[VIDEO]

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell, Ranking Member of the Senate Commerce Committee, delivered the following remarks at today’s hearing on spectrum management:

“Mr. Chairman, thanks for convening this important hearing. I look forward to hearing all our witnesses and your expert testimony on this subject, and I look forward to working with the chairman and all my colleagues in any way possible to resolve our previous conflicts on these issues.

“Last Congress, the committee worked to expand commercial spectrum access while protecting critical Department of Defense and federal system infrastructure. And I think we can all agree on two facts. First, the commercial industry needs access to more spectrum to innovate and bring new technologies to market. But second, the vital national security, aviation security and essential federal capabilities that rely on Spectrum must be protected.

“One of our witnesses, I think, characterized it best, Mr. Clark, in his testimony, said, ‘The US military will need to operate in additional areas of electronic electromagnetic spectrum to address the increasing challenges of the threat environment to overcome its numerical and geographic disadvantages to China.’

“I couldn't agree more. During the last Congress, I worked to try to balance those access issues with national security efforts, and many of my colleagues on this committee have directed the Department of Commerce to have a larger role in trying to define the issues of agency overlap in this area of spectrum.

“That led to the Department of Commerce and the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreeing on the legislation that we put forward that would open up more spectrum for commercial uses, and study basically how we could work together on spectrum sharing. So I want to continue to focus on how we get this right. We need to ensure that our global leadership and advanced wireless technology against China is there. However, we need legislation and leadership that doesn't abandon our national security goals.

“I know it's easy to say this is what I want to do, but I'm firmly convinced, when looking at the past history here, the only thing that's going to work is the collaborative, hardworking efforts and probably test bedding of technology that will allow us to get this right for the future.

“In 2019, the FCC auction, 24 gigahertz band, endangering our ability to track and predict hurricanes. In 2020, the FCC approved Ligado’s petition to use satellite spectrum for 5G and risk severely disrupting essential GPS service. The US government is now facing a $39 billion lawsuit because of that debacle.

“And in 2020, the FCC also rushed to auction the C-band, which was adjacent to spectrum used by airline altimeters. Concerns about interference with those flight safety systems nearly caused the FAA to ground all flights. It also put $81 billion worth of private investment by wireless industry at risk, significantly delaying the deployment of 5G in the United States.

“In early 2000, Congress had to spend about a billion dollars replacing the radar system on the B-2 Stealth Bomber because of uncoordinated changes to spectrum allocations. This is exactly what I'm talking about when we say we need to work together. We cannot continue to have this play out in a way where we're not thinking about our military capabilities.

“In Ukraine, we are seeing how essential spectrum is everyday. The Russians are jamming Ukraine drones, communications, GPS, and satellites. This all shows that our military needs to be nimbler, more flexible if we are going to succeed in our operations in that kind of contested and congested spectrum environment.

“And let's face it, today, our warfare does depend on Spectrum enabled communications. As one Brigadier General who is in charge of cyberspace and war fighting said, “Spectrum is no longer just an enabler of the warfare, it is the warfare.”

“So today's victories and battles really will depend on us getting this right, and if we lose the spectrum more, we lose the war.

“Today's hearing is about how we keep the US globally competitive, while China and Russia and other foreign adversaries are making inroads that we need to assert our leadership in the rest of the world. So I would like to work with my colleagues on legislation that would help us get this right and continue to move forward.

“I will also note that President Trump, in Mr. Clark's testimony, has a line “The most challenging driver of us spectrum policy access requirements will be the Trump Administration's initiative to establish a comprehensive missile defense architecture for the United States.”

“Well, I don't know how we can do that if we give the spectrum away. So I look forward to today's hearing, and I thank my colleagues and the chairman for this important hearing.”

Sen. Cantwell Q&A

[VIDEO]

Sen. Cantwell: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and again, thanks for this hearing. I actually so appreciate the panel of witnesses. Dr Hazlett, I think lots of members of this committee could give a critique of the FCC, and it would probably mirror yours in the issues of challenges of that agency in addressing our most urgent needs, and probably the fact of good broadband mapping lacking. And even when Microsoft produced one by zip code, they still didn't use it. So there's a long line of concern here about the current FCC structure.

Dr. Baylis, love that you are training the next generation of young people to understand this dynamic, because we will need it. There's a reason that the information age is just sucking up everybody out of college that now that you can produce. So keep producing them.

Mr. Pearl, thank you for this crystallization of I think your exact words are: “Ensuring that we preserve critical military spectrum based capabilities while creating opportunities for commercial access to spectrum.”

So that's it. That's what we're trying to do. That's what we tried to do in the bill that DOD and NTIA and the Department of Commerce agreed to.

So the challenge becomes -- and thank you, Mr. Clark, for your football analogy because of the away game, because I do think that really does give you a picture of what war fighters face when -- but the one thing I struggle with is that, if you could, I feel like people misunderstand where we are.

It's like, I'm not saying we're playing at Pee Wee League, but let's say we're playing at the K-12 league right now, but this shift in the dynamics and capabilities of the warfare that's going to take place based on spectrum, it's going to be-you're not going to be in K-12 football, you're going to be in a Super Bowl.

And how do we get people here to understand, as you said, you can't unilaterally disarm if the ascending technical capabilities and challenges- and I wonder if you could address white space, a lot of people talk about, “Oh, well, we can just have dynamic spectrum sharing,” and you could easily, but there's lots of ways that right now, that that is really detrimental to our efforts.

Bryan Clark: Right, yes, Senator Cantwell, so a couple things on that. One is that the military is going to have to be much more dynamic in its use of the spectrum. So we’re going to have to maneuver a lot more in the spectrum to avoid where our adversaries are looking for us, or to get to where adversaries are so we can jam them. Using some of the technologies that Dr. Baylis is developing, we will eventually be able to both do those operations as well as maintain some ability to have commercial users operating on that same spectrum. But we're not there yet. Those technologies are not fielded yet.

The reason being that our opponents, like we see in Ukraine, it's a constant cat and mouse game in the electromagnetic spectrum, and so you operate in one part of the spectrum, you quickly get detected and jammed. You have to maneuver to another part in order to be able to continue to communicate with your allies, be able to continue sensing targets and attacking your enemy. So this cat and mouse game in the spectrum requires you to be maneuvering back and forth, and you can't be isolated to very narrow band of spectrum during operations, and we have to train to be able to conduct those same types of operations.

Sen. Cantwell: But we're going to grow in complexity here, right?

Bryan Clark: Right.

Sen. Cantwell: We’re just at a very elementary level, and now it's going to grow in complexity. So I don't think, Mr. Pearl, you're not suggesting that we mandate auctions before we do all those technical feasibility studies, are you?

Matt Peal: No. I mean, I think we need to mandate clearing targets and then do the analysis, but certainly before you hold the auction, you need to do the work of making sure that we're not going to interfere with essential military capabilities.

Sen. Cantwell: Which is what I think DOD was requesting of us, and why they supported the legislation. But Mr. Clark, back to this work, hard work, like AMBIT and CBRS. How do we go forward here with those ideas? Because in the one case, it's Navy spectrum, right? And we hear a lot of great things about this, but there are paths forward. But do we have to test bed? What is it that we have to do to get this right? And how do we do, as Mr. Pearl is suggesting, this more collaborative effort on the innovation that the private sector can drive?

Byran Clark: There's a lot of new modeling simulation tools and obviously test bedding these capabilities is going to be really important. So there is a path forward to be able to identify the opportunities for spectrum sharing, but physics comes into it also because certain parts of the spectrum just aren't going to lend themselves to things like missile defense or to electronic warfare. I have to jam an opponent where his system operates. So we'll be limited by physics and being able to just maneuver anywhere in the spectrum to avoid the commercial users. But within those spaces where we can use the spectrum effectively in the military, we need to figure out if there's a way we can co-exist or share.

Sen. Cantwell: Yeah, and the Chinese just falsely kick them out, right? They just control everything. I mean, I guess you could have that hierarchy. We don't want that hierarchy.

Byran Clark: China’s approach to spectrum management is they have PLA personnel embedded inside the radio management centers and in industry who then maneuver the commercial users out of the spectrum whenever the military wants to conduct routine training operations, development, testing-

Sen. Cantwell: That’s our competitor, and that's why we have to beat them, and so we have to figure out how to take care of this defense issue. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.