giddy up a giddy up a giddy up a ding dong...

 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.

This explanatory illustration compares 4G with 5G. It was included in a 2020 Government Accountability Office report examining 5G wireless. (GAO/Provided)

“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.”

Army Brig. Gen. Jeth Rey, director of the Network Cross-Functional Team, and Army Maj. Gen. Robert Collins, the program executive officer for command, control and communications-tactical, listen to a presentation at Fort Myer, Virginia, April 26, 2022. (Colin Demarest/C4ISRNET)

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.”

btw for the ocd gang there a 5G's in the capti0n. hehehehehe.