The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under the Biden administration seems intent on auctioning off more electromagnetic spectrum to various wireless providers for commercial development. The problem is that the U.S. military, including the U.S. Navy, currently uses the bands under consideration. Moreover, many advanced radar systems — essential to force protection — operate in those bands.

Past auctions have raised revenues for the government totaling over $120 billion, so it is no wonder that FCC officials and even the Biden Treasury have an interest in seeing them go forward. However, the assertions by national-security experts that sales of such spectrum threaten the security of our military forces, and the safety of our nation, have been hard to ignore. Last month, these concerns came to the fore when Congress failed to reauthorize the FCC’s mandate to conduct such auctions and Biden’s nominee for FCC chairwoman withdrew from consideration under political fire.

More recently, defense hawks in Congress have urged their colleagues to exercise caution. As Senator Mike Rounds (R., S.D.) put it, “The development of 5G networks is important to both the economic prosperity and national security of the United States, but the premature auction of spectrum must not jeopardize the systems that depend on radars and other critical sensors to protect our troops and our citizens from air or missile attacks.”

The question immediately at hand regards the auctioning off the 3.1 to 3.45 GHz frequency band, which is currently controlled in the United States by the Department of Defense (DoD). This is a critical frequency range for the military, as it covers D, E, F and S bands of frequency used by many of the military’s most essential radars. For example — and I have personal knowledge of this as a former aircraft carrier tactical-action officer — when one of the Navy’s Nimitz-class carriers gets underway and is escorted by its Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Burke-class destroyers to protect it from enemy air threats, $15 billion in ships and aircraft and over 7,000 sailors are being protected by radars operating across the 3.1 to 3.45 GHz bands.

General Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, offered a similar message during a Senate hearing this March. He cautioned that auctioning or selling off that spectrum could affect “multiple platforms to include maritime homeland defense platforms, airborne early warning platforms, ground-based early warning platforms that enable me to provide threat warning, attack assessment, and defend from potentially airborne assets, etc.”

Any action by Congress or the FCC to grant wireless providers exclusive access to this spectrum will limit the ability of military commanders to defend their ships and crews by forcing them to rebuild critical defensive-surveillance and reconnaissance networks, with radars tuned to frequencies not optimal for their tactical needs. Alternatively, it will require them not to bring up their radars at all while operating close to land-based wireless networks.

What is really frustrating about this is that the DoD has offered a viable compromise position in which it would share this part of the spectrum with commercial providers in a multi-tiered fashion, not unlike the deal worked out in the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum, which lies just below the band presently under consideration.

In the deal worked out for CBRS, the government and the wireless networks employ a three-tier spectrum sharing regime in which the users leverage a shared-license approach. However, this option, thus far, has been ignored by certain wireless providers seeking absolute control over the desired 3.1–3.45 GHz band to compete in the current 5G and future 6G markets.

One hopes the FCC and Congress will remember that the same foreign-competitor nations challenging the U.S. in commercial markets also represent a challenge to the U.S. military, only with lives on the line rather than profits. While I would personally be in favor of the military’s retaining absolute control of the spectrum in question, the DoD under the Biden administration has offered a viable compromise for spectrum sharing. As such, before reauthorizing the FCC to auction off any new spectrum, Congress should secure a promise from the new chairman that it will accept the sharing compromise on this key spectrum band of frequencies.