The Department of Defense (DOD) will work to prevent interference to aviation instruments, as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) continues to auction C-band spectrum used for 5G communication, Defense News reported on Thursday.

“The approach should be not on trying to slow down 5G metro deployment, but speeding up development and testing of mitigations that can serve as an interim gap until avionics manufacturers can harden their systems,” said Alan Burke, the Pentagon’s chair for the interagency Aviation Cyber Initiative Task Force.

The head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) requested that the FCC pause the sale of the C-band spectrum in Dec. 2020, following findings that 5G operations could cause harmful interference to radar altimeters, which are used to measure the distance between the aircraft and the ground.

To combat the threat, the Pentagon will study how the deployment of 5G networks will impact military aircraft, then enact a strategy to mitigate any safety concerns. “The longer-term challenge is going to be making — not just radar altimeters — but avionics systems that are resilient to out-of-band interference,” Burke added.

"The FCC confronted a host of technical, legal, practical, and political challenges in structuring this auction,” outgoing FCC chairman Ajit Pai said. “It would have been easy to delay. But we rightly pushed ahead and overcame every one of those obstacles. As a result, we significantly advanced United States leadership in 5G and have enabled America’s wireless consumers to more quickly benefit from 5G services.”

As part of the 5G FAST Plan, the FCC has projected to sell more than 5,000 new flexible-use overlay licenses for C-band spectrum in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz frequency. The first phase of the auction received bids totaling $80.9 billion. 

“We’re working to establish a collaborative interagency approach,” Burke said. “And that includes [establishing] a national 5G operational test range. If we wanted to do operational testing of our radar altimeters in a 5G C band environment, we don’t have the capability to do that right now. And so that’s a shortfall that we want to work to address.”

The Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Youngstown State University will collaborate on a potential $1 million project to establish a center in the Midwest region for training workers in the battery and electric vehicle manufacturing industry.

“We are in a period of tremendous advancement in battery technologies, presenting new opportunities for electric vehicles and energy storage systems,” said DOE Secretary Dan Brouillette. 

DOE said Wednesday the Energy Storage Workforce Innovation Center will be built to develop skilled labor that can support “Voltage Valley,” the northeast portion of Ohio where a number of EV and battery companies intend to make investments.

The vehicle technologies and advanced manufacturing offices under DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy will serve as project sponsors.

Development of the workforce development center supports the Energy Storage Grand Challenge, an effort by the department to accelerate battery production and commercialization.

"With these new technologies and growing industries, it is essential that we prepare a workforce that will lead the next generation of energy storage technologies into practice," Brouillette added.

Maj. Josh Benson, a spokesman for the U.S. Marine Corps, said the service plans to establish the first Marine Littoral Regiment in fiscal year 2022, as part of its strategy to counter peer competitors in the Indo-Pacific with small maneuvering units, USNI News reported Wednesday.

“Experiments, wargames, modeling and simulation will play a key role in the phased approach to the MLR development. First, the formation will be built, mainly from units that already exist in Hawaii, then the capabilities flowed in,” Benson told the publication. 

“The largest muscle movements between now and the standup of the MLR will be structure and manpower adjustments. While this is taking place, further refinement of associated capabilities and concept development will occur in order to ensure the first MLR is capable of contributing to the continued Force Design Phase III efforts,” he added.  

In 2020, the Marine Corps started testing the MLR concept with the 3rd Marine Regiment in Hawaii. According to the service’s early plans, the MLR will have 1,800 to 2,000 Marines and sailors and feature a littoral anti-air battalion, littoral logistics battalion and a littoral combat team.

“The MLR will be uniquely designed to maneuver and persist inside a contested maritime environment where its primary mission will be to conduct sea denial operations as part of a larger Naval Expeditionary Force,” Benson said. “The MLR being built in Hawaii over the next three years will be the first of its kind in the Marine Corps."

U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and its partners intend to award three-year grants for quantum information science and technology research. AFRL said Friday it partnered with a Korea-based information research institute and the Asian country's national research foundation to jointly launch a solicitation for the grants.

The partnership between AFRL's Asian Office of Aerospace Research, Korea's NRF and Institute of Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation aims to offer research opportunities to scientific and technical professionals in both the U.S. and Korea. The solicitation continues the past 11 years of collaboration between IITP, NRF and the U.S. military.

“Our international program officers create programmatic opportunities to discover bold, high-risk, high-reward research that will modernize our Air and Space Forces," said Shery Welsh, director of AFRL's Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Interested parties may submit white papers, three pages long at most, which contain descriptions of planned proposals. AFRL would then select finalist teams that will be eligible to turn in full, formal proposals.