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Schwartz warns against dependence on GPS

The Air Force’s top uniformed leader thinks the military is too dependent on global positioning and must develop an alternative to the navigation system to reduce its vulnerability to enemies.

Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz delivered his warning about the government’s satellite constellation Jan. 20 at a national security conference in Washington but also assured his fellow defense leaders that Air Force scientists are working to develop other navigational technologies.

“Global positioning has transformed an entire universe of war-fighting capability. Our dependence on precision navigation in time will continue to grow,” Schwartz said in the opening address to the conference, sponsored by the Institute of Foreign Policy and Tufts University’s Fletcher School. “It seemed critical to me that the joint force reduce its dependence on GPS aid.”

In the last eight years that the U.S. has been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, troops from all the services have come to rely on GPS to locate both each other and hostile targets. Airmen who are combat controllers, for example, carry receivers to call in close-air support.

Schwartz told the audience he fears reliance on GPS could paralyze operations if an enemy blocked the GPS datalink or — even worse — programmed U.S. satellites to send the wrong coordinates.

“Our operations cannot grind to a halt for a degraded or denied system,” he said. “Our reliance on information technologies, for example, is very well known.”

Besides GPS, Schwartz said, the Air Force has come to rely on other information operations provided by space-based capabilities, such as imagery and communications satellites, as well as those from single-purpose aircraft.

For the space-based technologies, Schwartz wants the Air Force to do more than simply harden satellites from attack.

“We must … proceed to build more resilient systems, including next-generation protected space communications and air-breathing or terrestrial alternatives and complements for a variety of space-based capabilities,” he said.

A terrestrial alternative for a communication datalink, for example, would be an airship, which the Air Force is developing. The airship also serves as an example of the multirole aircraft that Schwartz and his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, want the service to invest in.

Future weapons systems, Schwartz said, must be made “as versatile as we possibly can.”

As an example, Schwartz cited B-52s flying with sniper pods. The Air Force offered to fly the giant bomber over Haiti to take pictures of the damage caused by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

“You would never have guessed a B-52 would do this type of thing,” he said. “So what we are trying to do at the strategic level is not shackle ourselves to applications of our resources that are traditional and comfortable. And think more broadly and aggressively on how to make better use of these assets.”