Military Tests Commercial 5G Networks as Drone Sensors
If the approach holds up, existing telecom towers could help track hostile drones without new dedicated hardware.
Military planners are testing whether existing commercial 5G networks can double as battlefield sensors for spotting and following drones. NATO's DiBaX 2026 exercise in Latvia, run from October 19 to 30, examined whether 5G towers could passively detect and track flying objects, and it tried three methods of using commercial 5G, with some trials failing. The exercise also used AI agents to link systems that had never been built to talk to each other, including a Maven system and a national system, a fix NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation said took hours. Separately, AT&T and Ericsson demonstrated 5G-based detection outside AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, where the system found, located and tracked multiple drones flying between 300 and 400 feet. For developers and operators, the appeal is reuse of telecom infrastructure at little extra cost, while the trade-off is that 5G masts could become more attractive military targets.
Why it matters
The trials suggest that networks built for phone calls and data could also serve as a passive layer for spotting and following drones, which would matter to militaries looking for cheap, quickly deployed coverage. The NATO exercise also showed that AI agents can connect systems never designed to work together, a fix that reportedly took hours rather than the long integration projects usually expected. Both points point toward existing infrastructure carrying more of the defensive load. The same reliance raises the question of whether 5G masts would become more attractive targets in a conflict, a risk the trials do not resolve.
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