Commercial Tech at Heart of Future Defense Spectrum Management

The electromagnetic spectrum is required for nearly every aspect of space-based communications, from satellite to satellite to satellites to soldiers on the ground. Ensuring the spectrum needed for that communication is protected for use by the U.S. and its allies, increasingly means adopting technology developed in the commercial sector.

Over the past few decades, the commercial sector has spent four times as much on research and development than the federal government, including in areas like spectrum management, said Air Force Maj. Gen. Steven J. Butow, the military deputy director of the Defense Innovation Unit, while speaking Wednesday at the Association of Old Crows International Symposium and Convention, just outside Washington.

"During the time that we were not investing in electronic warfare capabilities as a fighting force, the commercial sector was taking off, digitizing, adopting communications capabilities - 3G, 4G, 5G - scaling up," Butow said. "You have companies like Qualcomm that were developing new methodologies to harness previously unusable parts of spectrum for economic advantage, and all kinds of different business models that we can learn from and then look at how we apply that today."

Today's warfighters, Butow said, have more commercial capabilities at their disposal than they did in the past, when everything was military issued.

"Now we have a plethora of different commercial capabilities that we can use throughout peacetime, contingency and even in war, and so do our allies," he said.

"Commercial technology provides the best way for us to actually rapidly expand and integrate with our allies and partners."

Working with the commercial sector to bring the best of what it has to offer into the Defense Department is part of what the DIU does, said Butow.

"The Defense Innovation Unit was created in 2015 by then Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, with the sole purpose of trying to bring the commercial technology sector back in, in a way that we could really benefit from a lot of innovation happening outside of the Department of Defense," he said.

Today, Butow said, much of technology development in spectrum management and in capabilities related to electronic warfare are being developed in the private sector. Integrating that into the department is a challenge that DIU is solving.

"The DOD has the monopoly on wicked problems," he said. "If you really want to solve a tough problem, we probably own it. And the best talent ... in the commercial sector today, they really want to work on those kind of problem sets."

Creating pathways for that to happen, he said, is what DIU does. In the last decade, he said, about 100 different organizations related to innovation have developed in the Defense Department, which do just that.

"Let's create an opportunity for them to be able to work on our problems in a way that could be financially favorable to them," he said.