The hearing we previewed in the last post (Spectrum for War and Peace) has wrapped and we now know who’s standing in the way of opening up the spectrum pipeline. Spoiler alert: The military-industrial complex (MIC) is cool with the status quo.

MIC spokesman Bryan Clark doubled-down on the conspiratorial idea that China is running a scam on the Western World by encouraging us to standardize on the 2 – 8 GHz mid-band for 5G and 6G when its best use is for naval and other military radar systems. The section of his comments on this claim is titled “China’s long con for spectrum superiority.” It highlights papers touting the value of mid-band for data, which we’re meant to believe are phony Chinese propaganda that we’ve swallowed because the world of commerce is pitifully naïve.

Sure enough, everybody likes the mid-band: it’s good for wireless data networks for many of the same reasons that it’s coveted by the MIC, nice propagation in terms of distance vs. energy. But the requirements of data nets and radar aren’t completely aligned.

Differences Between Networks and Radar

Let’s look at the most obvious differences between data and radar. Data wants to penetrate obstacles while radar wants to harvest reflections. Hence, radar wants higher frequencies than data.

• Data networks want their signals to penetrate obstacles between transmitters and receivers while radar wants its signals to bounce.
• Data networks composed of battery-powered devices want extreme power efficiency, while radar is stationary and often hooked up to massive sources of power such as the nuclear generators aboard naval ships.
• Data networks want their beams small and focused so they don’t create out-of-band interference. Radar uses much wider swathes.
• Radar transmitters rotate while data transmitters are stationary and divided into sectors.
• Data encodes information on radio sine waves by cleverly manipulating amplitude, phase, and frequency. Radar only cares about raw energy.
• Data networks support millions of concurrent users through hundreds of thousands of radios while radar networks serve dozens or hundreds of devices at most.
• Data networks are bidirectional (active senders and receivers on both ends) while radar and other sensor networks are unidirectional pairs of active and passive endpoints.

Hence, data is a much more complex and demanding application than sensing. When data network designers seized on the mid-band, they did so because their knowledge of physics led them to the same conclusion about the best way to meet the needs of their application.

[ Note: Certain kinds of sensor networks are closely coupled to specific frequencies: the passive water vapor sensors used by NOAA must be tuned to the frequencies of the phenomena they measure. But active/passive sensors are free to utilize much more diverse frequency bands since they have control over both ends of their conversations.]

What Really Happened

So no, China didn’t con 5G and 6G network designers to follow its lead; the designers independently landed on the best solution for their highly demanding application, while radar designers probably picked frequencies best aligned with the state of radio signal processing equipment when they developed their systems piecemeal over the course of 100 years of combat. Radar is a legacy application while 5G data is brand new.

Clark, who doesn’t appear to have any radio expertise, is most likely parroting a script given to him by his MIC paymasters, a group primarily interested in protecting the installed base of radar and the recurring revenue of maintenance.

Indeed, upgrading military radar is a very expensive proposition. One notorious example is the classic B-52 bomber:

The 1960s-era B-52, whose missions have ranged from nuclear alert during the Cold War to precision strikes against the Taliban, is the workhorse of the Air Force’s bomber fleet. The service is undergoing a $48 billion overhaul to keep it operating for another 30 to 40 years alongside its newest bomber, the B-21…

The first, called the B-52 Radar Modernization Program, has seen its cost estimate grow from $2.3 billion in 2021 to $3.3 billion as of March, according to Jason Knight, deputy senior material leader for the B-52.

Barriers to Military Improvement

This one project is more pricey than the entire annual budget for USAID, a paltry $40B by comparison. The barriers to radar improvement aren’t just fiscal, they’re also time-driven. Clark estimated that it would take 20 years to replace current military radar even if money weren’t an issue.

This tells me that the project to revise and improve military radar needs to start right away. We don’t live in a world where the MIC has a blank check to purchase systems without regard to their economic impact. When radar was invented it was the only game in the radio space. In today’s world, military systems need to coordinate with commercial ones.

Of course, we already do this in limited cases. Clark explains that China has the ability to pre-empt commercial networks with military ones as if that were such a weird thing, justifying his conspiracy theory. This is exactly the capability that CBRS uses in its three-tiered permission system. The US uses automation to do something China does with human labor under the guise of military-civil fusion.

Radios in War and Peace

Peacetime radio policy doesn’t need to be entirely driven by wartime requirements. Rather, we need radio policy that can pivot between war and peace. For example, some of the drones that Ukraine used to capture Russian territory in Kursk were programmed to use the same radio channels that Russia uses. They couldn’t be jammed without disabling Russian drones.

In Kursk, many Russian drones were also simply jammed out of existence:

“[Ukraine] discovered the main frequencies of our border radio communication networks, drone control frequencies, and prepared powerful jammers that crushed our communications,” according to another Russian blogger quoted by WarTranslated.

An Agile Military Supports a Vibrant Economy

At the start of the war, Russian drones were superior, but three years later Ukraine turned the table with its own, internally developed drones. Note that this didn’t take 20 years thanks to a somewhat superior Ukrainian procurement process.

The main problems MIC disclosed at the America Offline hearing are failures of engineering and procurement. It’s not practical to stock the military with systems targeted for 20 years of use when wartime conditions in today’s world require rapid adjustments in the field. Systems must be agile.

Straight-jacketing the wireless economy will not make Americans safer, the proposals floated by MIC at the hearing amount to nothing more than delaying tactics. The rank and file military knows what has to be done: the military needs to recognize that spectrum is the primary battlefield with IT as the foundation. The military doesn’t need a revival of the Warrior Ethos, it needs to become a nerd-driven technology enterprise serving the public interest.