Wade Johnston, Director of Innovation at Klas Government, Former CIO at Army Futures Command

Almost everyone today has a smartphone and connection to a 4G network that allows you to be productive without a laptop. You can now conduct video conference calls, stream videos and play games at will. Getting past the marketing and sales hype, 5G will change everything. 5G gives the consumer not only an even better user experience, but more importantly will enable the capabilities required to modernize the military, law enforcement, and first responders. The real benefit of 5G is its capabilities in machine-to-machine communications. The data throughput, ultra-low latency, scalability and spectrum requirements are the foundation for smart cities/warehouses/ports, autonomous vehicles and remote robotics. These same capabilities overlay on the modernized force. Whether they are on a private 5G network or the local infrastructure, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines will be more connected than ever while producing terabytes, if not petabytes, of data per day. All this data will be available for analytics through artificial intelligence. It will not matter if it is at the edge or in a garrison, all that data can be processed and actioned. 5G will help us be more mobile, more capable and more precise.