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Global Positioning Without GPS
GadgetMike sends word of an award to Boeing for work on a Robust Positioning System that could make use of cell signals, television transmissions, and other clues to provide position information when GPS is unavailable. (Wonder if they've heard about Skyhook Wireless, which does a similar job based on Wi-Fi hotspots, for 2500 US cities and towns.) The work is being sponsored by the US military, so it's not surprising that they don't want to rely on upcoming GPS enhancers or replacements from France, China, and Russia. Here is the Boeing press release.
This is more a matter of removing the motive for $OTHER_COUNTRY to try to confuse the US's offensive infrastructure by destroying disabling our GPS satellites. It works both ways, obviously, if $OTHER_COUNTRY is using similar technology -- but any missile which is going to do really significant damage will be able to get close enough to where it needs to be using inertial guidance, so the example you give isn't a serious concern.
Moreover, disabling GPS is really an asymmetric threat -- it's easy to do (if you're China, for whom the necessary technology is already a sunk cost), and has an impact on your opponent far greater than its marginal cost. Avoiding unfavorable asymmetric threats is a Good Thing.
They got lost. Ships hit rocks and aircraft hit mountains. Google Earth has an interesting feature where you can overlay old maps on the current images. There you can see how inaccurate the old map makers were.
From the military point of view, GPS means less bombs hitting civilians. During WWII and the Korea war it was normal to drop hundreds of bombs, flattening several city block or even entire villages, just to hit one bridge. Today when a bomb hits anything other than the intended target it's considered a major fuck-up.
The smarter technology gets around us, the more efficient we get. We need to make sure we have a fallback system in case the new technology fails, of course, but we are still much better off with the smarter systems than with the old tech solutions.
This idea seems pretty flimsy..
If you are incorporating known, ground based beacons/signals to provide positioning data wouldn't it be easy enough for the enemy to emulate those beacons/signals from some location near to the real one to create multiple signatures and distort positioning data? Wouldn't this confuse the proposed system?
All it would require is transmitting eq that you could fit into a small, mobile (cargo van type) container. Now you have to a: track down the false signatures & have response teams to eliminate dupe signals, or b: rely solely on satellite signals which is what GPS does.
Am I making any sense?
Regards.
I actually use it several times a year when I go backpacking, but I never count on it working and always keep USGS Topo maps and/or US Forest Service maps and a compass with me so that if my GPS unit fails I don't get lost. The GPS is nice to have in the back country, but more for purposes of tracking my pace, movements, and elevation than for actual navigation. The maps available for the back country tend to be off and are missing a large amount of information on trails so all that I can use in these cases is a the lat/long or UTM info (UTM works much better with Quad maps, but with other maps latitude and longitude work just fine). I think that anyone that really relies on GPS for navigation is just short changing themselves, not know how to read a map and figure out relatively close to where you are is taking a risk.
I am also a private pilot and spend a lot of time on the water. I have never counted on GPS in these situations either, although GPS sure is handy when it comes to getting right back on top of a known fishing spot. When I got my pilot's license GPS was not an approved form of navigation so we learned dead reconing skills and how to read a chart for VFR rules (who knows what they are teching new pilots these days, I haven't flown in a long time and haven't kept myself current). I never got my IFR license so didn't spend too much time with IFR tools like Loran but they can also be quite accurate. I know I could always find an AM radio station with the direction finder (I used it to listen to talk radio more then navigation, but it was fun to know where the stations tower was located). There are plenty of ways to navigate without GPS, most of them just require finding the intersection of two lines and having an idea of where you are in the first place.
Bullshit.
Planes flew before GPS and they somehow managed to arrive at their destinations.
Trucks deliver goods all the time.
Walmart employees might get lost going to the toilet, but thats not actually critical.
liqbase
If the pilot is even slightly competent he can fly and find his airport and LAND without GPS,LORAN, or other navigation system. A compass or even dead reckoning works quite well and last I knew you had to learn it.
But then we had a story a couple moths ago how military pilots could not fly because their GPS's failed.
If you cant fly with your entire instrument cluster dead, then you have no business being in the cockpit of an aircraft.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.