It’s time for the US to invest in the future of GPS strategically, write Dennis Blair and Paul Selva. (Courtesy photo/United Launch Alliance)

Dennis Blair, who served as director for national intelligence from 2009-2010, and Paul Selva, vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff from 2015-2019, know the utility of the GPS system as well as anyone. In this new op-ed, the two men, who now serve on an advisory committee on the issue for contractor Lockheed Martin, lay out the challenges ahead for the system, and more importantly, specific suggestions on how to keep it safe and secure.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) and other Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) play an ever-increasing and more valuable role in our military equipment and operations, and the world’s economy. Put bluntly: The consequences of a lost or degraded GPS are grave and we must dedicate resources to enhancing it, now.

Transportation services, public safety, finance and many other sectors are reliant on GPS; losing the system would result in massive economic damage, estimated by one report to be at least $1 billion per day even without factoring in impacts on aviation, rail, public safety or the space sectors; including those factors could potentially double that estimate. And for national security, the damage would be even more critical.

US military command and control systems, tactics, all our ships, aircraft, tanks and other mobile systems, and many of our most effective weapons rely on GPS. Without it, the armed forces would have to fall back on older systems that are much less effective, leaving us with a Vietnam-era military.

As occurs with any widely used and essential system, criminals and hostile governments seek ways to exploit GPS for profit or geopolitical advantage. The National Executive Committee on Space-Based Position Navigation and Timing has documented GPS service interruptions from unintended frequency interference, amateur hackers, criminal networks, shadowy paramilitary organizations, and nation states.

Demonstrated threats, some temporary and some permanent, range from jamming and spoofing signals to destroying satellites with kinetic weapons. The latest chilling incident was the Russian shoot down in November 2021 of one of its own satellites followed by an announcement on its state-run television station that it had the capability to destroy many GPS satellites to “leave the United States and NATO blind.”

GPS was the first and remains the largest precision navigation and timing (PNT) system, but other countries have developed similar systems including the European Galileo, the Russian GLONASS and the Chinese BeiDou systems. Their capabilities are comparable to GPS and could be superior in future, if we don’t invest now.

In addition to the direct threats to our GPS system from hostile nations and criminals, there is a serious competitive threat from the Chinese BeiDou system that became operational last year. China promotes BeiDou vigorously. It has provided Thailand, a US treaty ally, with $300 million in foreign aid to use BeiDou in Thai government phones.

Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China signed contracts for BeiDou with several Middle Eastern countries. A much newer system, BeiDou has enhanced regional capability across the Asia Pacific region through a constellation in three different orbits (MEO, GEO, and an Inclined Geostationary Orbit). Unlike all the other foreign PNT systems, BeiDou is not interoperable with GPS. China is building a competitor, and judging by current behavior in related areas, will use any edge it gains in its geopolitical competition with the United States.

Retired Gen. Paul Selva. (DOD)

 

The good news is that the United States is not hopeless. There is a way forward, and it starts with treating precision navigation and timing as an integrated mission within the Department of Defense.

The Defense Department is the GPS operator, responsible for the accuracy and defense of its infrastructure and protecting the GPS signal from disruption by potential adversaries. The department should start by overseeing the development of integrated improvements — space, control and user segments — for greater resilience. The United States’ Space Force should have the lead for defining system architectures, and the authority and imperative to mandate resilience standards and military user interfaces. Military user interfaces should adopt a more commercial approach and allow for multiple receiver devices to be developed to respond to rapidly changing mission requirements.

Former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. (US)

The challenge to GPS has long been known, and there have been steps taken to make it more resilient, both for the armed forces and for civil users. The satellites being launched today are under the “Next Generation GPS III” program. They provide greater accuracy, greater ability to overcome jamming, and the L1C signal beam, to improve connectivity for civil users. The “GPS III F,” or follow-on system, will provide additional enhancements. However, the space segment is only a third of the overall system. Seventeen years ago, a Defense Science Board study pointed out that as the space segment is modernized:

“the capability to activate, monitor and operate those new signal capabilities must be designed, tested and incorporated into the operational control segment. . . At the same time, new user segment receivers/chipsets must be developed . . . and installed/integrated into user systems . . to process and exploit the new signal capabilities.” 

Unfortunately, that criticism is still valid today. The control and user segments cannot take advantage of the improved resiliency capabilities of the space segment. The control segment has not evolved from the original, centralized GPS design. There is little or no capability to decentralize operational control of the space segment under attack. Cybersecurity has become a far greater concern than it was when the system was originally designed and needs continual improvement.

The civil user segment is dynamic, and there are new and ingenious apps coming on the market all the time. However, they do not incorporate resiliency improvements and are just as vulnerable as current applications to interference.

Military receivers that can take full advantage of the more accurate and powerful signals are not widely available. Updating the entire receiver inventory is a huge undertaking — it is not just purchasing a new smart phone. Thousands of existing weapons guidance systems and hundreds of systems on military platforms need both hardware and software upgrades.

Here are our recommendations for securing GPS for the future:

  • Improve the ability of the GPS control segment to respond to physical and cyber-attacks.
  • Synchronize the funding and fielding of user segment systems based on the deployment timelines of current major war plans. That is, ensure that the platforms and weapons that are scheduled to respond first to conflicts all have resilient and robust GPS receivers.
  • Develop a counter-PNT team in US Space Command that can simulate realistic enemy attacks on the GPS system in exercises and has the capability for attacks on the GLONASS and BeiDou systems if authorized in crisis and conflict.
  • In cooperation with the Department of State, expand US cooperative relationships with allies and partners that are deploying space-based navigation systems. Agreements could provide alternatives to a US-only system and bring in additional investment to improve the resilience of the space and control segments of the GNSS architecture through a truly multi-layered, coalition architecture.
  • Continue to invest in improvements to the space segment of the system to exceed the capabilities of competitor systems to keep GPS as the preferred international PNT system. These include enhanced resilience on the GPS platform that is adaptable to evolving threats, on-orbit programmability to maintain relevance over time, intersatellite cross-links that permit integration of GPS across space assets, and accelerated recapitalization to get these capabilities on-orbit faster to pace the threat.

In addition, the Department of Transportation should work through the Civil GPS Service Interface Committee to develop, with the private sector, more resilient receivers for use in critical applications such as aviation safety, first responders, electrical grid and financial transaction timing. The same technology should be made available to all users that have concerns about GPS interference.

The Global Positioning System has been a Field of Dreams success. The Department of Defense built it, and they have come. Originally fielded to provide the American armed forces with a warfighting edge, the system has not only accomplished this mission, but it has become an absolutely vital component of the national civil infrastructure. Its very success has brought both threats and competition.

Now we must do the hard thinking and make the smart investment and management decisions to meet the threats and competition and maintain GPS as the most capable and secure PNT system in the world.

Dennis Blair is the former Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Command and former Director of National Intelligence. Paul Selva is the former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Both are members of the Strategic Advisory Group of Lockheed Martin Space, which builds the GPS III / IIIF satellite systems.