US leaders have been warned to concentrate on GPS and PNT to guard the nation

In Ukraine and the Center East, good weapons are degraded or neutralized. Drones and missiles are deflected or turned again on attackers.

Within the Baltic, South China Sea and elsewhere, denial and manipulation of satellite tv for pc navigation indicators has turn into a each day a part of nice energy competitors. These stark demonstrations of vulnerabilities have highlighted long-standing considerations concerning the functionality of GPS and different American positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) capabilities.

Lately, safety and navigation specialists printed two paperwork that provide robust critiques of the low precedence and a focus senior management has given to PNT points over the past 20 years.

One is a four-page memo despatched July 19 to the Deputy Secretaries of Protection and Transportation from retired Admiral Thad Allen, Chair of the President’s Nationwide Area-based PNT Advisory Board.

Within the memo, Allen warned “America’s continued over-reliance on GPS for PNT makes important infrastructure and functions susceptible to a wide range of nicely documented unintended, pure, and malicious threats.”

He added that the board’s “conclusion is that PNT on the whole and GPS particularly haven’t been accorded their rightful prominence within the nationwide coverage agenda.”

“Merely put, the Board believes that the 20-year-old framework for GPS governance and the present coverage statements set up neither the precedence that the system deserves nor sufficiently clear accountability for its efficiency.” 

The opposite doc is a nineteen-page paper printed July 18 by the Nationwide Safety Area Affiliation (NSSA), titled “America’s Uneven Vulnerability to Navigation Warfare: Management and Strategic Route Wanted to Mitigate Important Threats.” Two of the important thing findings on this doc, sponsored by the Resilient Navigation and Timing Basis, are that the U.S. faces a “long-standing lack of progress on points vital to U.S. nationwide, homeland, and financial safety,” and that “Targeted management, correctly empowered and resourced, is crucial to the nationwide PNT technique’s success.” 

Allen’s memo was nominally a report of the Advisory Board’s most up-to-date assembly in Colorado Springs this April. As a part of that report, the board’s 9 suggestions from Jan. 2023 had been reaffirmed, and three extra had been forwarded.

The governance construction is just not working

The overwhelming majority of Allen’s message handled GPS, the vulnerability of America’s PNT, the significance of PNT to the nation’s security and safety, and the failure of the federal government to do the issues it mentioned it ought to and would do to guard it. Finally, Allen argued that the management and governance construction established by presidential directive in 2004 and reaffirmed in 2021 has not been working. 

In actual fact, PNT has been missed by the federal authorities’s evaluation of its personal important infrastructure, Allen argued. All important infrastructure sectors use, and virtually all depend on GPS. But concerning the Nationwide Safety Memorandum on Crucial Infrastructure Safety and Resilience printed in April, Allen wrote “We had been stunned to find that GPS is nowhere talked about in that vital doc.”

Nationwide PNT functionality is missing

Allen additionally emphasised that the true concern isn’t just about GPS, however total nationwide PNT functionality, which now lags behind that of China.

Reinforcing this message, the memo included the next desk to check U.S. versus Chinese language nationwide PNT methods. Finally, it exhibits that China has deployed a much more complete and resilient PNT system in comparison with the U.S.’s continued over-reliance on GPS.

Based mostly on these disparities, Allen wrote that “The Board believes it’s time to take a contemporary take a look at our method to PNT governance and set up a transparent technique for re-establishing an unquestioned place of management for the U.S. To achieve success, such a technique requires a governance construction characterised by clearer authority and accountability. Ideally, the administration ought to suggest laws to Congress that might help this purpose with a transparent mandate (authorization) and assets (appropriations) ample to the duty.” 

The NSSA paper additionally expressed very related considerations about GPS vulnerability — and about America being far behind in PNT resilience and “navigation warfare.” It additionally known as for motion by each the administration and Congress.

The paper cited quite a few presidential and congressional mandates to deal with PNT going again to President Clinton. But, the nation nonetheless has plenty of “shortfalls” in functionality, a lot of that are listed within the Federal Radionavigation Plan, together with: 

• an absence of means to resist spoofing, jamming and pure and unintentional interference;
• the shortcoming to inform customers when indicators are compromised;
• restricted safety from cyber threats;
• the shortcoming to detect and find of interference sources; and
• the shortage of options when GPS is compromised or not obtainable.

It went on to say that “American society has been remodeled by the provision of GPS” and “The hurt to the U.S. financial system that might end result if GPS companies had been misplaced is incalculable.” 

On the identical time, threats and precise disruptions to GPS companies all over the world have been tremendously growing. The report particularly talked about current adversarial actions by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Navwar and “GPS Blackmail”

This ought to be of nice concern to the nation, in response to NSSA. America is so depending on GPS that “merely the specter of disrupting GPS companies may be sufficient to affect U.S. nationwide safety and international coverage.” 

Going additional, the paper means that the November 2021 Russian destruction of considered one of its satellites with a ground-based missile and subsequent risk to destroy all GPS satellites if NATO crossed its “pink line” could have already got subjected the U.S. to “GPS blackmail.”

“Regardless of 90,000 Russian troops massing alongside the border with Ukraine, U.S. officers determined in opposition to sending sure navy gear to Ukraine to keep away from scary Russia,” the paper reads.

The consequence of all of this, the paper says, is that “…the system’s unmitigated vulnerabilities might lead to doubtlessly profound home and worldwide implications.”

These implications, it continues, might embrace “cascading results which unravel America’s socioeconomic cloth.” 

These embrace lack of worldwide status; tremendously decreased data and communications movement from house and on the bottom; antagonistic socio-economic impacts due to psychological blows to the populace and bodily hurt to infrastructure; and hurt to America’s homeland and nationwide protection. 

To treatment this, the NSSA report says, “The US should quickly develop and implement a complete, complete of nation, technique to redress its uneven vulnerability to Navwar [navigation warfare] and restore U.S. management in space-based and terrestrial PNT.”

Each the administration and Congress have to be concerned on this effort, says the NSSA, to make sure American management is correctly geared up and centered on the problem forward.

Dana A. Goward is President of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Basis. He’s a retired Coast Guard helicopter pilot and previously served because the maritime navigation authority for america. He has been a member of the President’s Nationwide Area-based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board since 2015.

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