The DoD and the Trusted Capital Marketplace have identified autonomous systems as one of the 27 areas in which commercial technology could be leveraged for military applications. In my discussion with Pete DeNagy, a subject matter expert on both autonomous systems and 5G, we tackle this challenge head on. After I define the somewhat unique characteristics of the military use case for autonomous systems (and the unique complexities), Pete explains how the commercial world is implementing autonomous vehicles . . . and be prepared; it’s likely different than you think . . . at least it was to me. Rather than develop navigation systems that can inherently mimic the cognitive and control capabilities of a human driver, automotive manufacturers (and government agencies) are implementing communications-centric autonomous navigation systems, which leverage 5G, low latency, high bandwidth, and other properties as substitutes for the compute intensive (and algorithmically complex) alternative of mimicking human drivers. Will this work in the battlefield? That’s where Pete illustrates how it can . . . what the key drivers are, what the central innovations that are required, and the rather short timeline that is needed to achieve this. Emails: [email protected] and [email protected]