5G at the Heart of Next-Generation Military Communications

Over the past seven years, Guillaume Lambert has led France’s national transition from legacy TETRAPOL networks to a sovereign 4G/5G mobile infrastructure designed for public safety and emergency services.

As the founder and Director General of ACMOSS (the agency responsible for operational mobile communications for security and emergency services), Guillaume oversaw the design, deployment, and governance of the “Réseau Radio du Futur” (RRF)—Europe’s first sovereign 4G/5G network dedicated to emergency and response services. The RRF currently covers 98% of French territory and is managing the migration of 400,000 personnel—including crisis management teams, police officers, gendarmes, firefighters, emergency medical staff, Ministry of Justice personnel, customs officers, armed forces (for domestic operations) —from the legacy TETRAPOL network to a new full-MVNO 4G/5G architecture based on contracts with the four national mobile operators.

For decades, armed forces have relied on their own networks: proprietary, siloed, expensive to maintain, and slow to evolve. That logic is now reversing.

NATO has identified next-generation communication networks, including 5G, among its nine Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (EDTs) — technologies that present both new opportunities and new threats to Allied security.

Like industry before it, like healthcare and public safety before it, defence is shifting toward the open standards of commercial mobile networks — 4G, 5G, and tomorrow 6G. This shift is one of the most significant structural changes in the B2B telecommunications market for the decade ahead.

At the 2025 Hague Summit, NATO Allies committed to investing 5% of GDP in defence and security spending by 2035. Of that total, 1.5% of GDP is earmarked for defence-critical infrastructure — cybersecurity, communication networks, civil resilience. ICT investments by European NATO members in aerospace and defence already exceeded $11 billion in 2025, on a sharply accelerating trajectory.

Non-negotiable security requirements for military use of 5G

Mobile networks were not designed for military use. Their security standards do not cover the full network stack and represent only a baseline. To be qualified as “defence ready,” a 5G network must meet a body of requirements that goes well beyond commercial compliance.

The first requirement is supply chain verification. If civilian or military 5G networks were compromised or fell under the control of potential adversaries, the consequences for NATO’s military instrument — and therefore for deterrence and defence — would be catastrophic. NATO has accordingly integrated trustworthiness criteria into its security policies and procurement procedures, with particular attention to high-risk vendors.

The second requirement is a Zero Trust architecture. The Zero Trust Data Format (ZTDF), ratified by NATO’s Combined Communications-Electronics Board as an interoperable cross-border standard, extends Zero Trust principles to the file level itself: each piece of data carries its own encryption, access rights, and audit trail, regardless of the network through which it transits. It is no longer the network’s security that protects the data — the data protects itself.

The third requirement is electromagnetic risk management. Rogue cell towers, compromised terminals, and the geolocation of devices during operations are real risks for any military operation using 5G. Dynamic spectrum sharing and the ability to pivot rapidly between frequency bands are among the available countermeasures. NATO is working to integrate these electronic protection measures into the next generation of its STANAG 5665 standard.

The fourth requirement is end-to-end encrypted transport and secure inter-network roaming, enabling NATO military personnel to roam across Allied networks without compromising data integrity. NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE), based in Tallinn, Estonia, has validated Oracle’s Security Edge Protection Proxy (SEPP) solution — deployed on a Druid 5G Raemis core network via Oracle Roving Edge Devices — as a trusted mechanism for securing roaming communications between member nations’ networks, with encryption both in transit and at rest.

Military use of 5G will combine public, private, and non-terrestrial networks

Building a full-stack private 5G network exclusively for military use would carry significant drawbacks: high capital and maintenance costs, limited coverage, and the requirement for dedicated spectrum allocations. Leveraging commercial 5G network components alongside private 5G networks reduces costs and delivers far wider coverage. The answer is therefore not binary — proprietary network or public network — but hybrid and multi-layered.

The reference architecture emerging for next-generation military mobile networks organises around three complementary layers.

The commercial public network forms the base layer: it provides coverage, capacity, and economies of scale. Quality of service, priority, and preemption mechanisms — such as those deployed in France’s Réseau Radio du Futur (RRF), Europe’s first sovereign 4G/5G network dedicated to public safety and emergency services, operational nationwide since June 2025 — guarantee military users’ access even under network saturation.

Deployable private 5G networks — or “tactical bubbles” — form the operational layer closest to the forces. Solutions such as Nokia’s “Banshee,” already in use with the US Marine Corps and at NATO’s Ādaži base in Latvia, enable rapid deployment of a private 5G/LTE network under austere field conditions, with network slice isolation, co-located edge

computing, and interoperability between national and coalition forces. NATO’s REPMUS exercise in Portugal demonstrated that a mobile 5G bubble can extend the operational range of unmanned maritime systems from 10 to 30 kilometres between 2023 and 2025.

Tactical 5G networks also address the requirement for low electromagnetic signature. Operating in the 24–29 GHz band, the 5G mmWave tactical bubble creates a local, temporary network with native Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) and Low Probability of Detection (LPD) capabilities. High-throughput connectivity remains robust against electromagnetic interference and jamming attempts. The limited range inherent to mmWave — from a few hundred metres to a few kilometres — is not a drawback in this context. It is precisely what gives the bubble its stealth: a high-frequency directional beam with naturally limited atmospheric diffusion, making it extremely difficult to intercept from a distance. The range constraint becomes a security attribute. This is what Microamp’s 5G mmWave tactical bubble — integrating Anduril Industries’ VoyagerVM 4.0 military-grade edge server and Druid Software’s Raemis™ core network — demonstrated at MILCOM 2025, MWC Barcelona 2026 and more recently at SOF Week 2026. Convinced by this technology, the UK Ministry of Defence awarded a contract to Microamp in early June 2026—through the NATO DIANA initiative—to support the development, experimentation, and operational testing of its advanced millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5G communication capability in a combat context.

Non-terrestrial networks (NTN) — comprising LEO, MEO, and GEO satellites, as well as High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) drones — form the resilience and extended coverage layer. According to experts gathered at the Defense Communications Forum, NTN are now an integral part of the 5G ecosystem. The 5G-NTN convergence has moved from concept to real deployment. The objective is not only to extend coverage where terrestrial infrastructure is absent, but to ensure dynamic interoperability, secure routing, and mission continuity across the full land-to-space continuum.

Should terrestrial infrastructure collapse, a 5G NTN constellation with an onboard core network becomes both base station and network core — keeping critical communications active for civilian, emergency, and military users without dependence on ground-based power. This is the architecture the US DoD is pursuing with Starshield, and which Telefónica tested in 2025 aboard a NATO Standing Naval Forces vessel.

NATO’s military communications planning, based on the PACE methodology (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency), is being redefined accordingly: 5G is moving from the contingency option toward the primary option, with HF, VHF, and UHF networks as fallback.

5G as the enabler transforming C2 headquarters into C4ISR

As the battlefield digitalises, the ability to command and control in real time has become a decisive factor of success. It is in this context that the concept of C4ISR — Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance — has emerged to describe the most advanced form of military headquarters. Such an architecture constitutes the nervous system of military operations: designed to collect massive volumes of data from multiple sensors, databases, and global sources, process it, and share it with authorised users for better-informed decision-making. 5G is its vascular system — the enabler that makes C4ISR operationally viable.

5G integrated into DoD operations supports CJADC2 — Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control — by enabling seamless communication between platforms operating across land, maritime, air, space, and cyber domains. Network slicing allows virtual networks to be prioritised according to mission-critical applications, with dynamic and secure resource allocation.

Concretely, 5G transforms command headquarters along three axes, enabling their architectural evolution from C2 to C4ISR.

First, the very high data throughputs enabled by 5G support real-time multi-domain data fusion. An operations centre can simultaneously ingest drone video feeds, force geolocation data, IoT sensor alerts from the area of operations, and intelligence databases — on a unified dashboard, with sub-second latency. This is exactly what France’s SYRIUS Dispatcher platform delivers for crisis managers coordinating RRF-connected public safety operations.

Second, 5G supports the development of edge command autonomy by catalysing all three components of autonomy: platform autonomy, collaborative autonomy between platforms and domains, and mission autonomy — where an operator assigns an objective to a platform and lets it operate. The combination of mission autonomy with PACE plans embedded on each UAV or unmanned vessel, integrating 5G communications, MANET mesh networking, and 5G NTN satellite access, ensures command continuity across a very wide spectrum of combat conditions.

Third, 5G enables edge AI at the network boundary. The future of C4ISR architectures will be defined by systems that learn, adapt, and coordinate in near-real time across multiple domains. Deep learning algorithms rapidly analyse ISR feeds, identify anomalies, and suggest courses of action. 5G with co-located edge computing is the sine qua non condition for these algorithms to execute at the point of action, without dependence on distant cloud connectivity.

5G as a dual-use infrastructure: from communications to sensing and electronic warfare

The most consequential evolution in military 5G is one that is still largely invisible in public debate: 5G networks are not only communication systems. They are becoming sensing systems — capable of detecting, classifying, and tracking objects in their electromagnetic environment, including threats that no dedicated sensor was deployed to intercept.

This convergence has a name in 3GPP standardisation: ISAC, for Integrated Sensing and Communication. Introduced as a study item in 3GPP Release 19 and progressing toward normative standardisation in Release 20, ISAC repurposes the radio signals already transmitted by 5G base stations as radar illuminators. The same New Radio waveform that connects a terminal to the network simultaneously measures time-of-flight, Doppler shift, and angle-of-arrival of reflected echoes — enabling environmental sensing without any dedicated radar hardware. In a military context, this transforms every 5G base station — whether commercial, private, or tactical — into a node of a distributed passive sensing network.

Counter-UAS (C-UAS) is the most immediate operational application. The proliferation of commercial and military drones has outpaced the deployment of dedicated detection systems. A 5G network operating in ISAC mode offers a structural response: it covers the same geographic area it already serves for communications, requires no additional spectrum, and can be updated through software rather than hardware. Multiple base stations receiving echoes of the same drone create a multistatic radar geometry, providing the three-dimensional tracking accuracy and Doppler signature discrimination needed to distinguish an autonomous quadcopter from a bird, or a fixed-wing loitering munition from an aircraft. Combined with edge AI co-located at each base station, classification can occur in near-real time, without reliance on a distant processing centre. This is precisely the kind of latency-critical application that 5G’s sub-millisecond Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) profile was designed to serve.

Beyond drone detection, 5G networks offer a new layer of electromagnetic domain awareness. The electromagnetic environment — frequencies, signal sources, interference patterns — is a battlefield in itself, increasingly contested by adversaries capable of jamming, spoofing, and direction-finding. A dense 5G network, by virtue of its coverage, its multiplicity of antennas, and its continuous spectrum monitoring capabilities, constitutes a distributed signal intelligence (SIGINT) infrastructure. Anomalous RF emissions — rogue transmitters, hostile terminals, electronic attack systems — can be localised by correlating observations across multiple base stations, without any dedicated SIGINT platform. This passive sensing capability is the civilian 5G network’s equivalent of what NATO’s SIGINT aircraft achieve in a much narrower geographic corridor at vastly higher cost.

The mmWave tactical bubble extends this logic into the kinetic domain. Operating in the 24–29 GHz band, 5G mmWave signals offer centimetre-level spatial resolution when used for sensing — sufficient to map the contours of a building, detect human presence through walls, or track the micro-Doppler signature of a crawling combatant. At these frequencies, the boundary between communications and radar becomes architecturally porous. The same antenna arrays that form the mmWave beam for data transmission can be repurposed

for active sensing through beam steering, without hardware reconfiguration. What Microamp and Druid Software’s tactical bubble demonstrated at MILCOM 2025 in the

communications domain is therefore also a proof-of-concept for forward-edge sensing — a capability with significant implications for urban combat and perimeter security.

The electronic warfare implications of ISAC are already drawing attention from Allied defence research organisations. A 5G network operated by a potential adversary, or compromised by one, ceases to be a neutral communications substrate: it becomes an intelligence collection platform targeting the forces it nominally serves. This is why the “clean network” requirement discussed earlier is not merely a supply chain concern — it is an ISAC concern. A base station that can sense its electromagnetic environment can also exfiltrate that environment. The architecture of trust that governs military use of 5G must therefore extend to the sensing layer, not only to the data transport layer.

For defence planners, the practical implication is that the choice of 5G infrastructure is now simultaneously a choice of ISR architecture. Operators and integrators who can demonstrate ISAC-capable networks, with sovereign supply chains and validated sensing performance, will hold a structural advantage in the emerging defence 5G market. This is a dimension of “defence readiness” that goes well beyond what today’s commercial compliance frameworks anticipate — and that organisations with operational experience in the interface between communications and situational awareness are best positioned to address.

Conclusion: defence-grade 5G — the next major B2B telecom market, for those who qualify

The defence 5G communications market will not open to all operators. “Defence ready” qualification demands supply chain sovereignty, a validated Zero Trust architecture, and the ability to operate in degraded or contested environments. Operators whose networks incorporate equipment from high-risk vendors will in all likelihood be excluded. This is, above all, a market of trust — even more than a market of performance.

What France’s RRF has built for public safety and emergency services — a state-operated network core, open 3GPP standards, priority and preemption mechanisms, a roadmap toward 5G Standalone — is precisely the model Allied armed forces are watching with growing interest. Public safety has shown the way. Defence is now following.