When newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth finally sits down in his Pentagon office, a complicated but consequential problem will be among those piled on his desk: What to do about the ongoing war over the electromagnetic spectrum.
For years the Defense Department and commercial providers have tussled over usage of mid-band spectrum — between 1 GhZ (gigahertz) to 6 GHz usage, which makes up the 3.1-3.45 and 3.5 GHz S-band — widely considered to be the “Goldilocks” zone of the spectrum.
The DoD long has contended that this part of the spectrum band is essential for its various satellite communications, radars and navigation systems. However, US and foreign commercial companies covet those frequencies for providing high-speed wireless service to civilian and military users alike.
The issue: spectrum space cannot be used by both parties at the same, and crowding too many broadcasters into nearby frequency bands causes interference that would have a crippling effect on critical warfighting missions, current and former DoD officials tell Breaking Defense. Commercial industry, on the other hand, says the DoD’s concern is overblown.
“It is a zero sum game. There is finite spectrum, and the physics of the spectrum, about the desirability of the lower [3 GHz band] both for our target acquisition radars and for 5G, this makes it very difficult,” John Sherman, former DoD chief information officer and now dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, said in an interview.
While it may seem the Trump administration has more pressing issues to tackle in its first month, industry is expecting to get a real sense of where the new government is going on this issue with a Feb. 13 meeting of the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). And if past statements from Trump appointees hold, the Pentagon may find itself on the back foot as it seeks to defend its spectrum turf.
Here’s what you need to know about the fight over spectrum, key players and where the Trump administration may be leaning.
Military Systems vs. Future High-Speed Internet
The spectrum debate is hardly a theoretical one. The systems that rely on it are being used regularly by US forces around the world, said one defense official involved in the issue, speaking on background. The Navy’s Aegis AN/SPY radar, for instance, operates on the 3.1-3.5 GHz S-band.
The spectrum debate is hardly a theoretical one. The systems that rely on it are being used regularly by US forces around the world, said one defense official involved in the issue, speaking on background. The Navy’s Aegis AN/SPY radar, for instance, operates on the 3.1-3.5 GHz S-band.
US ships in the Red Sea are currently “using critical spectrum for radars to make sure drones and missiles are not striking their vessels or commercial ships. The military uses spectrum in Ukraine to thwart Russian missiles aimed at Kyiv and elsewhere. In the domestic United States, service members use the spectrum to train for overseas deployment,” the defense official told Breaking Defense in an email.
That’s why, the defense official said, DoD “must maintain spectrum access where and when needed to meet security objectives. Both international and domestic regulations regarding telecommunications and information and communication technologies (ICTs) must support this end state.”
It technically would be possible for the DoD to move its signals from the 3.1-3.5 range frequencies so they can be given to commercial industry, but Sherman said that amounts to a massive undertaking that would require replacing countless US military radar systems, costing “hundreds of billions” of dollars and creating a major security risk as the Pentagon scrambles to replace systems.
Though the spectrum may be finite, there could be ways to share parts of it, or at least part of the time — an idea the Pentagon has suggested it’s not totally against.
In fact, a prototype methodology for spectrum sharing was agreed way back in 2015 between NTIA and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates commercial spectrum use, for sharing of the 3.55 to 3.65 GHz band, otherwise known as the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS). The CBRS supports a wide range of wireless communications, including keyhole markup language files that are used to store and display geographic data.
That agreement was modified last summer, with input from the Navy, to expand spectrum access to the civilian side for high-speed internet services.
The DoD last April announced that it is undertaking a study, along with the NTIA, which coordinates federal agency spectrum use, on what is called “advanced dynamic spectrum sharing” with wireless providers in that band. The announcement came less than a week after release of a heavily redacted Pentagon report finding that — and echoing the defense official who spoke to Breaking Defense — any sharing scheme would need to ensure DoD has first dibs on access and strictly control other usage to avoid interference with military activities.
It is unclear, however, how long that study might take, and similar technical reviews in the past have taken years.
Who Slices Up the Spectrum?
The FCC and the NTIA are the two organizations with responsibility for setting US spectrum policy, and governing which users get access when to what bandwidths for what functions.
Within NTIA, it is the Office of Spectrum Management that sets the regulations for spectrum allocations to federal agencies, as well as certifying that government equipment meets the necessary standards to comply with those regulations.
In addition, there are two other interagency bodies that coordinate federal agency spectrum use.
The Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee (IRAC) is made up of most of the spectrum using agencies, including each of the military departments, according to the group’s website. The IRAC, which also has a liaison function with the FCC, is chaired by NTIA and is primarily a technical body. It meets monthly.
The second body is the Interagency Spectrum Advisory Council (ISAC), a top-level policy group composed of the principal members of each federal department that have an oversight control over spectrum use. It provides advice to NTIA and ensures “that all decisions made by NTIA, including those involving representations to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), take into consideration the diverse missions of the Federal Government,” according to NTIA’s website. DoD and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence both have seats on this council; for DoD it is the chief information officer who participates. The ISAC charter calls for a minimum of four meetings per year.
DoD “does have a little bit of a priority” in these groups, because it can “play the national security card” in decision making that then requires secret-level discussions, said one government official on background— before rushing to add that the department “rarely” takes such action.
Within the FCC, the Office of Engineering and Technology “develops and administers Commission decisions regarding spectrum allocations” for commercial telecommunications companies whether they use satellites, ground stations, ships or airplanes as broadcast platforms, according to the commission website.
None of the relevant agencies, including the National Security Council, responded on the record for this report.
Who Decides?
The trouble comes when the NTIA and the FCC disagree on spectrum usage, which has long been the case regarding DoD’s hold on mid-band spectrum.
At the working level, there are cooperation practices that are designed to avoid such disagreements in the first place, the government expert said.
In the event that there is “already an existing federal allocation,” then the FCC must consult with NTIA and unofficially discuss any plans they might have for commercial use of frequencies within or nearby that spectrum band, the expert said. The NTIA most often would then put together a technical group to undertake a study to see if there are compatibility issues and determine if spectrum sharing is possible between federal and non-federal users.
The FCC, in turn, shares draft proposals for new rules for commercial spectrum allocation with the NTIA for unofficial comment prior to FCC publication. Further, the NTIA, DoD, and even Pentagon agencies and military departments can comment in public once an FCC proposal is officially sent to the Federal Register.
Another government official told Breaking Defense, there is a “formal memorandum of understanding” between the NTIA and the FCC that clearly defines “coordination procedure when it comes to domestic rule makings.”
That MoU, the first government official said, is an official legal document [PDF] that specifies that the NTIA administrator and the FCC chair meet on a quarterly basis. If there are disagreements that cannot be resolved at the staff level, the idea is that these would be elevated to the principals to work out.
That document was signed in September 2022, following a GAO study in 2021 that found that there was no “clear” path for resolving high-level disputes between NTIA and the FCC and what processes existed were “chaotic.”
“If those meetings don’t resolve them, they would go up to the White House, to the Executive Office of the President,” the expert added.
But even if the president wants to get involved, the nation’s leader doesn’t have control over the FCC, meaning even the president is limited in their ability to resolve any disputes.
When a DoD dispute with the FCC remains unresolved after being fanned all the way up the chain of command, a last ditch effort for the NTIA is to go to court to block FCC action. The agency “can actually sue,” the first government official said, or make filings in lawsuits by other parties.
This is what has happened in the long-running Ligado case, although the experts said such action is almost never taken.
“In 24 years, [Ligado is] the only case I can recall of that happening. It’s extremely rare,” a second government official said.
How Trump Might Approach the Issue
With the change in administration, it is not beyond the pale that the entire effort to find a way to share the Goldilocks spectrum could be scrapped.
During Donald Trump’s first administration, the FCC leaned heavily toward the camp of wireless providers in the long-running spectrum wars — for example, controversially granting telecommunications firm Ligado a license to use spectrum over the vociferous objections of DoD, NTIA and a bevy of federal agencies that doing so would imperil the accuracy of GPS signals.
Trump’s recently appointed FCC chair, Brendan Carr, has been supportive of the wireless broadband industry’s campaign to widen its access to the spectrum. In 2020, Carr, along with the rest of the FCC, voted to support Ligado’s application, and he was a vocal supporter of opening up spectrum for economic benefits.
Further, the composition of Congress has changed and with it the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that traditionally has been strongly in DoD’s camp regarding spectrum access issues. In particular, former Sen. Jim Inhofe, R.-Olka., was unrelenting in fighting the FCC decision on Ligado. By contrast, current chair Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Missl, supported the FCC and Ligado during his previous tenure as chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
Furthermore, the spectrum battle is showing to be not only a conflict between agencies or government bodies but is also becoming a partisan issue. Republicans recently announced they want to include wireless spectrum adjustments in their upcoming reconciliation package that would reinstate the FCC’s spectrum auction authority. However, Democrats contend that the revenue in the package should be used for communications investments instead of offsetting other spending, Broadband Breakfast reported.
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