Glitch shows how much US military relies on GPS

By DAN ELLIOTT (AP) – 22 hours ago

DENVER — A problem that rendered as many as 10,000 U.S. military GPS receivers useless for days is a warning to safeguard a system that enemies would love to disrupt, a defense expert says.

The Air Force has not said how many weapons, planes or other systems were affected or whether any were in use in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the problem, blamed on incompatible software, highlights the military’s reliance on the Global Positioning System and the need to protect technology that has become essential for protecting troops, tracking vehicles and targeting weapons.

"Everything that moves uses it," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, which tracks military and homeland security news. "It is so central to the American style of war that you just couldn’t leave home without it."

(Actually I’m a great admirer of Professor Pike, but he’s just flat out wrong in those statements.  A great many military weapons systems … example our silo-based ICBM’s, make no use of GPS whatever, and a great many commercial aircraft fly without GPS also.  While I certainly agree it’s an important technology, it is hardly as ubiquitous in the commercial world as it has become in the private realm.)

The problem occurred when new software was installed in ground control systems for GPS satellites on Jan. 11, the Air Force said.

Officials said between 8,000 at 10,000 receivers could have been affected, out of more than 800,000 in use across the military.

(Quite frankly, when rolling out a major change in software to a network populated by hundreds of thousands of “uncontrolled” users, a 1% failure rate, which is what we have here, is a HUGE success.  When someone like Google, for example, changes something in their interface, do you think only about 1 % of the “uncontrolled” users out there across the web have problems?  It numbers more in the millions I would think.)

…

The Air Force said it hadn’t tested the affected receivers before installing the new software in the ground control system.

(It was not the job of the US Air Force to test the receivers.  They didn’t own them, weren’t under Air Force control in many cases and it is ALL GPS receiver’s task to follow the signal from the satellites, provided the signal is in the parameters of the ICD (Interface Control Document) which is the “contract” between the GPS Program Office and all users, world-wide.  If the author, Mr. Elliott, has his own GPS receiver, would he welcome the Air Force showing up at his door demanding he surrender his receiver so the new software change could be tested against it?  Seriously, this is an inane paragraph and accusation … the USAF nor any other world entity can test every GPS receiver in the world, even the military (foreign and domestic) owned ones.  This is the point an otherwise sensible article changes into nonsense, when a reporter assigns responsibilities to folks who don’t have that responsibility.

Seriously folks … I know the US military id the always available back-up whipping boy to blame any and all issues on …  but get real here, don’t broadcast to the world that my alma mater failed in their job when it wasn’t even their job to do so … that’s a cheap shot … or an ignorant one)

…. The Air Force said it traced the problem to the Trimble receivers’ software. Trimble said it had no problems when it tested the receivers, using Air Force specifications, before the ground-control system software was updated.

(So, now, many paragraphs down we come to the crux of the matter … a “he said”/”she said” between the USAF and Trimble, a huge, highly competent GPS industry giant who also had way less than 1% of its own products affected by this software change.  Hardly the facts that “world-wide” glitches are made from, in my view.)

Ever buy a computer that didn’t do some task properly?  Ever have  a car that wouldn’t start or an airline flight that lest 3 hours late because of maintenance issues?  Let’s put this into perspective, gentlemen, shall we.  Mr.Hasik makes much more sense in his quotes below … did anyone read them before all the ‘scare tactic” headlines and stories were already written? )

Civilian receivers use different signals and had no problems.

Defense industry consultant James Hasik said it’s not shocking some receivers weren’t tested. GPS started as a military system in the 1970s but has exploded into a huge commercial market, and that’s where most innovation takes place.

"It’s hard to track everything," said Hasik, co-author of "The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare." …

The rest of the article is a lot of random chat about hacking into the GPS, jamming the GPS, etc., which has nothing to do with the alleged subject, a problem the USAF caused which caused a failure in it’s own system.    In spite of Mr. Elliott’s premise that the US military relies very heavily on the GPS, he actually cotes only a couple of somewhat obscure research and development programs.  The rest of the millions upon millions of users around the globe seem to have gone on without a single hiccup.

I fail to see the relevance of the tiny “glitch”, except to point out that the GPS, like thousands of other utilities of both peace and war, have vulnerabilities, folks who seek to exploit those vulnerabilities and those who work to protect them.   But it’s hard to ascribe blame in general discussions, much more headline worthy to make accusatory statement about the “testing the USAF failed to do”.

There are a lot of very interesting and useful articles published on the GPS.  Sadly, this was not one of them.

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I particularly like John’s blog as he is one of a select few who actually writes about some of the real-world uses of GPS rather than the toy aspects so many focus on.  GPS is so much more than a dashboard car navigator or a pocket caching device, and it’s hard to explain things so that the average person gets the picture.

John is a professional pilot and Gold Seal flight instructor and he specializes in modern aircraft “glass dashes” which typically include integrated GPS systems.  Usually worth a read even if you don’t have wings.

The issue at hand is that the US General Accounting Office (GAO) has recently released a report Global Positioning System: Significant Challenges in Sustaining and Upgrading Widely Used Capabilities that is pretty critical of the USAF (the folks who actual build and run the GPS for the world) and in particular their efforts in getting the IIF (Block I Follow-on) birds built, tested and launched.

As a former USAF employee, directly involved with the GPS program since the days there was only one satellite on orbit, I’m a bit troubled too.  I’m disappointed by two things, two issues that are in some ways diametrically opposed to each other.

First I have been troubled for years by the way senior levels of US government have treated the NAVSTAR program.  I am a firm believer that my former USAF colleagues can accomplish most any reasonable task, but the mission of the USAF is to fly and fight.  The GPS is a national, nay, world public utility, and it’s contrary to logic and good leadership practices to just tell the USAF, “Okay general, while you are at it, promoting political change in SW Asia, providing the only space object catalog orbital control utility for the world and keeping those 50 year old KC-135 tankers in the air, take care of this little GPS project too.” 

The GPS, like the Internet, is another US military project that has expanded beyond all rational expectations and is being left to run as best it can.  Where is the higher level national interest and the world interest in these now essential international systems.  The European Union over the past few years have shown true “raised middle finger” leadership by wasting billions of Euros on their competitive and ill-advised Galileo program, essential just so they can be ‘different’.  What is needed her is cooperative leadership, not national pride and flag waving.  This deserves attention at much higher levels than the GAO.

As an aside I get a bit of a chuckle out of John’s concerns about the age of the current GPS constellation … “That means about a third of the GPS satellites are between 12 and 19 years old; a sobering thought” … valid concern, but how much more sobering to consider the age of the existing USAF aircraft and missile combat forces .. the GPS turns out to be one of the youngest and most technology ‘fresh’ systems out there.

The second issue that concerns me that the GAO report draws attention to at the intellectual level is faulty expectations.  The GPS today is exceeding expectations in virtually all aspects.  The life of the satellites has been prolonged far beyond the dreams of the original designers … to a large degree by the ingenuity and dedication of the folks in the 2 SOPS out there on the barren eastern plains of Colorado.  As an example, technicians in the 2 SOPS developed a technique years ago to ‘recondition’ batteries aboard the satellites remotely … one significant factor in the record levels of longevity. 

Also, since the first Gulf war, the accuracy of the navigation solution in the areas of combat has been greatly enhanced by ‘touching’ each bird (making more frequent ground to space contacts to enhance clock accuracy) bringing the overall accuracy in the area of interest up to better than 5 times the system specified figure.  A side effect from this work has been a sort of artificial world-wide increase in observed performance, leading to greater and greater expectations. 

How would anyone actually codify these efforts much less write them into a contract to operate the system?  My fear is, at some date that may be closer than we think, the Air Force is going to be forced to cut back on this labor-intensive ‘hand tuning’ and the system overall will revert to a level of performance far closer to its design document specifications.  The USAF will still be doing a highly creditable job … they always do .. but there may be a lot of customers who have grown used to getting a lot of extra performance for free that may become quite disappointed.

Here’s a great resource that shows a lot of data about the age of the GPS fleet.  Some areas for concern?  Indeed, but fear not, I think the system will stay healthy through the foreseeable future … there are a lot of my former colleagues, Civil Service, officer, enlisted and contractor personnel who are well aware of how critical the GPS is, even though it is actually so far outside their “job description”.  Hat’s off, guys, sometimes I wish I was still there.

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