The electromagnetic environment is a contested battlespace long before bullets fly. Over the last two years that contest has produced tangible spillover into civilian systems, and commercial 5G rollouts sit squarely in the crosshairs of both policy decisions and kinetic electronic warfare practice. As an engineer who has built and tested EW systems, I think civilian 5G planners need a pragmatic, technically grounded playbook to manage risk and preserve service reliability.
Where the problem shows up first is spectrum proximity and receiver vulnerability. The C-band 5G rollout in the United States exposed how a civilian service deployed at high power and dense site density can interact with existing safety equipment that sits in adjacent frequencies. Aviation radio altimeters and certain other airborne receivers saw potential susceptibility when C-band operators increased power near airports. That risk was substantial enough to trigger voluntary mitigations, equipment retrofits and formal regulatory follow up. These actions demonstrate two facts. First, civilian networks can create secondary risks to safety-critical systems when bands are adjacent or when emissions have unexpected spurious energy. Second, mitigation is possible but it takes time, coordination and expense to retrofit receivers or define exclusion zones.
A second and growing vector is intentional military use of high-power jammers and EW systems. Conflict zones since 2022 have shown that modern tactical jammers can blanket large areas and deny or degrade GNSS positioning and low-power radio services. That capability is not harmless to civilians. Strong jammers designed to defeat satellite navigation or remote sensing can swamp weaker civilian receivers, generate broad spectrum noise, and produce electromagnetic fratricide that affects any system relying on the same or adjacent bands. The operational lesson is simple. If I am running a high-power EW system to blunt an adversary, anything civilian using frequencies within the jammer’s footprint can be collateral damage. Public reporting and open think tank analysis from 2023 documented how jamming degraded GPS aided munitions and caused knock-on effects to civilian navigation in adjacent airspace.
Third, policy and resource competition between military and commercial stakeholders is increasing pressure on spectrum allocation. Military leaders have publicly warned that plans to repurpose or share certain bands raise risk to existing weapon and sensing systems. Sharing sounds attractive on paper. Practical sharing under operational conditions often reveals edge cases where the needs of high-power, continuous military radars or EW systems conflict with the intermittent but dense traffic patterns of mobile broadband. Those conflicts are not purely theoretical. They ripple into procurement choices, fielding timelines and the technical mitigations that operators must buy or build.
What does this mean for civilian 5G deployments in practice? There are four takeaways I want network operators and municipal planners to internalize:
1) Know your spectral neighbors and test at scale. Lab measurements and isolated drive tests will not expose all failure modes. Realistic, high-fidelity field testing that includes representative high-power emissions from likely military or legacy systems is necessary. If you are deploying urban small cells near radar sites, airports or military installations, plan joint test events with the spectrum incumbents.
2) Harden PNT and synchronization dependencies. 5G services rely on precise timing and location information for spectrum coordination and for some network functions. Assume GNSS can be disrupted regionally. Design network timing redundancy with holdover oscillators, alternate PNT sources and algorithms that gracefully degrade service rather than fail catastrophically.
3) Push for predictable guard bands, exclusion zones and coordinated mitigation rules in regulation. When a safety critical system is adjacent to commercial deployment, regulators need templates that define power limits, buffer zones and retrofit timetables so operators can plan capital spend. The C-band altimeter episode proves the cost of no plan. Public agencies should require documented coexistence plans before high-power activation in contested bands.
4) Prepare operational playbooks for deliberate EW events. Operators must have operational procedures for sudden regional noise or jamming events. That includes rapid fault characterization, switching traffic to resilient paths, invoking priority services and communicating clearly with public safety and aviation authorities. In many cases the damage is not a permanent hardware failure but saturation or desensitization that can be mitigated by changing frequency, power or antenna patterns.
On the technology side there are concrete engineering steps that help. Improve receiver front end linearity and filtering to reduce susceptibility to out of band energy. Use adaptive beamforming and null steering at base stations to reject strong interferers. Deploy anti-jam PNT architectures for edge nodes that combine inertial sensing, multi-constellation GNSS and network-based timing. Invest in monitoring platforms that collect spectrum usage and interference telemetry in near real time so that events can be triaged and sources geolocated quickly.
Policy solutions will not be painless. Military systems are expensive and mission critical. Rebasing or redesigning them to accommodate civilian 5G is not trivial and often unrealistic in budget and schedule. At the same time, commercial operators are building infrastructure that supports public safety and economic activity. The only practical path is predictable, evidence based sharing. That means early joint risk assessments, funded retrofits where necessary, and legal/regulatory clarity on who pays for mitigation and under what timeline. The Navy and other services expressed that concern publicly in late 2023 when the national spectrum strategy began to explore deeper sharing models. Those comments are worth taking seriously because they highlight the true costs of naive repurposing.
Finally, transparency and communication matter. When civilian networks and military EW overlap the political and safety stakes are high. Regulators, network operators and defense stakeholders must publish test results and playbooks where doing so does not harm operations. Local governments and airports should be warned in advance of planned high-power tests and operators should provide fail-safe plans for vulnerable services.
EW spillover into civilian 5G is not a single event problem that can be solved with a label or a one time retrofit. It is a long term systems engineering challenge that spans device design, network architecture, spectrum policy and operational coordination. Expecting otherwise will lead to expensive surprises and degraded resilience. The practical prescription is also straightforward. Test together. Harden receivers. Write operational playbooks. Fund and schedule mitigations in legislation and regulation. Accept that in a contested electromagnetic environment redundancy and conservative engineering will be the cheapest insurance policy for public safety and reliable service.