Advantages of Mobile Broadband Communications Services for Military Applications

Military operations continually evolve in response to threats and regardless of budget stress the need for quality communications is essential to modern military effectiveness. In particular, highly asymmetric opposition and non-traditional conflicts put a significant emphasis on intelligence gathering and real-time dissemination of that information to military leaders and operators. Additionally, current conflict experience shows that the location of operation of military and intelligence forces can change dramatically over short periods of time, leading to highly dispersed forces and the need to provide for worldwide reach of those forces. With such dynamic vectoring of these operations it is clear that communications over a global scale is needed. Furthermore, the minimum communications need has shifted from basic voice and data communications to highly multimedia-intensive video and other broadband communications, both in regional operational areas and for communications enroute to forward operating locations. The sheer amount of required broadband communications to support operations overwhelms MILSATCOM systems such as DSCS and WGS and thus a majority of such communication is currently supported by commercial satellites and commercial services on those satellites. In fact a variety of enabling services are being provided on global shared, global private, and regional private networks to military forces and in a significant number of cases provide more value to the military end user than could be provided with solely military-owned and operated networks. This paper examines key system advantages of commercially provided mobile broadband services, when such services makes sense compared to government-owned and operated systems/networks, when amalgams of multiple networks make sense, and describes why such architectures of services and systems can provide superior value to military end users now and in the future.