DoD CIO taking over as 5G lead, expanding pilot programs

Updated 5/15/23 at 3:49 pm ET with comment from FutureG and 5G Office Principal Director Thomas Rondeau.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s chief information office will take over all 5G-related activities within the department at the start of the next fiscal year, as it moves towards “an open network, open software approach” for industry to “dominate” and have a leg up against adversaries like China.

Speaking at a Defense Tech Week event today, Pentagon CIO John Sherman said his office “is taking over the 5G lead for DoD,” on Oct. 1 and has already been working on this area with the under secretary of defense for research and engineering’s office. The move would seemingly shift the Pentagon’s 5G efforts from USD R&E’s FutureG and 5G Office Principal Director Thomas Rondeau, who resides in the office of the deputy chief technology officer, to Sherman’s office.

Following the publication of this story, Rondeau provided a statement to Breaking Defense on May 15 saying USD R&E would work with the CIO as the transition takes place and as Sherman looks at expanding the Pentagon’s existing 5G pilot programs to additional DoD installations and including open radio access network, or O-RAN, pilots.

“As the research and engineering arm of the DoD’s efforts in telecommunications, the inclusion of CIO in the expansion of the pilots reflects the Department’s commitment to being on the cutting edge of this technology,” Rondeau said. “We are excited to expand upon the established partnership with CIO in experimentation and innovation and move into this next phase towards implementation.”

Sherman said the CIO’s office is working with a number of US companies to expand the pilots “as we move away from a closed-network kind of black box sort of thing, like certain Chinese companies like to do with their global marketing here” — seemingly a stray shot at Chinese-owned TikTok — “to more of an open-network, open-software approach that our US industry can work and dominate on,” Sherman said. “And this is something that we at DoD can help catalyze.”

The Pentagon in October 2020 awarded $600 million for the first set of three-year pilots at five bases in an effort to inform the department’s adoption of 5G networks. The first wave of pilots involved over 100 companies, with half of them being non-traditional industry partners. 

The first set of pilots were shared among four military services exploring spectrum sharing, building 5G networks for virtual/augmented reality training and building “smart warehouses.” The locations for the first tranche included Hill Air Force Base in Utah, Joint Base Lewis-McChord (Army and Air Force) in Washington, Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany in Georgia, Naval Base San Diego and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. 

The same year in June, DoD announced seven more sites under the second tranche of 5G pilot awards, this time with a key focus on spectrum sharing with the private sector: Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam (Navy and Air Force) in Hawaii, Joint Base San Antonio and Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. Fort Hood (recently renamed to Fort Cavazos), Fort Irwin and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton were also chosen as pilot test sites under the second set of awards. 

“There’s some due diligence we have to do on this,” Sherman said about the Pentagon’s 5G efforts. “But I do want to move along on this if at all possible.”

DoD Standing Up New Office Focused On Bettering User Experience

Meanwhile, DoD will be opening up a new office dedicated to user experience (UX), one of Sherman’s top priority areas. The new office will be similar to the Pentagon’s zero trust portfolio management office within the DoD CIO, which was formally stood up last year and is being lead by Randy Resnick.

“We’ve got to find the right human to lead it with his same level of expertise and passion,” Sherman said. “But for UX, the same as we have for zero trust, a small team, not to try to centrally manage everything but to coordinate the same as we’re doing for zero trust.

“We’re already working this right now across a lot of great stakeholders, but also moving along here on what we’re doing on [customer experience] in the department,” he continued.

Sherman did not say when the UX office will be established.

In an interview with Breaking Defense last year, Sherman said improving UX will be an emphasis for his office moving forward. His comments at the time were prompted by an “open letter” that went semi-viral on LinkedIn from an Air Force officer begging DoD to “fix our computers” before investing in other areas. 

Sherman and the CIO’s of the Army, Air Force and Navy responded with their own LinkedIn post saying they took the dialogue “to heart” and acknowledged that more work needs to be done on UX.