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China to Deploy Secure GPS by 2010
hackingbear writes "Unsatisfied by the reliance on American GPS navigation systems and not feeling much security joining the European Galileo system, China will expand its 4-satellite Beidou navigation system to a full-fledged, competitive, and encrypted system by 2010."
One of the big concerns about the Chinese system is interference with the US and European GPS systems, and up until now there haven't been any set specs to start a meaningful discussion over.
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China joined the project, but was using it for design and IP capabilities. If you look carefully, you will find that they had little desire to be part of that group, but wanted to know how to design the entire system and how to defeat the opposition. IOW, EU has shown China how to shut down their system, or how to just control it. But hey, EU did gain a few bucks from China. Smart on China's part, and really stupid on EU's part.
Look carefully at their network. If this was for policing, then the original 4 geo-sats would cover it. But they are building out a full 30+ system. It is not just GPS, but military communications. This is most likely not going to be used for policing, but truly for military use. And that is the problem. China is gearing up militarily. Just in the last several years, they have been launching new attack subs and SSBNs at a rate of at least 1 / per year each. We have spoken about China's shoot down of their weather sats (which is different than our shooting down a crippled sat that was coming down). We have spoken about their using a ground based laser on a US sat. China is now gearing up faster in the military front faster than anybody has over the last 100 years. That includes Hitler's build up in 1934-46, and FDR's 2 year build-up. Add to that the amount of spying going on as well as China's trying hard to hide budgets.
What we are looking at is that China is getting ready to attack, not defend.
Russia and India are now cooperating closer than ever, even while India is pulling closer to UK and America. They are getting worried about China's intention. I suspect that Russia will realize soon exactly why America is pushing their anti missle system. It is not about Iran, or even Russia.
No way around it, too much military equipment needs this these days. No one in China doubts that the USA would shut them out of the GPS at the slightest confrontation and the EU is a weakling and would crawl under American pressure. Unfortunatly that will mean that soon India will need it's own system as well since they also don't trust the USA very much. (USA has been funding pakistan through all the wars they had)
I can see why they won't trust the American system, but why not the nicer European system? Is there something in Galileo that won't fit their communist dictatorship agenda?
This is yet another lame move from the Chinese government. Instead of trying to reduce their huge inequality, or at least improving the quality of life for the billion living in poverty, they waste their relatively modest budget duplicating efforts just because they want to play big, as if they were some sort of Europe or USA. The problem is, people aren't dying of hunger in Europe or the USA. This is the same crap the USSR (and today's Russia, to a lesser extent) did.
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Actually I found an interesting article on this. The French invented a trick to make sure that the US would be unable to jam Galileo in a warzone. US allies like the UK and the Eastern Europeans forced them to not do this and so the Chinese decided to make their own fork.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/643/1 According to an article in last week's Space News, the Europeans and the US are disturbed by China's planned Compass military satellite navigation system. The Chinese are going to try to do to both America's GPS 3 and Europe's Galileo systems what the Europeans, under French leadership, tried to do to the US. Europe originally planned to neutralize the military advantage of the US system by putting their signal on a frequency so close to the US M-code one that any attempt to jam their signal would interfere with the US system's operation: a neat trick that was aimed at giving France a de facto veto over all US military operations. The rest of Europe didn't care to follow France into a conflict of this kind with the US so they forced France to swallow an agreement on this (See "Whatâ(TM)s the frequency, Jacques?", The Space Review, March 1, 2004)
China's existing Beidou navigation network is a clumsy system based on three satellites, (two operational and one reserve) in geosynchronous orbit, launched between 2000 and 2003. Its military uses have been limited, but it is suspected that they include providing guidance for the ICBMs China has aimed at US targets. Above all, this system has given China hands-on operational experience with satellite navigation hardware. Combined with the sophisticated science and engineering data they have been able to obtain from Europe, they are now in a position to begin work on their own military satellite navigation system. Australia, the US, Japan, and India can thank the good folks at ESA and the EU for the subsequent increased instabilityâ"or worseâ"in the region. Kind of scary isn't it that China is spending billions building something which is only useful if they fight a major war with the US.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The US' GPS system is dated and on the verge of becoming unreliable. Many of the sats are well past their anticipated lifes. Two of the US sats are expected to fail in the next year or two. Several missions to replace these sats have been pushed back or scrubbed over the years.
Right now, one of the sats has been coming up and down over this past year. IIRC, it is one of the sats past its prime and is high on the list of anticipated failures.
Frankly, the US needs new sats and the technology can be significantly improved. It is hard to imagine any country wanting to use the US' system when there is so much room for improvement, resolution, time precision, encryption, and associated military advancements (over the air encrypted rekeying/synchronization, etc).
Not to mention, it is foolish, from a national security perspective, to not be in control of such an important military technology.
If for no other reason, all of the countries creating their own GPS system are showing the world they are not stupid. Find me a person that believes the US would depend on a China controlled GPS system for much of its military capability and I will show you a moron. A country needs no other reason.
I agree with the general thrust of what you're saying, but you're being as simplistic as the previous poster in a lot of ways.
First off, US military power is at a seriously low ebb these days. We are locked into Iraq and Afganistan for the forseeable future. There's no way we could move equipment and material in a rapid manner from those theaters to a new one if another conflict came up, nor provide troops without a draft. It would have to be an EXTREMELY serious, direct threat to US or close allied soil (like Japan, NATO) for us to either drop the Middle Eastern ball, or draft enough troops to keep doing what we're doing now without sparking crippling dissent at home. Hard-liners in China are currently being kept well in check from forcing a confrontation over Taiwan, and their government seems much better able to continue holding them in check than we did on our hard-liners before we went into Iraq, but that isn't a given for any point past the present.
Secondly, China is already projecting global power, just not militarily. They have crushing economic power that they are not shy about using. They're not especially subtle about it (I've heard stories of Chinese businessmen going to US farms and offering farmers suitcases full of cash to break their contracts) but they don't need to be right now, and they're getting better at it. They have the power to destroy the American economy right now, and though it would take them down if they exercised that power at this point, they aren't sitting on that debt. Our current debt problems are a huge wakeup call to them that just being the lender doesn't make you immune to problems of the debtor. They're also fixing to fall into the same trap that America has fallen into, with anti-Chinese blowback from their rampant mercantilism. Right now there isn't a lot of it (China doesn't make political demands on governments it does deals with, the money flows extremely freely, the US is a bigger bogey-man, and the EU are ex-colonial powers and just about everyone harbors at least a small grudge) but if the trend of dangerous products coming out of China and Chinese-owned factories continues, they could be in for a serious problem. It may very well be poetic justice if the next Union Carbide-style disaster happens in the US, but that won't let the Chinese off any more than the US.
Excellent post! Informed, pragmatic rationalism based on facts - uncommon in /. discussions about international affairs.
See also a very informative article from the Atlantic Monthly: How We Would Fight China by Robert Kaplan, an experienced journalist covering U.S. foreign affairs and the military. Detailed description of China's current military, with short- and long-term views of their military growth.
A tiny exceprt: (please keep in mind that Kaplan isn't advocating for confrontation, but doing a thorough analysis of what might happen if foolish politicians get us into such a mess).
" At the moment the challenges posed by a rising China may seem slight, even nonexistent. The U.S. Navy's warships have a collective "full-load displacement" of 2.86 million tons; the rest of the world's warships combined add up to only 3.04 million tons. The Chinese navy's warships have a full-load displacement of only 263,064 tons. The United States deploys twenty-four of the world's thirty-four aircraft carriers; the Chinese deploy none (a principal reason why they couldn't mount a rescue effort after the tsunami)."
"China has committed itself to significant military spending, but its navy and air force will not be able to match ours for some decades. The Chinese are therefore not going to do us the favor of engaging in conventional air and naval battles, like those fought in the Pacific during World War II...Instead the Chinese will approach us asymmetrically...But the Chinese are poised to show us the high end of the art. That is the threat."
"There are many ways in which the Chinese could use their less advanced military to achieve a sort of political-strategic parity with us. According to one former submarine commander and naval strategist I talked to, the Chinese have been poring over every detail of our recent wars in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf, and they fully understand just how much our military power depends on naval projection--that is, on the ability of a carrier battle group to get within proximity of, say, Iraq, and fire a missile at a target deep inside the country. To adapt, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range--all the while developing an offensive strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier. The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile's hitting a U.S. carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda's attacks on the Twin Towers. China is focusing on missiles and submarines as a way to humiliate us in specific encounters. Their long-range-missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers."
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Also from the Atlantic Monthly:
Superiority Complex - Why America's growing nuclear supremacy may make war with China more likely Again, detailed anaylsis of possible flashpoints and the resulting warfare. Section title: "Strategic Implications of the Nuclear Imbalance"
The Beidou system returns time after after a query from a terminal. They can only handle so many requests a minute. On the other hand US and Euro system continually broadcast time and location information.