Pompeo: Congress Should Use Spectrum Sharing to Govern Military Bands

GHz band, have been a stumbling block in lawmakers’ attempts to reach a consensus on a broad spectrum legislative package (see 2408150039). Proposals “for Congress to grant sole control over critical bands to private firms, pushing the Pentagon, and their missions, aside … would be a costly mistake that would put American national security at risk,” Pompeo said in a Fox News opinion piece. “Massive amounts of military equipment, from radar to weapons systems, have already been developed and optimized specifically for the spectrum bands in question, and changing that … would take decades to complete and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.” That “unnecessarily grants our adversaries a victory and makes us less safe.” It also “discourages competition and opens the door to companies like Huawei and ZTE, the Chinese Communist Party’s state-backed spyware peddlers, to gain an even bigger share of global wireless hardware manufacturing.” Congress “needs to step up and find a solution that meets the needs of both consumers and our military, and spectrum sharing could be just such a solution.” Pompeo cited the FCC’s three-tiered model for sharing spectrum on the 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band and the more recent CBRS 2.0 framework (see 2406120027) as successful models. “Shared licensing democratizes spectrum access, making it accessible to a broad array of users,” which “is critical to unlocking America’s economic potential,” Pompeo said. “The Biden administration could have moved forward with this shared framework last year, but they missed their opportunity. Predictably, it has shown no desire to tackle this problem, as its National Spectrum Strategy simply calls for more studies. This is not leadership.”