Why America is Facing a Growing PNT Vulnerability Gap

A: That’s a good question, and it gets into a lot of governance and leadership issues. China leads the U.S. in a number of things and certainly in PNT resiliency. They have 10,000 kilometers of timing fiber network with 94 timing stations. They have BeiDou in medium Earth orbit, and they’re putting up three different constellations in low Earth orbit for positioning, navigation and timing. They also have a terrestrial eLoran network covering the entire country and reaching 1,000 miles offshore. The Republic of Korea has a similar setup. Saudi Arabia has eLoran. The United Kingdom has one eLoran transmitter and is establishing an eLoran network and a clock network. France is joining the U.K. in the eLoran project. So a number of our allies and adversaries are much more resilient than we are.

We keep saying we need to do something, but governance is the challenge. Dozens of very senior people are ostensibly involved in PNT governance. It’s led by the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Transportation. And because nothing has gone really south in the United States, there has not been an impetus for action.

The two deputy secretaries did move to establish a terrestrial PNT system in response to President Bush’s direction, but in the transition between the Bush and Obama administrations, OMB eliminated that decision by taking away $36 million. Since that time, OMB has prevented the Department of Transportation – which is tasked with this job – from requesting the appropriate funds.

A: Congress has certainly focused on PNT more this year than they have in a while. There are two things in the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act that we find encouraging from a congressional perspective. One is a House report that directs the Secretary of Defense to establish a senior position reporting to the Deputy Secretary that will manage, coordinate and lead PNT activities across the department. Right now there are projects going on all across the department, and they don’t seem to be coordinated. The General Accountability Office has criticized the department for poor leadership and governance in this area. I think on their PNT Governance Council there are 15 four-star and Under Secretary-level officials who are supposed to sit and make decisions and discuss PNT – yet no single person is clearly accountable.

A: I have heard people say that global navigation satellite systems aren’t global anymore because there are places in the world you can go, and if you receive a signal, you’re not even sure it’s a genuine signal. It could be a fake signal beckoning your ship onto the rocks or your aircraft into somebody else’s airspace.

I think it’s increased awareness, and it certainly has motivated people in Europe to begin thinking and doing things, especially the United Kingdom and France.

But quite frankly, I think that the rest of the world is still looking to the United States to see what the United States does, because we are still a dominant figure.

A: There are some folks in industry who are protecting themselves and making themselves less dependent on GNSS, and that’s a good thing. It is certainly not uniform, though. And I think there are a number of factors in the United States that create an environment where there’s not really a sense of urgency.

The federal government has not protected itself with resilient timing. Federal IT systems, networks, and applications still get timing and location information mostly from GPS. We have an executive order telling critical infrastructure and applications to protect themselves, but the federal government is not setting the example.

In the United States we’ve had incidents, yes, but not the dramatic, high-profile disruptions seen in northern Europe and other places where there are armed conflicts. So if the government isn’t doing anything and we’re not seeing a problem, why should commercial interests spend the money?

Companies don’t spend money unless it is going to improve their business prospects, or they have to because of law or regulation.

And while there are commercial PNT services out there, they aren’t the wide-area, inexpensive, easy-to-access services like GPS. So, there’s cost, uncertainty about long-term availability, and a lot of effort to incorporate new equipment into an enterprise. A lot of people are reluctant to do that – especially if they don’t see how it’s going to make them money.

A: It’s the hybrid architecture incorporating space, fiber and terrestrial broadcast.

We advocate – and we’ve published papers on this, and the Department of Transportation has published a paper that agrees with us – that each nation should access signals from space, signals from terrestrial broadcast and signals over fiber. Three very different phenomenologies so that any single threat vector is very unlikely to disrupt all three.

That’s what China has done. That’s what South Korea has done. That’s what the United Kingdom and France are doing.

They’re putting together clock networks with fiber, doing terrestrial broadcast with eLoran and accessing Galileo and GPS signals from space. Three very different phenomenologies, such that one threat vector is not going to be able to impact more than one of those services. So eLoran is terrestrial. It’s very high power – some of the transmitters are four megawatts. It’s low frequency at 100 kilohertz, for example, as opposed to the very high frequency for GPS. And it’s on the ground.

And then, of course, fiber – you can cut it with a shovel or a backhoe, but it is pretty difficult to disrupt fiber time.

A: All those things are reasonably easy if someone, especially the government, is focused on it and wants to make it happen. For example, the U.S. government is finally putting together a global operational assessment tool, as they call it, and it uses space-based detectors and others, I understand, to collect information on where the jamming is happening, where it’s coming from, and that sort of thing.

Protecting the frequencies – legalistically, that’s fairly straightforward. That’s already happened. The FCC, ITU and others have regulations prohibiting interference with the frequencies. But you also need to know interference is happening and then have the enforcement capability to put an end to it.

Alternative PNT systems will also help protect GNSS signals and spectrum. If users are easily able to access, perhaps even seamlessly switch to, an alternate PNT system, bad actors are much less likely to jam or spoof. Doing so would have much less impact.

A: It’s great that commercial entities are entering the market. And if you’re in the market and interested and willing and able to buy alternative PNT service, that’s great. We think that the United States government owes it to the nation to provide at least a PNT backbone safety net for everybody here at home as a matter of national and economic security.

And we argue that the government should not build anything, but it should state performance requirements and then go out and establish commercial contracts. There are companies that would be happy to provide additional space-based signals, terrestrial broadcast signals, and fiber network and timing. Leveraging America’s commercial capability would happen much quicker, and we believe it would be much less expensive for the federal government.

A: One of the most important factors is what’s called SWaP-C. The acronym stands for Size, Weight and Power-Cost. All of those things will influence how well any particular technology does.

The challenge most businesses are going to have is that customers will see them competing with GPS. The U.S. government for has for 40 invested all kinds of money, and private enterprise as well, making SWaP-C for GPS user equipment absolutely minimal – darn near free. It’s on a computer chip that can be produced for a couple of dollars, and its very easy to integrate into most systems. We’re just not going to see that with another technology.

I don’t think we’re going to see that even being approached by another technology unless the U.S. government decides it wants to use that technology and invest the same kind of time and money in it as it did in GPS. Without that, nothing else will get close.

A: I certainly hope they are incorporating this as it is fundamental. The challenge is that PNT is essentially critical infrastructure for the military, for NATO – for everybody. But in most places, it hasn’t been managed or viewed as critical infrastructure.

So capabilities are very patchy, except of course in Russia, China and South Korea. And the U.K. and France are setting a good example going forward too. But I would think that the NATO alliance would focus on this as a top priority because they’re going to need to do a couple things:

1. They need their civilian infrastructures and economies in order to support their militaries in Europe; and
2. Military forces need to have rock solid PNT when and if they have to go up against aggressors.

A: I think these are red flags that we are ignoring in our peril. To a certain degree, we’re with GPS the same place we were with airliner security before 9-11. Everybody says they understand there’s a danger, there’s a problem, but before 9-11, we didn’t harden the cockpit doors.

There were 142 commercial airliners hijacked before 9-11. In two of those cases, the hijackers said they were going to fly the airplanes into nuclear power plants if their demands weren’t met. But in spite of all of those hijackings, we never really improved airliner security or airport security to prevent bad things from happening.

We could well be in a similar situation with GPS, except the outcomes could be even worse than 9-11. We seem to be ignoring these trends and these obvious threats that are very easy to carry out. We ignore them at our peril – at our extreme peril.