Frederick Moorefield, a deputy chief information officer at the Department of Defense (DOD), told FCW in an interview published Thursday that spectrum information technology modernization would be one of the first priorities of the newly created Command, Control, Communications Leadership Board at DOD.
“We need to update and modernize our spectrum tools, as an example,” said Moorefield, deputy CIO for command, control, communications and computers and information infrastructure capabilities at DOD. “We believe that automation and tools are one of the biggest things that bridge between today and the future … ultimately going to fully autonomous capabilities in the future … where the machines will be talking to each other, sensing the environment, and moving across different spectrum bands.”
He said the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and other federal agencies will play a role in advancing automation and spectrum IT modernization.
Moorefield also shared his thoughts on the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept and the need for a “flexible and adaptable, software defined kind of operations” to support JADC2.
“One of the things that we're thinking about on the spectrum side is what kind of policies and what kind of acquisition changes need to be made in acquisition policy and strategy to allow for flexible, adaptive, software defined spectrum operations to allow systems operate across a variety of different frequency bands even within their own frequency allocation, if that's what they decide,” he said.
Moorefield also discussed the challenge posed by regulatory spectrum policy and the need for spectrum sharing to be the “new normal.”
“I really believe whoever figures out how to share is going to own the spectrum space,” he said. “The U.S. wants to be the lead for this. We think there's a lot of business in that space. We're trying to push that from an industry perspective. We think there's an opportunity there from an economic perspective, but also from a national security perspective.”
