The U.S. military is firing million-dollar missiles at Iranian drones that cost a tiny fraction as much — a striking example of the kind of overmatch modern warfare punishes.
The Department of Defense’s approach to electromagnetic spectrum policy follows a similar logic, occupying prime mid-band frequencies for vital but relatively low-throughput national security uses — including radars, satellite communications, navigation, and electronic warfare — even as those same bands could generate much larger commercial, allied, and strategic returns.
The Pentagon understandably views spectrum through a national security lens, but the current allocation reflects less strategic optimization than a legacy of policy choices made a century ago. Today, the federal government controls 95 percent of U.S. spectrum overall and 93 percent of precious mid-band frequencies below 3.1 gigahertz — with the Pentagon as the primary user— while commercial users get just 3 percent exclusively.
A forthcoming spectrum auction, mandated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, represents a compromise rather than a resolution in the broader policy contest over whether the United States will continue to privilege military incumbency over commercial wireless leadership.
The auction provides a lens into that contest, alongside developments in China and Iran and the underlying technical considerations of spectrum policy. The case for reform points towards a commercial-first model in which the Pentagon preserves exclusivity where necessary but otherwise serves as the primary adopter of secure commercial wireless capabilities — shaping standards, hardening security requirements, and defining resilience features before adversaries do.
The Upcoming Auction and the Risks of Spectrum Stasis
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act launches auctions to repurpose existing commercial spectrum, followed by feasibility studies for potential federal relocations, including the Defense Department. Last year, the wireless telecommunications industry asked Congress for a 2,500 megahertz spectrum pipeline to move the United States closer to global licensed mid-band benchmarks and strengthen its position against 5G leaders such as China, India, South Korea, and Japan. Spectrum and security advocates argue this is needed to bring spectrum bands closer to North American and international standards, bolster trusted ecosystems, and counter China’s 5G military advantages. By reducing fragmented regional variants, spectrum harmonization expands the market for allied device and chipset makers and supports interoperable dual-use communications across NATO, coalition logistics, emergency response, and allied procurement. Despite this, Congress enacted just 800 MHz.
Mobile and satellite operators are expected to bid for geographically defined licenses that provide exclusive commercial rights to use those bands, subject to federal war and emergency authorities under 47 U.S.C. § 606, which allows the government in wartime or certain national emergencies to prioritize communications, close stations, or commandeer communications facilities and equipment upon just compensation. Auction proceeds feed the Spectrum Relocation Fund (47 U.S.C. § 928), which reimburses federal agencies like the Pentagon at 110 percent of relocation costs for sharing or moving systems — for example, for the 2.7–2.9 GHz, 4.4–4.9 GHz, and 7.25–7.4 GHz ranges —ensuring no net loss from commercial transitions. To date, 125 MHz of Department of Defense-occupied mid-band spectrum has been transitioned for commercial use. DoD retains use of 3,300 MHz, about 60 percent of the lower band.
The Pentagon’s current spectrum posture benefits from status quo bias: Longstanding holdings are treated as inherently optimal simply because the military perceived that it achieved its objectives, not because they represented the best path forward. However, future requirements will necessitate identifying which spectrum elements truly drive military effectiveness, why they matter, and how they could be achieved more efficiently.
Much of the current allocation reflects an earlier policy choice to bifurcate federal and nonfederal spectrum governance. To manage federal spectrum, the Department of Commerce created offices as needed: the Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee in 1922, the Frequency Management Group in 1934, and the National Telecommunications Information Administration in 1978. Each entity was stood up long before today’s wireless economy and modern methods for defense and spectrum valuation. Moreover, while Federal Communications Commission proceedings operate under strict disclosure and process rules, the 22 federal agencies under the Committee deliberate largely behind closed doors, issuing only infrequent meeting minutes and limited public disclosures. This opacity might be tolerable if federal holdings were a minor fraction of U.S. spectrum, but they comprise the vast majority.
Commercial users generally acquire spectrum licenses through competitive Federal Communications Commission auctions and pay market-based prices, while federal users receive spectrum assignments without an auction price, fee, or comparable market test. The National Telecommunications Information Administration does publish federal band reports and quantitative assessments, but federal spectrum use is still less transparent than commercial licensing, and agencies do not routinely face the same price signal, resale discipline, or efficiency pressure as auctioned users. Thus, the Pentagon’s spectrum use reflects path dependence as much as present-day necessity, with adversaries’ spectrum advances driving competition — a point noted in the 2020 Department of Defense Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority Strategy.
The war in Iran tests the Pentagon’s spectrum strategy in real time and underscores a basic lesson: Both overmatch and undermatch are costly. In modern conflict, advantage depends not on maximizing control over every resource, but on matching a threat’s capabilities with speed, resilience, and adaptability. A force confronting everything from cheap drones to hypersonic missiles cannot rely too heavily on bespoke platforms, stovepiped procurement, and broad static spectrum reservations when many of the fastest-moving and most disruptive capabilities now come from the commercial market.
Over or Undermatch: The Iran Test
Iran reportedly destroyed America’s $300 million AN/TPY-2 radar site in Jordan — a key sensor in America’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile-defense architecture — and Qatar’s $1 billion AN/FPS-132 early warning radar, among other losses. Iran’s strikes, likely facilitated by Russia and China, were not catastrophic but showed electronic warfare superiority hinges not on Pentagon spectrum volume, but resilient adaptation.
While the wider conflict showcases U.S. military precision strike capabilities, it also highlights how drones can generate outsized effects against the United States, its partners, and global commerce. That reality raises uncomfortable questions about whether America’s radar and air defense posture is overly optimized for high-end warfare while remaining inefficient against low-cost systems that exploit terrain, clutter, and cost asymmetry. The U.S. military operates hundreds of standalone radar systems and more than 1,000 radar-equipped platforms across a vast swath of valuable spectrum, but this setup has not fully deterred or defeated Iran’s attacks. This suggests a mismatch between legacy defense architectures and the current threat environment.
In an era of adversaries wielding cheap, adaptive tools, the test is translating spectrum posture into survivable, operationally decisive combat power.
China’s Spectrum Policy
Whereas U.S. spectrum policy reflects a democratic policy contest and market competition for commercial spectrum, China long ago deemed spectrum an instrument of national strategy governed from the top. Its Ministry of Industry and Information Technology serves as the sole spectrum authority, aligning allocation decisions with industrial policy, 5G deployment, and civil-military fusion. China’s principal 5G allocations in the 2.6 GHz, 3.3–3.6 GHz, and 4.8–5.0 GHz ranges, estimated at up to three times more than U.S. commercial mid-band spectrum availability, helped it move faster and farther in commercial 5G by some measure. China uses spectrum policy as an instrument of national power, aligning it with global standards to thrust its technology champions deep into foreign markets, networks, and infrastructure. Through companies such as Huawei, ZTE, BYD, and others — supported by indigenous software like ByteDance, AI systems like DeepSeek, and satellite platforms like BeiDou — Beijing can create durable channels of dependence and influence wherever Chinese systems are adopted. Its ambition is larger than commercial gain: convert technological embeddedness into economic coercive power and strategic leverage, shaping the battlespace before conflict begins and — ideally — achieving its objectives without firing a shot.
China’s centralized system delivers speed and end-to-end solutions, but often at the expense of transparency, competition, and allocative efficiency. As detailed in a new report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, state-backed incumbents enjoy structural advantages, commercial rivalry plays a weaker role in determining the best use of spectrum, and military requirements are folded into an opaque bureaucracy that can conceal both vulnerabilities and inefficiencies. On the military side, reliance on intensive civil-military coordination rather than clearer lines of authority can create its own risks in interference management, flexibility, and wartime responsiveness. While China’s system is faster, it is not necessarily better.
Spectrum governance in the U.S. system, by contrast, is fragmented among Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Telecommunication Information Administration, and its Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee. The result is slower decision-making, periodic deadlock, and a persistent inability to expand licensed mid-band spectrum at the pace of major Asian competitors.
Why Mid-Band Spectrum Matters
Mid-band spectrum matters for the commercial sector because it underpins network capacity, service quality, innovation, and economic competitiveness. Mobile wireless drives an estimated annual $825 billion contribution to the U.S. economy, about the size of Pentagon’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget request. One salient consumer benefit is cord-cutting — already 14.7 million U.S. subscribers get home broadband through fixed wireless access, a 5G-based service that delivers high-speed connectivity over the air instead of via buried wire. When spectrum is scarce, networks carry less traffic, support fewer advanced industrial and consumer applications, and become more expensive to build and expand. Those constraints ultimately show up in the form of higher costs, slower innovation, and reduced investment, with consequences not only for consumers but also for the military, which increasingly depends on the speed and scale of the commercial wireless ecosystem.
Mid-band spectrum matters because it offers the best mix of coverage and capacity for commercial wireless. It propagates well enough to support mobile service over broad areas while also enabling the wider channels and greater data-carrying efficiency needed for high-performance 5G. Radar systems are operationally important, but most do not require the same sustained bandwidth as broadband networks, and several radar functions — including long-range surveillance, fire control, weather sensing, and air traffic surveillance — are already performed in other parts of the spectrum. For that reason, current military occupancy of prime mid-band spectrum should be understood less as a reflection of technical necessity than as a legacy of the allocation regime.
A Commercial-First Defense Model
The Pentagon should treat commercial infrastructure as the foundation for a growing share of military communications and buy mission-assured services on top of it. That means using its purchasing power to demand secure network slices, hardened devices, priority access, resilient cloud-connected communications, and other features tailored for military use. Some missions could still require exclusive spectrum, but far more of the future force can operate on commercial architecture that is adapted, secured, and stress-tested for military use.
This approach offers the strongest path to strengthening U.S. advantage because it aligns defense modernization with the country’s broader innovation base. No defense-only ecosystem can replicate the scale, speed, or iterative improvement of a U.S. economy that now invests nearly $1 trillion annually in research and development. Rather than isolating itself from that market, the Pentagon should act as an anchor customer that shapes standards, hardens capabilities, and converts commercial scale into operational advantage.
The United States will not achieve optimal military overmatch by hoarding spectrum under a static defense model while commercial technology advances at speed. Instead, it will do so by harnessing commercial innovation, securing it for military use, and fielding it faster than its adversaries.
Roslyn Layton, Ph.D., is an internet economist affiliated with Aalborg University, George Mason University National Security Institute, and Strand Consult. She studies mobile broadband network economics, security, and regulation.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: Staff Sgt. Robert Gavaldon via Wikimedia Commons
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