|
|
|
|
|
by jandrewrogers
897 days ago
|
|
GPS was trivially attackable from inception, that was not a design requirement given its purpose. The purpose of GPS was to precisely measure the planet in peacetime. A unique core capability of the US military is extremely precise INS technology, the capabilities and precision of which are closely guarded secrets and under continuous R&D. The precision of INS is dependent on the precision of your world model. GPS allowed extremely precise world models to be built globally, which provided the data model INS needs to be maximally effective. In wartime the GPS system can be killed by any near-peer adversary, but the damage has already been done to the extent inertial targeting systems have a precise model of the world. No US military system relies on GPS for navigation. Military navigation systems use GPS as an untrusted source for fine-tuning inertial navigation within tight error bounds. Against US military systems, successfully spoofing GPS might buy you several meters of deviation. This only affects the cheapest US guidance systems, since most weapons have active terminal guidance. It is worth noting that GPS corrections are being phased out in US weapon systems, purportedly due to improvements in INS tech that moot the value of GPS corrections. The tl;dr: GPS was developed to build a precise model of the world in peacetime that could be fed to inertial targeting and navigation systems in the complete absence of GPS. In that, it has been a massive success. US military systems have never relied on GPS for anything important. Contrary to popular media, the US has never produced GPS-guided weapons, even the cheapest systems are INS at their core. Civilian systems use GPS for navigation, against its design, because they can mostly ignore its trivial susceptibility to hostile actors. |
|