It's 2035, and the sun beats
down on a vast desert coastline. A fighter jet takes off accompanied by four
unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) on a mission of reconnaissance and air support.
A dozen special forces soldiers have moved into a town in hostile territory, to
identify targets for an air strike on a weapons cache. Commanders need live
visual evidence to correctly identify the targets for the strike and to minimize
damage to surrounding buildings. The problem is that enemy jamming has blacked
out the team's typical radio-frequency bands around the cache. Conventional,
civilian bands are a no-go because they'd give away the team's position.
As the fighter jet and its automated wingmen cross into hostile territory, they
are already sweeping the ground below with radio-frequency, infrared, and
optical sensors to identify potential threats. On a helmet-mounted visor
display, the pilot views icons on a map showing the movements of antiaircraft
batteries and RF jammers, as well as the special forces and the locations of
allied and enemy troops.
While all this is going on, the fighter jet's autonomous wingmen establish an ad
hoc, high-bandwidth mesh communication network that cuts through the jamming by
using unjammed frequencies, aggregating signals across different radio channels,
and rapidly switching among different channels. Through a self-organizing
network of communication nodes, the piloted fighter in the air connects to the
special forces on the ground.
As soon as the network is established, the soldiers begin transmitting real-time
video of artillery rockets being transported into buildings. The fighter jet
acts as a base station, connecting the flying mesh network of the UAVs with a
network of military and commercial satellites accessible to commanders all over
the world. Processors distributed among the piloted and unpiloted aircraft churn
through the data, and artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithms locate the targets
and identify the weapons in the live video feed being viewed by the commanders.
Suddenly, the pilot sees a dot flashing on the far horizon through his
helmet-mounted display. Instantly, two of the four teammates divert toward the
location indicated by the flash. The helmet lights up a flight path toward the
spot, and the pilot receives new orders scrolling across the display:
New Priority: SEARCH AND RESCUE
Downed Pilot, 121 miles NNW
Execute Reconnaissance and Grid Search, Provide Air Cover
The two UAVs that have flown ahead start coordinating to identify the location
of hostile forces in the vicinity of the downed aircraft. A Navy rescue
helicopter and medical support vessel are already en route. Meanwhile, with the
fighter jet speeding away on a new mission, the two other UAVs supporting the
special forces squad shift their network configuration to directly link to the
satellite networks now serving the base-station role formerly played by the
fighter jet. The live video feed goes on uninterrupted. The reconfigurations
happen swiftly and without human intervention.
Warfare has always been carried out at the boundary between chaos and order.
Strategists have long tried to suppress the chaos and impose order by means of
intelligence, communication, and command and control. The most powerful weapon
is useless without knowing where to aim it. The most carefully constructed plan
leads nowhere if it is based on bad intelligence. And the best intelligence is
worthless if it arrives too late. No wonder that over the past two centuries, as
technologies such as photography, electronic communications, and computing
became available, they were quickly absorbed into military operations and often
enhanced by targeted defense R&D.
The next key enabler is fifth-generation ( 5G) wireless communications. The
United States, Europe, China, and Russia are now integrating 5G technologies
into their military networks. These are sizable and complicated projects, and
several different strategies are already becoming apparent.
At Lockheed Martin, we're enhancing standard 5G technologies to connect the many
platforms and networks that are fielded by the various branches of the armed
services. We call this our 5G.MIL initiative. Earlier this year, in two
projects, called Hydra and HiveStar, we demonstrated the feasibility of key
aspects of this initiative. Hydra yielded encouraging results on the
interoperability challenge, and HiveStar showed that it was possible to quickly
construct, in an area with no existing infrastructure, a highly mobile and yet
capable 5G network, as would be required on a battlefield.
The new work takes an unusual approach. It is a collaboration with commercial
industry in which technology is transferred from the civilian to the military
sector, not the other way around. Radar, rocketry, and nuclear energy got their
starts in military labs, and it took years, even generations, for these
technologies to trickle into consumer products. But today, for fundamental
technologies such as computing and communications, the sheer scale of
private-sector development is increasingly beyond the resources of even the
largest national defense agencies. To deploy networks that are sufficiently
fast, adaptive, agile, and interoperable, warfighters now have little
alternative but to exploit commercial developments.
No wonder, then, that the U.S. Department of Defense, through an initiative
called 5G to NextG, and various complementary investments from individual armed
services, has committed upwards of US $2 billion to advance commercial 5G
research and to perform tests and experiments to adapt the results for military
purposes.
To understand the significance of such a shift, consider how the United States
got to this juncture. In 18th-century conflicts, such as the Revolutionary War,
the only battlefield sensors were human eyes and ears. Long-distance
communication could take days and could be interrupted if the messengers it
relied on were captured or killed. Tactical battlefield decisions were signaled
by flags or runners to commence maneuvers or attacks.
By World War II, combatants had radar, aircraft, and radios to sense enemy
planes and bombers up to 80 miles ahead. They could communicate from hundreds of
miles away and prepare air defenses and direct fighter-interceptor squadrons
within minutes. Photoreconnaissance could supply invaluable intelligence—but in
hours or days, not seconds.
Today, the field of battle is intensively monitored. There are countless sensors
on land, sea, air, space, and even in cyberspace. Jet fighters, such as the
F-35, can act as information-processing hubs in the sky to fuse all that data
into a single integrated picture of the battlefield, then share that picture
with war fighters and decision makers, who can thus execute command and control
in near real time.
At least, that's
the goal. The reality often falls short. The networks that knit
together all these sensors are a patchwork. Some of them run
over civilian commercial infrastructure and others are military,
and among the military ones, different requirements among the
different branches and other factors have contributed to an
assortment of high-performance but largely incompatible
communication protocols. Messages may not propagate across these
networks quickly or at all.
Here's why that's a problem. Say that an F-35 detects an
incoming ballistic missile. The aircraft can track the missile
in real time. But today it may not be able to convey that
tracking data all the way to antimissile batteries in time for
them to shoot down the projectile. That's the kind of capability
the 5G.MIL initiative is aiming for.
There are broader goals, too, because future battlefields will
up the ante on complexity. Besides weapons, platforms, and gear,
individual people will be outfitted with network-connected
sensors monitoring their location, exposures to biochemical or
radioactive hazards, and physical condition. To connect all
these elements will require global mesh networks of thousands of
nodes, including satellites in space. The networks will have to
accommodate hypersonic systems moving faster than five times the
speed of sound, while also being capable of controlling or
launching cyberattacks, electronic warfare and countermeasures,
and directed-energy weapons.
Such technologies will fundamentally change the character and
speed of war and will require an omnipresent communications
backbone to manage capabilities across the entire battlefield.
The sheer range of coordinated activities, the volume of assets,
the complexity of their interactions, and their worldwide
distribution would quickly overwhelm the computing and network
capabilities we have today. The time from observation to
decision to action will be measured in milliseconds: When a
maneuvering hypersonic platform moves more than 3.5 kilometers
per second, knowing its location even a second ago may be of
little use for a system designed to track it.
Our 5G.MIL vision has two complementary elements. One is
exemplified by the opening scenario of this article: the quick,
ad hoc establishment of secure, local networks based on 5G
technology. The goal here is to let forces take sensor data from
any platform in the theater and make it accessible to any
shooter, no matter how the platform and the shooter each connect
to the network.
Aircraft, ships,
satellites, tanks, or even individual soldiers could connect
their sensors to the secure 5G network via specially modified 5G
base stations. Like commercial 5G base stations, these hybrid
base stations could handle commercial 5G and 4G LTE cellular
traffic. They could also share data via military tactical links
and communications systems. In either case, these battlefield
connections would take the form of secure mesh networks. In this
type of network, nodes have intelligence that enables them to
connect to one another directly to self-organize and
self-configure into a network, and then jointly manage the flow
of data.
Inside the hybrid base station would be a series of systems
called tactical gateways, which enable the base station to work
with different military communication protocols. Such gateways
already exist: They consist of hardware and software based on
military-prescribed open-architecture standards that enable a
platform, such as a fighter jet made by one contractor, to
communicate with, say, a missile battery made by another
supplier.
The second element of the 5G.MIL vision involves connecting
these local mesh networks to the global Internet. Such a
connection between a local network and the wider Internet is
known as a backhaul. In our case, the connection might be on the
ground or in space, between civilian and military satellites.
The resulting globe-spanning backhaul networks, composed of
civilian infrastructure, military assets, or a mixture of both,
would in effect create a software-defined virtual global defense
network.
The software-defined aspect is important because it would allow
the networks to be reconfigured—automatically—on the fly. That's
a huge challenge right now, but it's critical because it would
provide the flexibility needed to deal with the exigencies of
war. At one moment, you might need an enormous video bandwidth
in a certain area; in the next, you might need to convey a huge
amount of targeting data. Alternatively, different streams of
data might need different levels of encryption. Automatically
reconfigurable software-defined networks would make all of this
possible.
The military advantage would be that software running on the
network could use data sourced from anywhere in the world to
pinpoint location, identify friends or foes, and to target
hostile forces. Any authorized user in the field with a
smartphone could see on a Web browser, with data from this
network, the entire battlefield, no matter where it was on the
planet.
We partnered recently with the U.S. Armed Services to
demonstrate key aspects of this 5G.MIL vision. In March 2021,
Lockheed Martin's Project Hydra demonstrated bidirectional
communication between the Lockheed F-22 and F-35 stealth
fighters and a Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance plane in flight, and
then down to ground artillery systems.
This latest experiment, part of a series that began in 2013, is
an example of connecting systems with communications protocols
that are unique to their mission requirements. All three planes
are made by Lockheed Martin, but their different chronologies
and battlefield roles resulted in different custom
communications links that aren't readily compatible. Project
Hydra enabled the platforms to communicate directly via an
open-system gateway that translates data between native
communications links and other weapons systems.
Emerging technologies will fundamentally change the character
and speed of war and will require an omnipresent communications
backbone to manage capabilities across the entire battlefield.
It was a promising outcome, but reconnaissance and fighter
aircraft represent only a tiny fraction of the nodes in a future
battle space. Lockheed Martin has continued to build off Project
Hydra, introducing additional platforms in the network
architecture. Extending the distributed-gateway approach to all
platforms can make the resulting network resilient to the loss
of individual nodes by ensuring that critical data gets through
without having to spend money to replace existing platform
radios with a new, common radio.
Another series of projects with a software platform called
HiveStar showed that a fully functional 5G network could be
assembled using base stations about the size of a cereal box.
What's more, those base stations could be installed on modestly
sized multicopters and flown around a theater of operations—this
network was literally "on the fly."
The HiveStar team carried out a series of trials this year
culminating in a joint demonstration with the U.S. Army's Ground
Vehicle Systems Center. The objective was to support a
real-world Army need: using autonomous vehicles to deliver
supplies in war zones.
The team started simply, setting up a 5G base station and
establishing a connection to a smartphone. The base-station
hardware, a gNodeB in industry parlance, was an OctNode2, from
Octasic in Montreal. The base station weighs about 800 grams and
measures about 24 × 15 × 5 centimeters.
The team then
tested the compact system in an area without existing
infrastructure, as might very well be true of a war zone or
disaster area. The team mounted the gNodeB and a tactical radio
operating in the S band on a DJI Matrice 600 Pro hexacopter and
flew the package over a test range at Lockheed Martin's Waterton,
Colo., facility. The system passed the test: It established 5G
connectivity between this roving cell tower in the sky with a
tablet on the ground.
Next, the team set about wirelessly connecting a group of base
stations together into a flying, roving heterogeneous 5G
military network that could perform useful missions. For this
they relied on Lockheed-Martin developed software called
HiveStar, which manages network coverage and distributes tasks
among network nodes—in this case, the multicopters cooperating
to find and photograph the target. This management is dynamic:
if one node is lost to interference or damage, the remaining
nodes adjust to cover the loss.
For the team's first trial, they chose a pretty standard
military chore: locate and photograph a target using multiple
sensor systems, a function called tip and cue. In a war zone
such a mission might be carried out by a relatively large UAV
outfitted with serious processing power. Here the team used the
gNodeB and S-band radio setup as before, but with a slight
difference. All 5G networks need a software suite called 5G core
services, which is responsible for such basic functions as
authenticating a user and managing the handoffs from tower to
tower. In this trial, those core functions were running on a
standard Dell PowerEdge R630 1U rack-mounted server on the
ground. So the network consisted of the gNodeB on the lead
copter, which communicated with the ground using 5G and depended
on the core services on the ground computers.
The lead copter communicated using S-band radio links, with
several camera copters and one search copter with a
software-defined radio programmed to detect an RF pulse in the
target frequency. The team worked with the HiveStar software,
which managed the network's communications and computing, via
the 5G tablet. All that was needed was a target for the copters
to search for. So the team outfitted a remotely controlled toy
jeep, about 1 meter long, with a software-defined radio emitter
as a surrogate target.
The team initiated the tip-and-cue mission by entering commands
on the 5G tablet. The lead copter acted as a router to the rest
of the heterogeneous 5G and S-band network. Messages initiating
the mission were then distributed to the other cooperating
copters via the S-band radio connection. Once these camera
platforms received the messages, their onboard HiveStar mission
software cooperated to autonomously distribute tasks among the
team to execute search maneuvers. The multicopters lifted off in
search of the target RF emitter.
Once the detecting copter located the target jeep's radio
signal, the camera copters quickly sped to the area and captured
images of the jeep. Then, via the 5G gNodeB, they sent these
images, along with precise latitude and longitude information,
to the tablet. Mission accomplished.
Next the team thought of ways to fly the entire 5G system,
freeing it from any dependence on specific locations on the
ground. To do this, they had to put the 5G core services on the
lead copter, the one outfitted with the gNodeB. Working with a
partner company, they loaded the core services software onto a
single board computer, an Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX, along with
the gNodeB. For the lead copter, which would carry this gear,
they chose a robust, industrial-grade quadcopter, the Freefly
Alta X. They equipped it with the Nvidia board, antennas,
filters, and the S-band radios.
At the Army's
behest, the team came up with a plan to use the flying network
to demonstrate leader-follower autonomous-vehicle mobility. It's
a convoy: A human drives a lead vehicle, and up to eight
autonomous vehicles follow behind, using routing information
transmitted to them from the lead vehicle. Just as in the
tip-and-cue demonstration, the team established a heterogeneous
5G and S-band network with the upgraded 5G payload and a series
of supporting copters that formed a connected S-band mesh
network. This mesh connected the convoy to a second, identical
convoy several kilometers away, which was also served by a
copter-based 5G and S-band base station.
After the commander initiated the mission, the Freefly Alta X
flew itself above the lead vehicle at a height of about 100
meters and connected to it via the 5G link. The HiveStar
mission-controller software directed the supporting multicopters
to launch, form, and maintain the mesh network. The vehicle
convoy started its circuit around a test range about 10 km in
circumference. During this time, the copter connected via 5G to
the lead convoy vehicle would relay position and other
telemetric information to the other vehicles in the convoy,
while following overhead as the convoy traveled at around 50 km
per hour. Data from the lead vehicle was shared by this relay to
following vehicles as well as the second convoy via the
distributed multicopter-based S-band mesh network.
The team also
challenged the system by simulating the loss of one of the data
links (either 5G or S-band) due to jamming or malfunction. If a
5G link was severed, the system immediately switched to the S
band, and vice versa, to maintain connectivity. Such a
capability would be important in a war zone, where jamming is a
constant threat.
Though encouraging, the Hydra and HiveStar trials were but first
steps, and many high hurdles will have to be cleared before the
scenario that opens this article can become reality. Chief among
these is expanding the coverage and range of the 5G-enabled
networks to continental or intercontinental range, increasing
their security, and managing their myriad connections. We are
looking to the commercial sector to bring big ideas to these
challenges.
Satellite constellations, for instance, can provide a degree of
global coverage, along with cloud-computing services via the
internet and the opportunity for mesh networking and distributed
computing. And though today's 5G standards do not include
space-based 5G access, the Release 17 standards coming in 2022
from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project consortium will
natively support nonterrestrial networking capabilities for the
5G ecosystem. So we're working with our commercial partners to
integrate their 3GPP-compliant capabilities to enable
direct-to-device 5G connectivity from space. In the meantime,
we're using the HiveStar/multicopter platform as a surrogate to
test and demonstrate our space-based 5G concepts.
Security will entail many challenges. Cyberattackers can be
counted on to attempt to exploit any vulnerabilities in the
software-defined networking and network-virtualization
capabilities of the 5G architecture. The huge number of vendors
and their suppliers will make it hard to perform due diligence
on all of them. And yet we must protect against such attacks in
a way that works with any vendor's products rather than rely, as
in the past, on a limited pool of preapproved solutions with
proprietary (and incompatible) security modifications.
The advent of ultrafast 5G technology is an inflection point in
military technology.
Another interesting little challenge is presented by the 5G
waveform itself. It's made to be easily discovered to establish
the strongest connection. But that won't work in military
operations where lives depend on stealth. Modifications to the
standard 5G waveform, and how it's processed within the gNodeB,
can achieve transmission that's hard for adversaries to pick up.
Perhaps the greatest challenge, though, is how to orchestrate a
global network built on mixed commercial and military
infrastructure. To succeed here will require collaboration with
commercial mobile-network operators to develop better ways to
authenticate user connections, control network capacity, and
share RF spectrum. For software applications to make use of 5G's
low latency, we'll also have to find new, innovative ways of
managing distributed cloud-computing resources.
It's not a leap to see the advent of ultrafast 5G technology as
an inflection point in military technology. As artificial
intelligence, unpiloted systems, directed-energy weapons, and
other technologies become cheaper and more widely available,
threats will proliferate in both number and diversity.
Communications and command and control will only become more
important relative to more traditional factors such as the
physical capabilities of platforms and kinetic weapons. This
sentiment was highlighted in the summary of the 2018 U.S.
National Defense Strategy, the strategic guidance document
issued every four years by the U.S. DOD: "Success no longer goes
to the country that develops a new technology first, but rather
to the one that better integrates it and adapts its way of
fighting."
Here, it is worth noting that Chinese companies are among the
most active in developing 5G and emerging 6G technologies.
Chinese firms, notably Huawei and ZTE Corp., have more than 30
percent of the worldwide market for 5G technology, similar to
the combined market shares of Ericsson and Nokia. Chinese market
share could very well increase: According to the Council on
Foreign Relations, the Chinese government backs companies that
build 5G infrastructures in countries China invests in as part
of its Belt and Road Initiative. Meanwhile, in Europe, NATO
unveiled its first 5G military test site in Latvia in 2020.
Norway, notably, is exploring dedicating software-defined
networks in commercial 5G infrastructure to support military
missions.
Perhaps this convergence of commercial and defense-sector
development around 5G, 6G, and future communications
technologies will lead to powerful and unexpected commercial
applications. The defense sector gave the world the Internet.
The world now gives militaries 5G communications and beyond.
Let's find out what the defense sector can give back.
- STEVEN
WALKER
- DANIEL
RICE
- MARK KAHN
- JOHN
CLARK
Authors' note: 5G.MIL, HiveStar, and Lockheed Martin are all
trademarks of the Lockheed Martin Corporation. The authors wish
to acknowledge the help of Brandon Martin in the writing of
Why the World’s Militaries Are
Embracing 5G - IEEE Spectrum.
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