US media: The US military is accelerating the launch of 5G military testing

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On January 7, the website of the U.S. monthly magazine "National Defense" published a report titled "The U.S. Department of Defense Further Accelerates 5G Development", saying that the Pentagon is taking action to accelerate the adoption of 5G communication capabilities, which are expected to provide users with lightning-fast connections and low latency. The full text is excerpted as follows:

"This technology is critical to maintaining America's military and economic advantage, and the Department of Defense is investing heavily in 5G applications to test and demonstrate the various applications and uses of these emerging technologies in support of the National Defense Strategy," said Ellen Lord, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment.

5G technology has become one of the most talked-about technological innovations in the world, with countries racing to develop the fifth generation of wireless networks, which will offer significant improvements in data transmission speed, capacity and latency compared to today’s 4G networks.

Lord said at MITRE's 5G Summit in November 2020 that the Pentagon plans to strengthen 5G technology and invest heavily in future "next G" systems to support all combat functions, including firepower, command/control, intelligence, mobility/maneuver, protection, and maintenance/information.

“Ubiquitous, high-speed connectivity will change the way the military fights,” she said. “Future warfighters will leverage local and long-range 5G networks to transfer large amounts of data, linking remote sensors and weapons into a dense, resilient battlefield network.”

This data will be key to driving further developments in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, she noted.

In October 2020, the US Department of Defense announced a $600 million award for various 5G testing and trial activities across the United States.

The trials represent "the largest-scale, comprehensive testing of dual-use 5G applications in the world," said Michael Kratsios, acting undersecretary of defense for research and engineering and chief technology officer.

Lord noted that the trials will be up and running in 2021, with full-scale trials to follow the following year.

The Department of Defense plans to use all available spectrum under the 5G standard during the initial trial phase.

"The Department of Defense sees value in all spectrum bands for 5G, whether it's low band, mid band, high band or very high band of millimeter wave," said Joseph Evans, the Pentagon's lead director for 5G programs. "Different trials will...use different spectrum bands." Lord said the trial will help the Pentagon understand the technical implementation of spectrum sharing and potential mitigation techniques.

Participants in the program include commercial companies and traditional defense contractors.

At the Lewis-McChord Joint Base, the focus of the test will be augmented reality and virtual reality training. The goal is to quickly put a scalable, resilient and secure 5G network into the battlefield, provide a test platform for augmented reality and virtual reality capabilities under the 5G network, and apply these capabilities to mission planning, decentralized training and operations. Participating in the test are companies such as GBL Systems, AT&T, and Booz Allen Hamilton.

The question the trial is addressing, Evans said, is: "Can we leverage the connectivity and communications fabric that 5G networks provide to enable some advanced augmented reality-type gadgets and capabilities to be used by Soldiers in the field?"

At Naval Base San Diego, the trial will focus on smart storage and transfer between shore facilities and naval forces to improve the efficiency and precision of naval logistics, according to the Department of Defense. It will focus on the identification, recording, organization, storage, retrieval and transportation of supplies.

According to the Pentagon, the experiments at Nellis Air Force Base will focus on distributed command and control and developing a 5G technology testbed to help increase lethality in air, space and cyberspace while enhancing the survivability of C2 (command and control) systems.