Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Can The U.S. Fight A Major War Without GPS?

A U.S. Army 2nd Lieutenant Uses An Army Issued Smartphone To Pull Up A Map For Afghan Villagers United States Army via Wikimedia

James Hasik, National Interest: The American Military's Greatest Vulnerability: No GPS in a War

Raytheon's new GPS Operational Control System (OCX) might just be the most troubled program the Pentagon is running. This June, OCX incurred a dreaded Nunn-McCurdy breach, when its projected costs were judged to have increased by 25 percent. The problems, as Dee Ann Divis explained for Inside GNSS, “included inadequate systems engineering at program inception, Block 0 software with high defect rates, and Block 1 designs requiring significant rework.” Multiple cybersecurity requirements caused multiple delays too. All the same, Under Secretary Frank Kendall has just certified the program as meriting completion—the only thing worse than having to spend that kind of money on GPS is not having GPS to spend it on. But just how the Pentagon slowly marched itself into this problem is worth some consideration.

Read more ....

WNU Editor: Other countries are learning fast on how to take the U.S. military's GPS advantage away from them ....

North Korea Jams GPS Signals And Blocks Access To Websites Like Twitter, Facebook, And YouTube (April 2, 2016).
Has Iran Learned How To Disrupt U.S. Military GPS Systems? (January 21, 2016).
Russia Shuts Down US GPS Sites That Can Be Used For 'Military Purposes' (June 2, 2014)

1 comment:

Jay Farquharson said...

Map and compass, meanwhile:

>>THIS OCTOBER MARKS 15 years since American troops entered Afghanistan. It was a precursor to the occupation of Iraq and is the longest military conflict in US history. Yet the trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended in these wars have rated barely a mention in the presidential campaign.

The most recent estimates suggest that war costs will run to nearly $5 trillion — a staggering sum that exceeds even the $3 trillion that Joseph Stiglitz and I predicted back in 2008.<<

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/10/17/the-trillion-wars/uPVfSuDutnTZl5fIQ7YllK/story.html

Sooner or later, it adds up to real money, and might have something to do with that pesky US Deficit.