At Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada – announces the Pentagon – construction of a 5G experimental network will begin in July. It will become operational in January 2021.
The Red Flag, the most important air manoeuvre in the United States, took place at this base last March, with the participation of German, Spanish and Italian forces. The latter were also composed of F-35 fighters which – the Air Force says – were “integrated with the best of American military aviation” in order to “exploit the full potential of the aircraft and weapons systems on board”, including certainly the nuclear ones. At the Red Flag in 2021, 5G mobile networks consisting of towers, that can be assembled and disassembled in less than an hour for rapid transfer depending on the operation in progress, will probably already be in operation for testing in a real environment.
The Nellis base is the fifth selected by the Pentagon to test the military use of 5G: the others are in Utah, Georgia, California and Washington State.
A Congressional Research Service paper (see below) explains that this fifth-generation mobile data technology can have “many military applications. One such application is for “autonomous military vehicles,” that is, robotic air, land and naval vehicles capable of autonomously performing attack missions without even remote control. This requires the storage and processing of an enormous amount of data that cannot be carried out solely on board the autonomous vehicle. The 5G will allow this type of vehicle to use an external data storage and processing system, similar to the current Cloud for personal file storage. This system can make possible “new military operational concepts”, such as “swarming”, in which each vehicle automatically connects to the others to carry out the mission (e.g. an air attack on a city or a naval attack on a port).
5G will make the entire command and control system of the US armed forces more powerful on a global scale: currently – explains the document – it uses satellite communications but, because of the distance, the signal takes some time to arrive, causing delays in the execution of military operations. These delays will be virtually eliminated by 5G. It will play a decisive role in the use of hypersonic weapons, which, also equipped with nuclear warheads, travel at more than 10 times the speed of sound.
5G will also be extremely important for the secret services, making possible much more effective control and espionage systems than the current ones. “5G is vital to maintaining America’s military and economic advantages,” the Pentagon said.
Particularly advantageous is the fact that “the emerging 5G technology, which is commercially available, offers the Department of Defense the opportunity to take advantage of this system at lower costs for its own operational requirements. In other words, the 5G commercial network, made by private companies, is being used by the U.S. Armed Forces at a much lower cost than would be required if the network were made solely for military purposes. This also happens in other countries.
It is therefore understandable that the 5G dispute, especially between the United States and China, is not part of the trade war alone. 5G creates a new track for the arms race, which is taking place less in terms of quantity than quality. This is not addressed by the media and is largely ignored even by critics of the technology, who focus their attention on the possible harmful effects on health. This commitment is certainly of great importance, but it must be joined with those opposing the military use of this technology, which is unwittingly financed by ordinary users of fifth-generation mobile phones.
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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto. Translated by Roger Lagassé.
Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Featured image is from Greek City Times
