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Weekend Reads
False GPS data showing ships circling a point on land in China. (SkyTruth)
Just as Russian electronic warfare rendered American Excalibur missiles ineffective in Ukraine, a “handful of large-suitcase-sized jammers in lower Manhattan” could wreak havoc on the United States’ transportation, financial, and emergency-management infrastructure.
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are discovering new ways to exploit the Global Positioning System (GPS) and other vital position, navigation, and timing (PNT) technologies to target military systems and civilians. But American investment in this sector has fallen behind.
Hudson hosted leading authorities to discuss how the US can update its satellite navigation infrastructure for a new era of geopolitical competition. Read below to learn more.
Key Insights
1. The US needs to reinvest in satellite navigation technologies to keep up with adversaries and protect Americans.
“Unlike the United States, where we rely almost exclusively on GPS, China has not only advanced their satellite navigation system, but they have a host of terrestrial systems to back up and provide that PNT service when and if signals from space are not available. . . . Russia has almost certainly deployed a long-planned nuclear-powered electronic warfare device in space that is able to not only impact GPS on the ground and other signals, but a wide variety of communications and other links. So [this is] very much an issue in great power competition. The United States is incredibly vulnerable. We are way behind Russia in terms of terrestrial [navigation] and certainly well behind China.”
— Resilient Navigation Foundation President Dana Goward
“We need improved fall detection, isolation, and recovery. We need a backup navigation system. . . . It’s not a secret anymore that jamming and spoofing are scary, especially for aviation because it’s a safety-of-life application.”
— Professor Zak Kassas
2. GPS is a key technology for the US defense industrial base, and the Pentagon should reinvest in the private sector to spur innovation.
“This is just like munitions, which the Department of Defense took a 25-year hiatus on. And, oh my God, on February 22, 2022, we found out that all our munitions for fighting against Russia, for fighting against Iran, for fighting against China, were at 25 percent of need! And this was an investment decision made by the United States. We did this same conscious decision across 20 years to not prioritize the GPS mission, the electronic warfare mission in general, in the Department of Defense.”
“The private sector is completely ignored. Aviation ports and rails are what’s called military mobility. The number one demand signal on those in a crisis is the military. . . . When [the military] says we’re not going to care about the private sector, they’re not caring about military mobility. . . . Ports need that PNT signal for almost anything that’s happening in the port. We’ve heard a lot about the cranes recently, but it’s the gantries, it’s the rail system, it’s the gates, they all run off a PNT timing signal. And the locations as well. If it’s not functioning properly, our military equipment, supplies, personnel are not getting to the front.”
— Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery
3. The US needs to expand from the L1 satellite band into to the newer, more secure L5 band. But Washington also needs to look to other sources for navigation technology.
“So the L1 band is more crowded, and the signals there are fainter. You can’t have as high power levels as you can in L5. L5 is a sort of cleaner band, and you can have much higher power levels there. . . . So L1 is great, but it is more vulnerable to everything you’ve been hearing about. [China has] 27 L5 satellites up. We only have 17, which are not operable. And we have Galileo, Europe’s version of L5 [global navigation satellite system], with 25. Meanwhile, GPS was invented in the United States. We are now way behind, a decade, maybe 15 years behind Europe and China vis-à-vis the next-gen GPS.”
— Hudson Senior Fellow Robert McDowell
“Like any wicked problem, there are a series of things that you can do to manage it rather than solve it. We can certainly do L5. We should make things better in space as much as we can, but at the same time, I think if we continue to focus PNT entirely in space, it’s doing the same kind of thing and expecting a different result. So I think we need diverse sources. They’ll take longer. It took us 50 years to get where we are with GPS, but if we don’t start now, we’ll never get there and we’ll have the same kinds of things that we’re experiencing now.”
— Resilient Navigation Foundation President Dana Goward
Quotes may be edited for clarity and length.
Go Deeper
Russia is engaged in an electronic warfare campaign to jam the GPS signals of commercial flights, putting thousands of civilians at risk. Dan Kochis explains why it’s time for the US and its European allies to respond.
“Excalibur precision artillery rounds initially had a 70 percent efficiency rate hitting targets when first used in Ukraine. However, after 6 weeks, efficiency declined to only 6 percent as the Russians adapted their electronic warfare systems to counter it,” warned Hudson’s Dan Patt before the House Armed Services Committee.
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