The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare

September 1, 2003 GPS World

by Michael Russell Rip and James M. Hasik, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, June 2002, 448 pages, hardcover, $49.95.

During the more than three decades since the Global Positioning System was conceived, its possibilities have been thoroughly discussed. After all that time, however, the contribution of GPS to the infrastructure is not well understood, and its true performance remains largely unappreciated even by those who benefit regularly from its services, whether military or civil.

This book, with its particular focus, now provides a means to document the emergence and contemporary eminence of GPS in the evolution of precision warfare. Coming at this point in time, and given our country’s most recent experiences in Iraq, this subject is full of potential and calls for wider awareness and understanding.

I began my reading where most people do, looking over the book’s jacket to see what might be inside. There, I saw words such as “authoritatively written . . . rich in operational and technical detail . . . balanced,” and “sure to be a standard reference.” So far, so good — it sounded promising. This is a story that has been actively developing since the late 1980s when the Department of Defense (DoD) began to bring GPS on line as an operational resource. Also at the time, military and civil agencies were seriously engaged in crafting the policies by which the U.S. government would manage and operate the system. All things considered, the subject held positive prospects for interesting reading.

I did find the book easy to read, entertaining, and authoritatively written, as promised. However, for reasons I will address, I would not consider it a standard reference, at least without substantial additional editing. In total, the book presents a vivid, though somewhat discontinuous, description of the evolution of precision aerial warfare.

History

Starting with the World War I idea of tossing explosives out of airplanes, the book traces in some detail the technological evolution of bombing, both manned and unmanned, and its essential relationship to precise navigation for achieving strategic national objectives and tactical battlefield objectives. With the advent of true precision munitions (laser and electro-optical) during the Vietnam War, the situation changed dramatically, spurred by the ability to deliver specific munitions to specific targets.

When GPS began providing global, omnipresent, and low-cost precision, aerial munitions applications mushroomed. Attendant to those new capabilities, the authors introduce and discuss in considerable detail scenarios and tactics, the selection of munitions, and the critical importance of intelligence and target identification.

The story unfolds through comprehensively described and documented episodes of military force being applied by the United States and pays particular attention to the air campaigns of Kuwait/Iraq, Bosnia, and Yugoslavia. Throughout the descriptions of these military engagements, the authors highlight the importance to evolutionary precision warfare of the then-emerging GPS technology, with its continuous, ubiquitous, and precise positime services.

Even with the technology’s acknowledged risks and vulnerabilities, the authors portray GPS’s unique contribution of worldwide precision under all conditions as essential to precision operations, a message I am happy to see so thoroughly conveyed. In fact, though the book was published in 2002 — well before the recent war with Iraq — one can easily see how GPS-guided munitions have become the overwhelming weapons of choice to engage targets with efficiency and to minimize collateral damage and noncombatant injury.

Discrepancies

As I indicated, this book is authoritatively written; however, that label brings with it obligations for the authors to deliver technically and historically accurate information. Given the extent of research and documentation exhibited by the authors in describing the details of precision weapon evolution and engagement, I was disappointed by the number of errors — and a significant attribution oversight — that I encountered in the history and descriptions of GPS itself. In fact, some of the authors’ forays into detailed technical and historical aspects of GPS operation and evolution actually seemed to detract from the main story line. Most of the errors are minor, in the sense that they aren’t relevant to the central message of the book, but they are errors nonetheless and preclude the book from consideration as a “standard reference” regarding GPS technology. Unfortunately, given the extent to which GPS figures in the central message, it’s probably unrealistic to ask readers to just ignore those portions.

The following examples represent some of the most notable discrepancies.

Some of the descriptive GPS text appears dated, particularly with regard to service requirements for GPS signals and implementation of Selective Availability (SA). SA, one will recall, was a GPS accuracy-limitation feature, very unpopular with civil users, that was turned off by the federal government in May 2000.

While the authors do note the act of SA’s discontinuance almost in passing, other discussions of SA appear to have been written well before that event and presume it’s continued presence or reapplication, though such action has been specifically foreclosed by numerous official statements in the meantime.

The closing section in the chapter about GPS technology addresses the technologies unique contributions to precision operations and establishes the logical basis for the actions and events that follow, cementing GPS’s status as an essential element in the precision revolution. The following excerpts are central to the book’s message:

“GPS aids in all aspects of military combat operations, from designation of precise target coordinates to delivery of conventional munitions, with extreme accuracy under any conditions of target visibility (e.g. night, clouds, smoke, dust)…. The essence of GPS use, inherent in the precise signals that are it’s fundamental feature, is that GPS provides a direct, unambiguous correlation between a target point and the weapon intended to hit the target point. This translates directly into increased probability of kill for any particular weapon, increased force employment efficiency for military mission planners, and overall lower risk for the individual military members and units that must execute the missions.

“To the extent that a target point is defined and a weapon is guided by precise GPS signals, the probability that the target will be hit despite any other circumstances that exist is significantly higher with GPS than with any other combination of targeting and positioning technologies. It is this precise positioning capability, common to both target and weapon, that is both the basic military strength and fundamental military threat of GPS.”

I wholeheartedly agree with those words. And I remember them well because I gave a lot of thought to them as I drafted those passages for a report entitled “The Global Positioning System: Management and Operation of a Dual Use System” submitted to the Secretaries of Defense and Transportation by a joint DoD/DoT Task Force in December 1993.

As the DoD “focal point” for GPS, I had wanted to create a succinct description that captured the essence of GPS military utility as clearly as possible. I was proud of the result then and am happy to see the words resonate today. However, I would have been happier had they been properly attributed to the Task Force Report rather than claimed by the authors, particularly since most of the descriptions and findings in this book are so thoroughly documented.

In fact the entire Summary and Conclusion section of the GPS chapter, as well as some internal sentences regarding access to military signals outside the DoD, were copied verbatim from the Task Force report without attribution, an oversight I’m sure the authors and publisher will want to correct.

The authors note that Captain Scott O’Grady used a survival radio with integrated GPS receiver to communicate his location for rescue after being shot down in Bosnia. In reality, Captain O’Grady did not have such an integrated GPS capability but had to juggle separate GPS and radio handsets while simultaneously trying to evade capture and survive. His experience led to directly to the Secretary of Defense’s approval of an accelerated acquisition program for a truly integrated Combat Survivor/Evader Locator handset comprising GPS and robust communications capabilities. A developmental version of the integrated package, called the HOOK-112, did exist at the time, but was caught up with other personnel recovery issues in inter-Service bureaucracy. Captain O’Grady’s plight provided the impetus to break that logjam. I recall those events vividly because I was responsible for pulling the DoD-wide acquisition strategy together and providing the recommendation to Secretary Perry.

The chapter on GPS and electronic warfare paints the familiar picture of low-power signals made more effective by signal structure, frequency diversity, and receiver/antenna design, installation, and integration with other systems. Known vulnerabilities still exist that a capable adversary might exploit if they are not accounted for.

However, the graphics portraying jamming performance are difficult to interpret, contain errors, and don’t correlate with the text. This shortcoming may have been an effort by the authors to skirt security issues since details about GPS military jamming performance are classified. . In any case, the results here are certainly confusing.

An Interesting Tale

Although these discrepancies, and others, are substantive in terms of a historical/technical reference text about GPS, and while the attribution oversights absolutely must be addressed, the borrowed words remain relevant, and the errors end up being incidental to the central story. If anything, the authors included more background than they needed to support an interesting tale of technology’s effect on a particular aspect of warfare.

On balance, the book provides detailed and documented accounts of the dramatic influence of positioning technology, ultimately embodied by GPS, on nations’ abilities to effectively strike adversaries’ infrastructure and military targets and achieve strategic objectives. It shows that as the ability to strike with assured precision becomes prevalent, the pressures on intelligence and policy processes increase dramatically, driven by the consequences of error.

The book also points out explicitly that GPS has known limitations that must be accommodated in it’s near term employment as well as risks of dependence and proliferation that are still emerging. Those messages will become even clearer as GPS technology continues to affect the evolution of warfighting, as well as the advance of science and commerce, for the foreseeable future. That is the persistent effect of such a broadly useful technology.