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Galileo System To Include Jamming Capability
CharonX writes "The Galileo project, an european alternative to the US based (and controlled) GPS system, recieved a severe setback today.
Under US pressure the EU has agreed to use transmission frequencies that could be easily disturbed or completely jammed by the US military. Since one of Galileo's main advantages had been being independent of goverment or military control, this is a severe setback. Read more here on Heise.de (German - ya might want to use the fish)" Some of the background on this had NATO being unhappy with some of the provisions of it as well - at the least military structure.
This defeats the whole point of an independent system. The U.S. may be the superpower at this time, but this doesn't mean they should have such a strong hand in these decisions. If such a system eventually gets built and many years down the road the U.S. decides to invade a country which uses the Galileo system for its weaponry, what's to keep the U.S. from jamming and disabling their systems for a clean sweep? In a word, this is unfair. Other states should have the capabilities which the United States takes for granted. Very disappointed in my country.
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Why do I still pay taxes? I could as well pay directly to the US Government since they control our defense. Bah. Shame on the EU for letting the US walk straight over them!!!! .. what if the US get caught by a coup d'etat? Not as unlikely as many think.. they will immediately control the EU as well.
A dark day for Europe, this is.
I'm sure this sounds like flame bait, but as someone has already pointed out the article itself constitutes a tasty treat for the consumption of flame.
The question here is why would you not want the military to be able to jam a GPS system? I'd like to see some cogent thought in that direction, rather than froth and hand wringing without substantiation.
Let me give one positive example. North Korea launches a galileo guided missle toward new york. The US military disables it. Any others?
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>the EU has agreed to use transmission frequencies that could be easily disturbed or completely jammed by the US military
if they wanted, wouldnt the US military be able to jam them pretty easily no matter what frequencies they used?
could do a lot 'if they wanted to'. They could nuke Europe if they wanted to - it's not could to happen, but they could.
There is a very large difference between the EU allowing the US to jam and the US jamming against the wishes of the EU. We in Europe are getting quite uppity with the US, especially their foreign policy and breaking our new toy would not be looked on kindly.
The EU collectively has a lot of clout with the US, for example the import tariffs imposed on steel imported to the US are going to be removed due to pressure brought by Europe. The dollar is currently at an all time low against the Euro and the lower it gets the more influence we have.
Yes, except this would give the US Military capabilities over Gallieo, not the EU. Would the US agree to something similar? If the US should be able to jam the EU system, then surely it's perfectly fair for the EU to jam the US GPS system.
I wouldn't mind this provision as much, if the EU had the same rights as the US in this matter. In short, if the US Military wants the ability to shut off the EU's feed, then the EU member countries should have the ability to shut off the US feed. And how likely is it that the US would give France or Germany the ability to arbietarily decide to block their system?
There is no reason why my tax money should be used to create a second system that is equal to an already available and (within the spec limits) working one. It's only sensible to spend the money if there is a big enough advantage.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
It's about permission. Sure, the US could jam the EU system, but this is about talks to give the US permission to do so. There's quite a big difference.
For instance, if the EU has a 9/11 terrorist suspect, then the US can ask them nicely to export said terrorism to the US for trial. Or the US could, without any warning, drop a military taskforce into the EU and kidnap the suspect. Obviously, the latter isn't preferable to the former.
These talks are about giving the US permission to shut down the EU system whenever it wants. That's not a good thing.
First off, you focus on the US, but the fact of the matter is anyone - from anarchists to terrorists to civil disobedience organizers - can choose to jam BOTH the GPS system AND Galileo.
Then you mention how much clout the EU has with the US now. Unfortunately, all commodities are still traded in US dollars and probably will be for the foreseeable future. The high Euro has also significantly hurt European exports and all of this in the midst of increasing European deficits contrary to EU constitution by Germany and France recently. All this in the midst of rampant inflation like 30% increases in the cost of damned table salt per year in Greece last year, for example, and the UK being resistant to joining and giving up the pound. In fact, Europe's economy is teetering on stagflation at this point. The higher the Euro becomes the more expensive European exports become and the more European countries get hurt.
The article is pretty heavily laden with propaganda, and your post skims over too many details. However, just like the meteoric rise of the Nasdaq and Dow three years ago, the meteoric rise of the Euro of over 20% in the span of eight to ten months indicates something - volatility, not strength.
but US is running at a defecit i.e. is importing more than they're exporting. Dollar is slipping against the Euro, the same dollar is bringing in less and less 'product'. You could increase your deficit and bring more stuff in which is ultimately going to end in disaster as more and more dollars bring in less and less, or reverse the deficit by exporting more product (the sensible option). To export your products you need people to buy them, you don't want your main customer (Europe) imposing great big embargoes, restrictive taxes etc. That's why you should want to keep them happy. The EU knows it's in a strong position and (if we ever stop bickering with each other) will use this.
Not even Bush would be crazy enough to start a war against the EU. Shooting down EU satellites would be a declaration of war. Looking how much problems the mighty US army has with a 3rd world country like Iraq they should hessiate before making war with strong NATO allies. Of course, one could always nuke the EU, but both France and UK have nuclear weapons of their own.
This is a compromise like all compromises, it probably serves some purpose for both parties. The US military like to believe that they can do what they want and the EU don't like the thought that rouge states can take advantage of their technology.
On the other hand, it is not for sure that this is a final deal, since there are strong forces in the EU who do not want rogue elements in Pentagon or unpredictable presidents to control the safty of air traffic to mention one reason to have a trusted Galileo.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
but it goes against US law as well. This is a decidedly monopolistic move
While I'm in agreement that Europe should just tell the US government to fuck off in this instance, this statement is just stupid. A government is by definition a monopoly: it has to be a monopoly over some domain---typically territory---or it has no authority.
Unless you're prepared to declare all governments illegal---which of course makes no sense, since only in the presence of laws enforced by government can something be considered illegal---then antitrust measures cannot be interpreted as applying to governments.
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and the US has planned invasions on at least one ally.. with friends like that, who needs enemies?
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--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
As another poster said, IF the US wanted, they could nuke Europe. Of course, IF Europe saw the US as that kind of threat, they COULD switch from producing cruise ships, fancy automobiles and high-end electronic schnick-schnacks to producing fancy weapons instead. The sole reason Europe spends just a fraction of the money the US does on defence R&D is because it normally doesn't have to. If it felt it HAD to, the US wouldn't have much of a leg up on Europe anymore in that respect. As European nations have demonstrated plentifully in other areas (e.g. healthcare, public works), they are quite capable of appropriating gargantuan amounts of money, which could then be channelled to more destructive uses.
If Europe started a massive military R&D push today, they could take advantage of the huge advances and cost reductions in digital electronics since the 70s and 80s, when a lot of the current US stock of weapons was developed. Cruise and intelligent anti-aircraft missiles with current technology could be produced for a fraction of the cost, you wouldn't event need equivalents to the F-22 or anything. Stealth is only as good as the next generation of DSP algorithms and chips. The principles of mass production aren't quite the novelty they were during WWII when the US were the only ones churning out hardware on a huge scale.
This is all assuming all-out, take-no-prisoners war between Western nations, which given the economic realities of today is highly unlikely, almost ridiculous--as is the OP'ers flamboyant and boisterous statement.
If what you mean by "jam" is "make service unavailable", yes, I would expect anybody with access to a powerful enough transmitter should be able to wash out GPS signals; at least locally.
I would wonder about the vulnerability of such a jammer to an antiradiation missile... but technically it's possible.
The downside of course is that by doing so, you render all your GPS recievers inoperative as well.
What you really want to do in a GPS context is something called "selective availibility" where you remove or downgrade the service from unauthenticated "public" receivers. Your stuff still works to an 8-figure grid, but the bad guys are lucky to get 4 figures, and it jumps around a lot.
In order to do that though, you need access to the source signal. You can't really do that from a "jammer".
The funny thing is... I'm not sure how important selective availibility is from a national security perspective.
Back in my recce days, I was required to know where I was at all times to 6 figures (100 metres) using nothing more than a map, a compass, and an odometer/pace count. It takes a lot of practice, but once you learn how, you can locate your position very accurately using terrain features and keeping accurate track of your route.
Same deal in an urban environment. "Meet me at the corner of Peel & St Catherines" is accurate to 100 metres. "Meet me at the nortwest corner of Peel & St Catherines" is accurate to about 5 metres.
Some environments can be a little more tricky - open desert, fog, out-of-date maps - but as long as you're talking about humans, accurate GPS is a "nice to have" not a "must have or cannot function"
The exception is GPS-guided precision munitions... which are not exactly common items amongst the bad guys.
If you look at where the UN and/or the US have gone in the last little while... The preferred weapon in Rwanda was a machete. Somallia, the AK-47. Bosnia/Serbia, the AK47, the land mine, and at least one Panther tank. Afganistan, AK47 and the RPG. Iraq, AK47, AK74, and the RPG.
Most of the bad guys are fighting with technology that was state of the art in 1945 - and even then, there's at least one 1945-era technology that hasn't made it into the hands of more than a few countries.
Terrorists? McVey used a truck full of fertillizer. The various groups blowing themselves up in the Middle East also use various chemical explosives. The big Al-Quaida innovation was to crash a big plane full of jet fuel into a building - and that'll never work again, because they changed the "how best to survive a hijacking" procedure so quickly that one of the planes IN THE AIR AT THE TIME didn't play ball.
In terms of places to spend political capital, this seems like a bad investment. Piss off your friends, do little harm to your enemies, and don't increase actual security by any measurable amount.
Mind you, I just described the invasion of Iraq too....
DG
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for example the import tariffs imposed on steel imported to the US are going to be removed due to pressure brought by Europe.
Actually most of the pressure has come from primary swing vote states in the US where industries employing steel are prominant. There has been a huge backlash in the industrial Midwest (Michigan, Ohio) by small and large companies that have had to cut employees or fold because the price of metal has gone up. It seems Bush forgot the cardinal rule for global economy: penalize the local few (US steel makers) for the benefit of the majority (consumers, steel end users). Tariffs penalize everybody.
And since the economy is #1 on the Presidential circuit, this hasn't floated too well. The Democrats have rolled out ads pointing out the fact that GWB is the first president since Herbert Hoover to run a positive economy that has lost jobs.
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But the EU couldn't have done it even if they had to. For their own internal social/political reasons EU countries spend much less on their military budgets than the US. While I respect their reasons, this leaves them militarily impotent. The EU didn't go into the former Yugoslavia until the US went in - and this was in the EU's neighborhood.
So if the EU backs down to the US on military matters such as Galileo it is the result their own decisions. The EU can do very little with the armed forces that they have, and they are unlikely for political reasons to change any time soon.
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Firstly, I'm not sure how easy it is to jam such a system in a specific area without affecting a broader base, moresoover in a way that can't be done already. Also, the whole "what about the terrorists" arguement has become as stale as "what about the children." Do you think that the EU should bow to the US and degrade a service provided to everyone on the off possibility that the US might need to disrupt it going after a particular individual/group?
If the EU is in control of said system in the first place... and they're cooperating with the US, why not just let them do it?
The French have always been a big proponent but then again they have this massive penis envy with respect to the US.
It has nothing to do with penis envy. As a European, I want our economy to be strong and united, and our defense force strong and not reliant on a third party. This is not because I envy the USA. It is because I live in Europe, and even if the USA says that it'll propect us in the case of a third world war, I'd much rather the EU had it's own capabilities because the USA has shown itself to be increasingly unilateral in its actions.
Some in the current administration in the USA have even been questioning the "loyalty" of the UK recently, and if the administration is capable of that then it's capable of stabbling its 'lesser' friends in the back.
Sorry, but that's just the way it feels to me at the moment. Hopefully something will change in the near future and we'll be able to feel that the USA is a great and friendly power again.
But this 1M accuracy is needed : for exemple to locate on which side of a highway there's been an accident. Yeah, terrorists can use this system ? But medics too. And i bet that more lifes will be saved by this system than lost by 'bad guys' who will anyway make whatever is necessary to be harmful. After all, more people die every year because of car accidents than by terrorism and nobody started a 'war on car' ...
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As I said on another post, I'm pretty sure the rest of the world combined has equal military strength as the US.
Realisticly, that statement is laughably untrue. Sure, rest of the world combined may have numerical superiority in many areas, but no nation in history has the ability to project power like the United States.
For instance, the US fields 12 super carriers, complete with their escort battlegroups. In addition the US has about 50 Los Angeles class nuclear attack submarines. Care to guess how many fleet carriers are fielded by nations other than the US? I believe the answer is one - France's Foch. Britain has a significant force of smaller carriers. Britain, Russia, and a few other countries have significant submarine forces, but none are considered a threat to the Los Angeles class submarines. Nothing travels the oceans without the permission of the United States.
Now that the US has clear naval superiority, the Americas, Eurasia, Africa, and Oceana are isolated. The US can now defeat in detail the forces of Canada and Latin America. Canada is fighting with American hardware and fine troops, but it is simply a numbers game. Latin America doesn't stand a chance.
At this point, the "world" powers have lost the ability to take the initiative. The US gets to choose when battles occur, where they occur, and when they end.
Oceana also has a fine military, but again loses on account of numbers. Africa is easy enough. Most of Europe has a decent military system. American hardware would eventually prevail, but with significant cost. China is the tough nut to crack just on their traditional willingness to suffer immense casualties.
Of course, the US doesn't even need to invade. The US can just place its fleet carriers off shore of each of these places - one at a time - bomb the infrastructure to hell, and leave. They can never project power accross our oceans if we don't let them have a shipyard or a working runway.
It boggles the mind, but consider the fact that the US military can apply ANY measure of power to ANY point on the planet. By that measure, no one else comes close.