Opening Comments at Defense Strategies Institute’s Assured PNT Summit
*The following article was reposted from LinkedIn.
National Housing Center, Washington, D.C.
Good morning and welcome to year five! For those of you who I haven’t met, I am Dana Goward and I am privileged to serve as the President of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation. We are a charity that advocates for policies and systems to protect GPS satellites, signals, and users. If you believe in our mission and aren’t a corporate or individual member, check us out!
It has been five years that we have been gathering to discuss this incredibly important topic. I have been privileged to be the moderator of this event since its inception. Those of you who have attended before, you know that as we kick it off, I like to provide some global and national context for all the specific and technical presentations that make up the bulk of the summit.
In 2021 at the first summit we talked about the threats to GPS, some jamming and spoofing we had seen, what China, Russia, Iran, South Korean and a host of others were doing to make their national PNT more resilient, and the tactical and strategic implications of America’s over-relying on GPS and lagging so behind others. It was very much a “PNT and Great Power Competition” theme.
In 2022 we again talked about great power competition and focused on how, while preparing to invade the Ukraine, Russia shot down one of their defunct satellites with a ground-based missile. Shortly thereafter state media announced that if the US or NATO interfered they would shoot down all 32 GPS satellites and blind our forces. Subsequently, the administration elected to not send certain military aid to Ukraine to avoid provoking Russia into an invasion. We have no idea if there was any linkage between the two events.
In 2023 it was great power competition yet again. We discussed how in 1996 during a spat with Taiwan, China fired three missiles into the Formosa Strait. According to the People’s Liberation Army, two of them were lost because the US Air Force altered the GPS signals they were using for guidance. We talked about how the PLA labeled this “the Unforgettable Humiliation,” and how it stoked development of a space program that included Bei Dou and other PNT assets in space, and also nationwide fiber and terrestrial broadcast eLoran systems so that China would never have to depend on others, or on space, for the PNT it needed in its homeland. We also discussed how China might use PNT warfare to get back its own for the unforgettable humiliation.
Last year we started out with a little different tack and discussed how it is often possible to predict the future, if you are paying attention. Also, how hard it usually is for people and organizations to act and prevent bad things from happening. For example, for decades we knew the levees in New Orleans weren’t good enough. But we didn’t do anything about it until after Katrina. As another example, over 140 commercial airliners were hijacked before 9/11. In two instances the hijackers threatened to fly the plance into nuclear power plants if their demands were not met. Yet we didn’t do anything serious for airline security until after the twin towers fell.
What does that mean for our over-dependence on GPS in a world of great power competition, we asked, and how can we get to the left of the bang?
This year, let’s talk a few minutes about how we in America got here. From a place where America made GPS its gift to the world, to where others have surpassed us in both satellite navigation and in implementing complementary and alterative systems.
First we have to all acknowledge that GPS is an amazing system. When Dr Brad Parkinson and his team built it, and we are fortunate to have Brad speaking with us later in the program, they had to use both Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity to make it work. So it is a lot more than just really hard rocket science! And GPS has worked incredibly well and continues to do so. I can’t think of another new technology in the last 100 years that has brought so much benefit to so many people. We have an obligation to protect, toughen, and augment it with complementary and alternative systems.
Smart folks have known how important GPS is and been concerned about its vulnerabilities for a long time. In 1997 the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection told President Clinton they were concerned about the FAA’s plan to have aviation rely entirely on GPS for navigation by the year 2010. The President ordered a study and several years later the Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center issued a report saying that jamming was a problem, spoofing would become a problem, and relying entirely on GPS for anything wasn’t a good idea. The FAA should reconsider and the nation should look at other areas that were becoming over-dependent.
That report was issued on the 29th of August 2001. And, of course, 13 days later the world changed. So it wasn’t until 2004 that President George W. Bush issued NSPD-39 about space-based PNT. Among other things, it included directions to the Department of Transportation to work with others and get a backup capability for GPS.
There was another study, of course, and the good Dr. Parkinson was involved with this one as well. It found that the best way forward was to upgrade the legacy Loran-C system to eLoran to provide a terrestrial, high power, low frequency PNT complement to GPS.
In 2008 the deputy secretaries of Defense and Transportation and the national PNT executive committee they led approved that idea, and a press release was issued. A National PNT Architecture plan was published with GPS and eLoran at its core. Problem solved.
Except of cource it wasn’t. There were those with interests in GPS inside and outside of government who felt threatened by anything that might “compete” with GPS funding, however minor it might be. They worked with the folks at OMB and the $36M that was being used to operate Loran-C and that would fund its upgrade to eLoran was eliminated in President Obama’s first budget.
This put a distinct chill within government on all conversations and considerations of alternative PNT. Despite letters and questions from Congress, the entreaties or organizations like ours, and serious warnings from the intelligence community, that chill seems to have continued to today.
Yet that may be changing. The Federal Communications Commission has recently engaged in PNT in a big way. If you have not seen its Notice of Inquiry on developing PNT alternatives to GPS I highly commend it to you. Responses are due Monday, by the way.
And we understand very senior folks in the administration are concerned about the issue. As evidence of that, two of our speakers this year are more senior than we have ever had before
Tomorrow morning we will open our session hearing from General Michael Guetlein, Vice Chief of Space Operations, U.S. Space Force. I am sure he will have some insights for us about the future of GPS satellites and signals.
And today we are very pleased to have as our kickoff speaker, the nation’s second highest ranking military officer, Admiral Christopher Grady, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As you can imagine he has a very impressive record. I suspect that one of the things he is most proud of is his long service in many forms as a Surface Warfare Officer, or as those outside the Navy say, a sailor. In fact, he is the Navy’s longest serving SWO, and is carries the designation as the service’s Old Salt. Please help me welcome Admiral Chris Grady.