A strategic light at the end of the GPS tunnel

Recently the GPS ground component upgrade program called OCX successfully completed its first qualification test milestone and it couldn’t be more timely. 

These are dangerous times for American foreign policy, and especially for the US military forces around the globe attempting to support that policy.  Aggressive regional adversaries are increasingly exerting pressure and threatening the US and our Allies.  Russia invades and then annexes Crimea, wages a proxy war in the east of Ukraine,  and boasts of being able to march through the Baltic states and link with Kaliningrad in an afternoon. And they defiantly harass our ships and aircraft in the international waters of the Baltic Sea.

{mosads}On the surface the world today is demonstrably a more dangerous place, and the likelihood of military confrontation, especially due to an accident or misperception, is higher now than in decades.

A primary arena where aggression such as that described above occurs is the Cyber domain. During a recent interview former Secretary of State George Shultz, who helped spearhead the successful end of the Cold War, highlighted the Cyber Threat as critical to our future and he is spot on. 

The way our national leadership communicates with and commands and controls our military forces around the world has evolved, and is highly dependent upon technology and space-based systems. 

Critical Intelligence – Surveillance – Reconnaissance, and Command & Control capacities are all enabled or provided by space-based systems, and especially the Global Positioning System and its Position, Navigation, and Timing capabilities. GPS is the thread that binds Blue Force Tracker (the system that allows the Joint Force to know where all friendly forces are), intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination, large data sharing across the Force used in command & control and battle space awareness displays, Combat Search and Rescue, and precision target identification and weapons employment.

Unfortunately, GPS/PNT is currently vulnerable to electronic jamming and cyber attack.  So, what if it were not there?  What would be the consequences for the Joint Force?

The force would be fighting blind.  There would be a greatly increased potential for US casualties, mistakes and misperceptions, and ultimately mission failure.  All of which would just beget further adversary aggression which could very quickly spiral out of control.

The risk of this could be greatly reduced by earnestly moving forward with the Air Force’s planned upgrade to the GPS system’s software, called the Next Generation Operational Control System, or OCX. As insurance, the Air Force recently extended a gap-filler program for this vital capability by extending the current provider and enhancing their capabilities until OCX delivers. This path is prudent, but the necessary goal remains OCX and here is why.

OCX is now a comprehensive redesign that makes the GPS constellation and it’s control system fundamentally resistant to electronic jamming and cyber attack, but it wasn’t originally envisioned to do this.  It was simply a modernization program that now, according to the Air Force, “provides significant Information Assurance improvements over the current GPS Operational Control System” in that it would “prevent (and) detect attacks” and also “isolate, contain and operate during cyber attacks”.  Unfortunately the path to get to this realization was anything but direct or bump free. 

The OCX program is over cost and behind schedule, in part because the original requirements for the system did not anticipate the burgeoning proliferation of cyber threat capabilities. Congress may also share part of the blame as they failed to fully fund OCX in the past.  Cyber threats continue to expand and evolve and become more capable.  There is no way to freeze the threat in time and design and build to that capability and have the system deal with the threat once fielded.  The enemy has a vote, and it did and continues to do so.  It is difficult to predict the evolution of threats over any system’s development and acquisition cycle, which is more an indictment of our current DoD acquisition system than of any single program.

Responsible elected officials in our government must see the world as it is, not as they would have it be, and have the courage and resolve to deal with that world.  The threat to our forces across the globe dealing with these aggressive adversaries is still there and expanding.  Failing to fund improvements to such an integral piece of our ability to command and control our Joint forces is simply not an option. 

And GPS is here to stay.  As Air Force General and former Commander of Air Force Space Command Willie Shelton once said, “Do we have too much dependence on GPS?  That is the question we are starting to ask across the Department of Defense. The answer is not to get off GPS, however.  That will never be the answer in my view.”

GPS must be made secure to help prevent potentially devastating strategic failures and the even more dangerous world they would engender. Building upon OCX’s recent success and getting to its necessary fielding requires full and stable funding.

Maj Gen (ret) Howard N. Thompson is a former Chief of Staff at NORAD and USNORTHCOM and Air Force Fighter Pilot.