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22 August 2024

The U.S. Military Is Quietly Reinventing Itself on the Great Lakes

Jerry Hendrix

For two weeks in July, over 40 companies, ranging from small start-ups to major defense “primes,” gathered in Alpena, Mich., on the banks of Lake Huron. They had come to conduct an exercise designed to test combinations of systems that operate in the electromagnetic spectrum. The effort was sponsored by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, with the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Ind., taking the on-scene lead on the exercise’s execution. Additionally, commercial participants got to interact with representatives of the Army’s C5ISR Center, the Air Force Test Center, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Michigan National Guard.

The testing range, which spanned the northeasternmost portion of Michigan’s mitten, was selected because the region and lake provided participants, who came from all over the United States, the ability to fully test their systems across the breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum without fear of interfering with any major population centers. The goals of the exercise were to gain rapid technological development through interactions with fellow subject-matter experts and to experiment within an operationally relevant environment created by the exercise managers.

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