The GPS constellation that provides positioning, navigation and timing signals to the US military and civilians around the world, is made up of 31 active satellites. (BlackJack3D/Getty Images)
Military leaders have long recognized the need to improve the resilience of the Global Positioning System (GPS), due to its essential role providing positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services for joint operations. But there is neither a comprehensive Department of Defense strategy nor one official assigned to ensure PNT resilience and finish GPS modernization, resulting in an uncoordinated cornucopia of service-level puzzle pieces that might not exactly fit together, putting at risk assured military PNT access during a conflict.
To minimize this risk, DoD needs to consolidate responsibilities for the PNT architecture into one role and create a comprehensive strategy, with two focus points. First, pushing the department to complete current GPS modernization efforts as quickly as possible, and second, prioritize and harmonize the various service-level efforts to develop and integrate PNT alternatives, with emphasis on ones that do not rely on satellites, as backups. This approach would also present opportunities for cost-benefit analyses of service-level programs, identifying those where the juice is not worth the squeeze and which could be cut.
Today, GPS access is critical to joint operations, but access to GPS is threatened by a variety of counterspace weapons, with signal jammers being a persistent and prevalent threat. Disrupting GPS would force a platoon of marines to navigate by a compass and map, the same method used by their great-grandfathers on Iwo Jima and by their great-great-grandfathers at Belleau Wood. Crewed fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, tanks, Humvees, drones, destroyers and aircraft carriers all depend on GPS signals for navigation. Smart munitions and missiles cannot operate effectively in GPS-denied environments.
The Pentagon is hardly unaware of this risk, which is why for years, the military has been modernizing GPS around a more jam-resistant GPS signal, called M-code, and improved cybersecurity. But while the Space Force is already launching new GPS satellites, though three have been sitting in storage on the ground since being built by their manufacture, it is late finishing the ground segment. Additionally, other service branches, who are responsible for making sure hundreds of weapon systems have new M-code receivers, have faced procurement and integration delays. These ground segment and receiver delays leave GPS modernization incomplete and the military unable to fully benefit from the new system.
It might seem obvious to focus on finishing current upgrade efforts, but the Space Force is spending money on a new satellite constellation to provide GPS “lite” services with unclear benefit over full-blown GPS. This initiative, called Resilient GPS (R-GPS), which would cost around $1 billion over five years, envisions about 20 satellites offering a subset of full GPS functions. Congressional appropriators questioned how the new satellites would mitigate jamming threats and observed that the effort does not address the delays in fielding jam-resistant M-code compatible equipment.
The department needs to double down its focus on bringing M-code fully online, rather than getting distracted by efforts like R-GPS. That’s mission number one.
And yet, there is a real reason to pursue true GPS alternatives, and those efforts need to be coordinated in their early infancy. But there is no cross-service strategy to manage these programs and no DoD-wide approach to measure success or determine priorities.
The Air Force, Army, and Navy are developing systems that use onboard inertial sensors and clocks, equipment not reliant on external signals, to navigate and keep time. The services are also experimenting with systems that use celestial or magnetic navigation, terrestrial image navigation, or non-GPS signals, like TV broadcast towers sending PNT signals. Alternatives like these that do not rely on satellites are important given concerns that certain counterspace weapons could make parts of space unusable for an amount of time.
Ideally, the DoD would have a plan for PNT resilience that recognizes the criticality of GPS and its modernization, while balancing that recognition with the need to develop non-GPS alternatives, especially ones that do not rely on space access. Without any doubt, at the center of that plan should be GPS, particularly efforts to complete GPS modernization and unlock the power of the M-code jam-resistant signal. Though the Space Force has a central role in completing GPS modernization, the other services have responsibilities too, specifically for new user equipment. The plan also needs to include non-GPS alternatives, specifically ones that do not rely on satellites.
The next question is who should be responsible for developing such a plan. Pentagon officials already have cross-service PNT mandates. The DoD’s PNT Oversight Council is charged with performing a coordinating, architecting, and oversight role, while the DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO) is responsible for PNT policy. But this approach is somewhat unwieldy because it means the PNT enterprise is managed and architected by committee, leaving no one official responsible (i.e., where the buck stops here) for optimizing PNT resilience. Giving such a role to the CIO makes little sense. Launching and flying satellites and building technologies that navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field are very different than running mainframe computers and cloud datacenters, operations of more day-to-day concern for the CIO.
To fix this, DoD should consider consolidating the resource prioritization and architecting functions of the PNT Oversight Council and policy responsibilities of the DoD CIO into a new role. Given the importance of PNT to joint operations, such an official should report to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, where Pentagon resource management, planning, and policy functions already reside. This approach would make the new role responsible for an overall PNT blueprint but leave acquisitions to each service, who also operate and use PNT capabilities.
Rather than disband the PNT Oversight Council, it should be retained to provide direction and advisement for this new role. This structure would somewhat mirror how DoD handles the nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) system. In that case, the NC3 Enterprise Center is responsible for maintaining a DoD-wide NC3 architecture, leaving the acquisition and operation of its elements to the services.
A consolidated PNT architecting, resource prioritization, and policy function would also be well-placed to look across the services and assess which programs are worth the cost and which are mere distractions, taking away funding and resources that could be better used for other PNT resilience efforts.
No one should doubt that today’s adversaries have GPS in their crosshairs, particularly with sophisticated jamming systems. But today, there is no one entity at DoD taking responsibility for making sure all the PNT puzzle pieces fit together. That needs to change. The Pentagon needs a cross-service “one stop shop” (i.e., one official and not a committee) with responsibility for developing priorities and a blueprint that ensures military PNT resilience and access.
Though a modernized GPS, which must be finished as soon as possible, is undeniably the star of the show, other non-space PNT alternatives have important supporting roles to play.
Clayton Swope is the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project and a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
