NATO Exercise Banned From Jamming GPS

judgecorp writes "A major NATO exercise off the coast of Scotland has been ordered to stop using GPS jamming technology after complaints that to do so would endanger the lives of fishermen and disrupt civilian mobile phones. The exercise — called 'Joint Warrior' — planned to disrupt GPS for 20 miles around each warship"

Comments

Lads, they've taken our GPS...get 'em

[syousef]

"I am William Wallace. And I see a whole army of my countrymen, here in defiance of tyranny! You have come to fight as free men. And free man you are! What will you do without freedom? Will you fight?” Two thousand against ten?” – the veteran shouted. No! We will run – and live!” Yes!” Wallace shouted back. Fight and you may die. Run and you will live WITHOUT GPS at least awhile. And dying in your bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here as young men and GET A SATELLITE LOCK? Tell our enemies that they may take our lives but they will never take our GPS SIGNAL!”

Re:The best part

[wagnerrp]

Play nice... don't HARM the jammers!

Re:What?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on the GPS system. It's one of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, it could go down some time. What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?

Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on mechanical navigation equipment. They're some of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, charts can be inaccurate, sextants can rust, and compasses can break. What happened to dead reckoning, estimating your position by the taste of the water, keeping an eye out for towns on shore, and all the other skills people used to be taught?

Re:What?

[Waffle Iron]

What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?

The innumerable shipwrecks dotting the shores of the British Isles over the centuries suggest that GPS navigation might be a bit more foolproof than those methods.

Re:Weird?

[subreality]

It's not to practice jamming... it's to practice operating when the Bad Guys are doing the jamming.

Re:What?

[Waffle Iron]

I wouldn't depend solely on GPS either, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea to *intentionally* disable GPS and force people to use less reliable and rarely practiced methods, even if they all know how to use them.

Re:Ungrateful

[Scutter]

The US military developed, launched, and maintains GPS for military purposes. They allow everyone else to use it for FREE. Now those same users are screaming because the people who PAID FOR GPS want to turn it off for a few days in a limited area. "How dare they stop providing us free service! We demand they continue providing us free, uninterrupted service!"

The US military didn't pay for it. I paid for it. I graciously allowed them to use my tax money to purchase it for their use with the strict instruction that it was also to made available for my own use.

I think maybe you forgot who works for whom.

Re:fake it

[digitalchinky]

Not at all. The effect jamming has on GPS is already well established and can be reliably reproduced in a lab/classroom environment - the receivers mostly just cease to work. Also nothing screams "I am exactly right here" quite like a jammer does, any half decent rack of ELINT gear will locate it within a very short space of time.

The parent is correct.

Re:Weird?

[subreality]

1, There are are a whole lot of GPSes involved. It's a lot more than a nav unit on the bridge, and they don't all share a single off-switch.

2, You don't want to practice "OK, everyone turn off your GPS now and switch to plan B!". You want to practice "Why are we drifting to starboard? Is this an instrumentation failure? WTF is ERROR 7505?", because that's how it happens when you're doing it for real and you need to learn to work through that kind of confusion.

Re:The US owns the satellites

[kimvette]

This is why:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System

After Korean Air Lines Flight 007, carrying 269 people, was shot down in 1983 after straying into the USSR's prohibited airspace,[10] in the vicinity of Sakhalin and Moneron Islands, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good.[11] The first satellite was launched in 1989, and the 24th satellite was launched in 1994.

Initially, the highest quality signal was reserved for military use, and the signal available for civilian use was intentionally degraded ("Selective Availability", SA). This changed with President Bill Clinton ordering Selective Availability to be turned off at midnight May 1, 2000, improving the precision of civilian GPS from 100 meters (about 300 feet) to 20 meters (about 65 feet). The executive order signed in 1996 to turn off Selective Availability in 2000 was proposed by the US Secretary of Defense, William Perry, because of the widespread growth of differential GPS services to improve civilian accuracy and eliminate the US military advantage. Moreover, the US military was actively developing technologies to deny GPS service to potential adversaries on a regional basis.[12]

GPS is owned and operated by the United States Government as a national resource. Department of Defense (USDOD) is the steward of GPS. Interagency GPS Executive Board (IGEB) oversaw GPS policy matters from 1996 to 2004. After that the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Executive Committee was established by presidential directive in 2004 to advise and coordinate federal departments and agencies on matters concerning the GPS and related systems. The executive committee is chaired jointly by the deputy secretaries of defense and transportation. Its membership includes equivalent-level officials from the departments of state, commerce, and homeland security, the joint chiefs of staff, and NASA. Components of the executive office of the president participate as observers to the executive committee, and the FCC chairman participates as a liaison.

USDOD is required by law to "maintain a Standard Positioning Service (as defined in the federal radio navigation plan and the standard positioning service signal specification) that will be available on a continuous, worldwide basis," and "develop measures to prevent hostile use of GPS and its augmentations without unduly disrupting or degrading civilian uses."

Mercator Projection: Why Scotland's sea is NOT BIG

[evilandi]

>the ocean is big

Sigh. Mercator Projection.

The "ocean" around Scotland is NOT big. The SEA around Scotland is actually quite small. It's as far north as Newfoundland and Labrador.

It just LOOKS big on the map due to two-dimensional maps stretching out the northern and southern extremities of Earth.

Scotland, in particular Faslane, is where NATO keeps its nuclear submarines. The locals live cheek-by-jowl with these submariners and for the most part get along just fine. But closing off all the sea between all the inhabited islands in the west of Scotland just isn't feasible.

Scotland's only 200x150 miles

[evilandi]

>What the hell is a fishing boat doing within 20 miles of a major exercise?

Scotland is only 200 miles x 150 miles in size. A fourty-mile exclusion zone (20 miles radius) would kill the entire marine economy for the western coast of the country.

And the marine economy is pretty much the only economy in western Scotland.