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8 October 2024

Marines Tap Mobile 5G for Deeper Battlefield Awareness

Gidget Fuentes

As Marines fought across training ranges during a recent desert exercise, unit commanders and exercise controllers tracked their movements and actions – all in real-time.

That was the plan in using an ad hoc 5G mobile network set up in true Marine Corps fashion, with a pair of discounted trucks repurposed from the Army and retrofitted with 5G cellular towers.

Each Fifth Generation Cell-n Light Truck, or COLT, provided a 5G bubble that collected, received and relayed data into the wider enterprise network as the Marines maneuvered through the scrubby, hilly terrain at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, Calif., during Service Level Training Exercise 5-24 that ran July 13 to Sept. 11. All that digital information fed into a common operating picture, expanding situational awareness for the exercise controllers and unit commanders of what was happening, as it was happening, officials said.

It marked the first time the Marine Corps created a mobile 5G network in an experiment. Exercise and training officials with the service’s Training and Education Command see advancing technologies, including 5G networks, as critical to support home-station training, predeployment exercises and operational demands in the all-domain environment.

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