JULY/AUGUST AIRFORCEMAG.COM connectivity, you may be able to get [intelligence, surveil-
lance, and reconnaissance] information into your virtual
reality headgear and understand it better.”
Elsa B. Kania, an adjunct senior fellow in technology and
national security at the Center for a New American Security,
sees training as a natural bene ciary of increased speed and
decreased latency or delay.
“The intersection between AI and 5G will be really in-
teresting, and it goes both ways,” Kania said. “You’ll need
AI to manage 5G systems, given the complexity, and the
connectivity that 5G provides” will allow increased ma-
chine-to-machine communications so data fusion and AI
capabilities run more smoothly.
Kania said more can be done in experiments as well
as in evaluating potential risks and deciding how battle
networks should operate in a world where untrustworthy
network and hardware providers could be part of the
ecosystem.
The Air Force should invest more money in basic re-
search for next-generation telecommunications like 5G,
Kania said.
“Given that a lot of 5G applications are relevant in air,
space, and cyber, I think the Air Force could be at the
forefront of a lot of this going forward as they build upon
existing programs and research to explore new directions,”
she said.TOTALLY WIRELESS NETWORKING?
While the Air Force’s regional 5G rollout gets underway,
another information technology pilot program could also
lay the foundation for future progress: Enterprise IT as a
Service (EITaaS).
Konieczny imagines the Air Force could someday replace
ber and wireline networks with a totally wireless solution.
Mike Le , AT&T’s vice president for defense, said wireless
infrastructure could be transformative. “We view it as a
platform to explore how the Air Force can ultimately bene-
t from the power of 5G and a network that delivers faster
speeds and response times,” he wrote in an email. “We can
explore the future potential for a massive number of smart
connections that can enable new mission capabilities like
never before.”AFB, Fla., where the service plans to build the technology
into its “base of the future.”
And 5G technology is not limited to commercial wire-
less networks. e same capabilities could also be used in
targeting and command, control, and communications for
hypersonic weapons, Pentagon spokeswoman Elissa Smith
suggested.
e Defense Innovation Board said in an April report on
5G that it also “has the potential to strengthen existing mis-
sions like nuclear” command, control, and communications.
“At an enterprise level, 5G can vastly improve day-to-
day tasks such as logistics and maintenance, elevating the
e ciency and speed of work across DOD,” the report said.
Indeed, Samsung predicted in a 2018 blog post that 5G
would help reinvent how the Air Force monitors its supply
chain and tracks its assets. “Flight line operations and main-
tenance teams can leverage secure tablets within a secure
5G environment to view real-time inventory and schemat-
ics, better utilize spare parts, manage aircraft diagnostics
solutions, and more,” the company wrote.
Konieczny said a “ight line of the future” project is al-
ready underway that would bring secure wireless connec-
tivity to maintainers where they work.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in May, Chris-
topher C. Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland
Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,
said greater bandwidth will provide new capacity to support
the ever-expanding “Internet of things”—network-enabled
devices embedded in everything from base maintenance
and security sensors to training systems.
A Defense Department-wide 5G experiment will look to
create a “smart” port or depot by connecting maintenance
and test systems together, automating work that airmen
do manually today, Konieczny said. “It’s a way of actually
knowing where all your assets are going,” he said. Smart
systems could automatically track where spare parts are
installed, eliminating time-consuming paperwork. “We
can link together, dynamically, what parts are existing in a
particular component based upon the tags they have already
attached to them.”
MULTIDOMAIN OPERATIONS
5G also promises to enable Air Force Chief of Sta Gen.
David L. Goldfein’s vision for multi-domain operations,
speeding decision-making through enhanced situational
awareness.
Air Force Chief Scientist Richard J. Joseph said in an April
15 interview that 5G capability will come rst, followed by
use cases that leverage it. “It’s sort of ‘build it and they will
come,’” he said. “You will see protocols for how we move our
information around, because now we’re moving a lot more
information. e question is, when we have the capacity to
move a lot more around, will other things happen? Will we
move so much information around that our problem will
be sifting through the information and guring out what
it means?”
As 5G drives new ways of waging war, airmen will have
to train and think di erently. at promises ripple e ects
in areas like Air Education and Training Command’s Pilot
Training Next initiative and in how missions are organized
and planned.
“Mission planning may be more interesting. We don’t
know how they’re going to do that yet because we haven’t
talked about it yet,” Konieczny said. “If we have good 5G
Photo: SSgt. Ceaira Tinsley
Using a laptop and portable diagnostic equipment during
exercise Africa Lion 2019 in Morocco, avionics maintainers
from the 555th Aircraft Maintenance Unit perform an
airspeed-leakage test on an F-16C.