Mr. FLYNT. No; not necessarily. Mr. ALEXANDER. Just intelligence? Mr. FLYNT. Well, control. For instance, a great deal of this, I understand, is used in your telemetry to which you referred a few minutes ago. Mr. ALEXANDER. That's right. Mr. FLYNT. In addition to the control of flying or orbiting missiles, what else would be controlled by this? Mr. ALEXANDER. Well, the industrial, scientific, and medical would be one of the things. You might run a stove, one of these machines that the doctor uses for heat. Radio astronomy, you study the heavens with this sort of thing. That does not transmit information. Mr. FLYNT. That's right. The reason I asked that is so many of us are familiar with and acquainted with certain uses of it, and I myself am totally ignorant of some of the uses with which you are very familiar. Mr. ALEXANDER. Surely. Radio navigation is a very potent use. Mr. ALEXANDER. To put it briefly, it takes in every use of radio that we as a nation or the world has made use of, is expressed within this part of the spectrum as we know it from 10 kilocycles to 30,000 mcs. The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Avery? Mr. AVERY. Mr. Alexander, could I ask you one further question? If I understand it, where you add a color on that top line as you run it over there, that is where you said you cover cwf; is that right? Mr. ALEXANDER. No, sir. I think cwf would be up in here somewhere. [Reference made to chart above 30,000 mes.] Mr. AVERY. Then let me ask it another way. By all mechanism known to us today, we don't use the spectrum past the point of color? Mr. ALEXANDER. Yes, sir; we do, but as I understand it, the conference at Atlantic City in 1947 provided only to here. But we have progressed up to here. [Referred to chart.] Mr. AVERY. I see. Mr. ALEXANDER. Our proposals at the conference will include a proposal all the way up to 40,000 mcs. Mr. AVERY. I understand that. Now that sets the stage for my next question. Is there any preemption of the spectrum of the first country or the first authority to mechanically control it? Does that preempt it for that ownership or does it all come under the jurisdiction of the world conference on communications? Mr. ALEXANDER. I think, sir, a year ago I would have answered "No" to your question, but now that we have positive possibilities in the way of satellites, why it is not as clearly a yes-and-no sort of thing. But largely these frequencies will not interfere one country with another. They are short-range frequencies basically. Now they can be made to bounce off the moon and bounce off satellites and therefore be interfered with in other countries. But normally without that sort of technique, there would not be a question of preemption. That is why this top line is made so broad where there is a sharing. In other words, where we want to, perhaps, put it in space (service) or television, why Australia may want to use it for something else or some other service. So when you get above 25 or 30 megacycles in this part of the spectrum, there is not that problem. They don't travel across oceans and bother various countries. They do if the countries are right together like Canada and the United States. Then we must work out what we call special arrangements between those neighboring countries. But the answer to your question is "No." The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Alexander. (The charts used during the testimony of Mr. Alexander face this page.) Mr. STEWART. Mr. Chairman, as Mr. Alexander has made quite clear, there are decisions that have to be made within the limits of these physical characteristics that he has talked about. Some portions of the spectrum are more widely used and are more widely useful than other portions. So while there may be a lot of room in one part of the spectrum, in other areas, and those are the areas that tend to embarrass us, there is not enough room. There are too many people wanting to use the same frequencies because those frequencies have the characteristics which are most desirable at the present time. It isn't the easy problem of deciding this is a good use and something else is a bad use, therefore the good use gets preference. The problem comes because there are two or three or a dozen good uses. Somebody has to make a very hard decision, knowing that when he makes it somebody is going to be very unhappy, because by deciding in favor of one good user, he must necessarily decide against other good users. Nature is completely indifferent to whether the chosen, the favored user is Government or non-Government. That brings us to the second aspect which disturbs us, namely, the organizational aspect. As Mr. Alexander mentioned, you have dual control over the spectrum. You have the Federal Communications Commission composed of 7 individuals devoting full time to the problem of communications, backed up by a staff. True, they devote part of their attention to other than radio matters, but essentially there is a full-time communication management job. But when you come to the other side of the picture, the Government side, you have the ultimate authority in the President of the United States as Commander in Chief, and also exercising certain authority conferred in the Communications Act of 1934. Now the President of the United States, according to popular report, has other things to do than spend his full time in managing the radio side of the spectrum, the Government side, so that tends to get pushed down. One of the convenient devices for handling the situation that results is IRAC, the International Departmental Radio Advisory Committee to which the chairman referred earlier. That is an extremely useful technical body, but it is a body composed of users. The situation is one in which naturally there is a desire to accommodate the wishes of the users who participate. There is nobody sitting in the position of arbiter. There is nobody who can ask too many hard questions. There is nobody who has an overriding task of requiring that the necessity for a particular new assignment be established in the light of all the assignments that have been made in the past. Nor is it at all certain that these very competent technicians operating at a relatively low technical level have all the information about policy, present and future, which might be most useful in making he wisest assignments in the light of future needs. I might illustrate this matter of difficulty of getting agreement by a situation that the President's Communications Policy Board ran into in 1950. The United States was then preparing for an international conference, but the American position had not been formulated after negotiations between Government agencies extending over a period of several months. We were asked in the President's Policy Board if we would try to define or help define the Government's position for this forthcoming international conference. Well, that didn't happen to be our job. At our request, however, a special committee consisting of the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Under Secretary of State and the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission drafted a policy which they were able to get adopted. In other words, Mr. Chairman, this situation is one which is made to order for suspicion, and there is every reason to believe that the suspicion does exist. Every service, Government or non-Government, is convinced of the importance of its mission. It is natural for each Government department to emphasize the importance of its role; and there isn't inherent in the situation any necessary motivation to conserve frequencies in order that they might be available for non-Government use. In many cases in the assignment of frequencies, security considerations must be taken into account, and that means that justifications for the assignments cannot be made a matter of record. And then when you have no public record, you have another fertile ground for suspicion. Perhaps the assignment was justified but it is going to be pretty hard to convince the man who loses out that it was justified. There is very intermittent high level consideration of these policy problems. Conversely I think it is true that the Government users at times are very dubious as to whether the non-Government users are making full use of all the space that they have. So that I feel very strongly that any examination of the spectrum which is made should not be limited to Government or non-Government; it must cover the entire spectrum, because what is done in one part is going to affect what is done elsewhere. Mr. Alexander's analysis has shown the unity, the continuity of the spectrum. This situation is not static. In effect, when a frequency study is made you will get the equivalent of a frame in a motion picture. That frame may accurately reflect the situation as of the time that the frame was exposed. It is not necessarily the same picture that was in the preceding frame. It is not the same picture that will be in the succeeding frame. In my opinion the need is not for a study. We have had those. The need, the important thing, is to correct the organizational arrangement; in the first instance to bring the Gov |