. But few U.S. cellular companies are in that market and none had private 5G networks secure and capable enough for what the military needs, so the Pentagon’s investment hopes to spur FutureG innovation from the U.S.-based industry. “It’s leveraging all the billions and billions of dollars that’s already been spent on commercial telecom… and bringing that to the military,” he said, adding that “we really want U.S. industry to be involved in this.”
Companies participating in the 5G demo included Texas-based Dell through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement or CRADA. “We had to work with industry to really kind of figure out what a private 5G network would look like that’s specifically for the military, because nobody had it,” Hoesly said, so Dell developed, deployed and demonstrated a private network.
At Camp Pendleton, the 5G demonstrations relied on a 5G communications network infrastructure testbed known as OSIRIS, or Open Systems Interoperable and Reconfigurable Infrastructure Solution, part of Lockheed Martin’s 5G technologies in the multi-domain environment. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the 5G EABO project, which includes Intel, Leidos, Mitre, Ericckson, and Dell and Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab.
The final demonstration event included Samsung 5G tactical phones, Leidos autonomous aerial drones using artificial intelligence and machine learning for physical security, and Mitre security application for encryption, according to a MCTSSA brief. Along with using the 5G standalone system with the OSIRIS testbed, the event demonstrated Dell’s private 5G tactical network using Polaris MRZR and Johns Hopkins’ tethered quadcopter 5G relay, which created private, mobile 5G networks that, officials said, provide something of a self-contained bubble.
The tethered drone doesn’t rely on an onboard battery so it “can fly for hours and hours and hours” and be retrieved and moved to a new location faster than erecting an extendable cellular tower, Hoesly said. “You’re just kind of limited on how the length of your cable is tethered. But eventually they want to switch over to something (untethered) that’s fixed wing, and they want to be able to fly at 6,000 feet and provide 100 square miles of 5G.”
New Lab Support
In late January, the Marine Corps and San Diego-based Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific will establish a lab with engineers and other experts at the Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity at Camp Pendleton, officials said. MCTSSA will use OSIRIS and assume the equipment the experiment developed.
“We want a lab that can answer questions like, is this secure – and if so, what’s your approach to security? Is this jamming resistance? Does it work with currently fielded Marine Corps systems?” Hoesly said. “How scalable is this? How well does this interoperate with our NATO partners? How well does it interoperate with our own other DOD organizations?”
Engineers and others at the lab will develop prototypes into deployable, scalable 5G wireless networks to support military forces operating in denied and contested battlefields. But creating a 5G network from commercial telecommunications raises lots of questions about security and interoperability, including with tactical radios and other electronics.
“A lab is going to be able to answer all those questions,” Hoesly said. The lab will be “a sandbox for companies that want to bring end-user devices and 5G equipment out and get it independently evaluated by the Marine Corps.” Reports will go to Quantico, Va.-based Marine Corps Systems Command, “where they can make acquisition decisions on where they want to go with 5G technology, what they want to field, and how they want to apply it to Marine Corps networks,” he said.
Under a prototype transition agreement with them, the expeditionary network lab will help inform Marine Corps requirements and, if aligned with the Army’s Tactical Mobility program, Pimentel said, “we could see hopefully fielding within the next few years.”
What systems ultimately are developed for Marines remain to be seen. “It’s going to be on wheels and it’s going to be mobile, and it’s going to be able to be set up and torn down quickly and be able to move. It’s got to fit within the power requirements that we bring out to the field” such as generators, Hoesly said.
But “there’s still challenges we need to work out,” he said. “How does the long-range communications work? Is it going to be celestial-based, or is it going to be something else? Is this system something you can box up and fly with? Is it light enough, is it small enough – and is it capable enough once you get there? Is it easy enough to use to where your average Marine can go to a school and learn how to use it, troubleshoot it and update it and maintain it?”
5G to the tactical edge
Any telecom advancements are sure to find fans among Marines in the field. Several years ago, Capt. Lucas Vancina was assigned to 9th Communications Battalion at Camp Pendleton and saw the way the Marine Corps did communications as something “very last century.”
“I really wanted to see the Marine Corps move into the 21st century and be more future-focused and modern in the way that we do communications, because it just felt we were very behind industry,” Vancina said. Today, he will work with Hoesly to establish the MCTSSA lab that’s envisioned as a FutureG center of excellence for 5G capabilities and would integrate and support the Project Dynamis ecosystem.
For Marines, 5G and the next FutureG will mean more flexibility and interoperability to enable integration of joint tactical radios, for example. The networks “are going to support those future capabilities like AI, (machine learning), cloud computing, autonomous systems, live video surveillance and computer vision. All of that stuff is going to require better, more modern networking capabilities,” he said.
Vancina recently graduated with a master’s degree in computer science from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., where he focused on 5G and wireless networking. Many people “don’t fully understand what 5G is and what it can provide,” he said. “It’s really kind of just thought of as basically higher bandwidth.”
But 5G networks are critical to support the joint force across the battlespace, as the joint cloud computing environment depends on seamless data sharing, “and all of that requires data to be collected at the edge of the network,” he said. “We need to… collect that data from the edge and we need to be able to process that and provide decision-quality information to those edge end-users and systems. In order to do that, we need a wireless edge network that will support those data rates and the optimization and security that is needed.”
Distributed mobile wireless networks and fallbacks will be needed in situations of degraded or denied communications, such as in an island-chain fight. “You can’t be tied to a single position anymore with long-range strike capabilities that are now part of the modern battlefield,” he said. “Wireless is what enables that. Wireless enables mobility. That is what is going to make our edge networks more capable and survivable.”
The network “is what’s going to determine what capabilities you’re able to deploy,” Vancina said. “Military leaders want to know how they’re going to kill things with stuff, and you’re not going to kill things with 5G. You’re going to kill things with those autonomous systems. You’re going to get better quality decisions with AI and ML, and the data sharing from sensors to shooters is what’s going to enable you to kill things. But all of that stuff happens and is enabled because of the network.”
“The network is the links in the kill chain. It’s what holds it together,” he added. “You can’t do JADC2 and you can’t do a kill chain without some kind of communications, and that’s what we’re trying to do better.”
