US TO SHUT DOWN GPS IN CRISIS?

The White House has com­pleted yet another piece of its never-​​ending review of the Clinton-​​era 1996 National Space Policy.
U.S. SPACE-​​BASED POSITIONING, NAVIGATION, AND TIMING POLICY, signed by the President on 8 December 2004, “estab­lishes guid­ance and imple­men­ta­tion actions for space-​​based posi­tion­ing, nav­i­ga­tion, and tim­ing pro­grams, aug­men­ta­tions, and activ­i­ties for U.S. national and home­land secu­rity, civil, sci­en­tific, and com­mer­cial pur­poses.“
In other words its a GPS pol­icy, and pretty aggres­sive one at that.

The pol­icy, which also comes in a clas­si­fied fla­vor, report­edly resulted in a direc­tive to the Secretary of Defense (SecDef) to develop plans to shut down civil use of U.S. GPS sig­nals in cer­tain emer­gen­cies and to deny advesaries access to for­eign space-​​based satel­lite nav­i­ga­tion ser­vices, such as the European Union’s Galileo sys­tem.
Does any­body remem­ber when Washington claimed that Galileo was unnec­es­sary, because we would never shut GPS down?
The Europeans have been buzzing about what the U.S. might do to Galileo in a cri­sis. Publication of a new Air Force Counterspace Doctrine fueled these fears, after Peter Teets asked a rather provoca­tive ques­tion in the foreward:

What will we do ten years from now when American lives are put at risk because an adver­sary chooses to lever­age the global posi­tion­ing sys­tem or per­haps the Galileo con­stel­la­tion to attack American forces with precision?

Comments like this have a way of being taken the “wrong way.” An ugly row recently erupted after a British paper reported that European par­tic­i­pants at a Royal United Services Institute con­fer­ence thought they heard U.S. offi­cials threaten “irre­versible action” to deny hos­tile pow­ers access to Galileo in a crisis–although other par­tic­i­pants dis­puted that any threat was issued.
Some of the dis­pute can, I think, be traced to a dif­fer­ence in think­ing about satel­lite nav­i­ga­tion. Whereas Americans tend to think of GPS as a mil­i­tary appli­ca­tion that civil­ians are per­mit­ted to use (reflect­ing the mil­i­tary ori­gins of GPS), much of the rest of the world sees it as a global pub­lic util­ity. I sus­pect we’ll be hear­ing a lot about this pol­icy by Galileo’s sup­port­ers.
–Jeffrey Lewis

December 16th, 2004 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.