Accessory to War

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  Space power—or, as some military commentators prefer to write it, spacepower—moved to the front lines of warfighting in early 1991. For forty-three days between January 17 and February 28, more than eighty thousand tons of bombs were dropped on the formerly thriving, fourth-largest military power in the world: the oil-endowed but heavily indebted nation of Iraq, which half a year earlier had invaded its small, still-thriving, also-oil-endowed neighbor and unyielding creditor Kuwait and had refused to leave despite a string of condemnatory UN resolutions. It was the first major US air war since Vietnam and the first major conflict following what then appeared to be the end of the Cold War. It was “the world’s first satellite war” (Arthur C. Clarke), “the coming-out party for space support” (Everett C. Dolman). The US military, which had dropped most of the bombs, repeatedly called it the world’s “first space war.” Never before had a military force been so dependent on Earth-orbiting satellites for extensive support of its war effort: strategy, tactics, planning, communications, identification of targets, weapons guidance, troop movements, navigation, long-range weather prediction. Satellites reshaped them all, while also providing early warning of Iraqi missile launches and, of course, live TV coverage.22

  Starting in the late 1980s, components of the military’s own advanced space systems had been called into action for mission planning in Libya, minesweeping in the Persian Gulf, communications and weather updates in Panama. But not until the first Gulf War did the huge military potential of such systems become evident. In the words of a US Space Command assessment issued in early 1992, “Space systems supported every aspect of planning, control and execution of the war with Iraq.”23 Or, in the words of a retired Royal Navy rear admiral and a retired Royal Air Force captain, “It was the first real test under war conditions of the $200 billion US space machine.”24

  A tangled web of factors instigated the Gulf War and its consequences. The national boundaries of Iraq had largely been drawn by the League of Nations in the early twentieth century when the Ottoman Empire was dismantled, and Iraq, resentful at having been nearly cut off from the Persian Gulf, had thrice claimed Kuwait as a proper part of its territory and campaigned for its annexation.25 The United States had, since the late 1970s, treated Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a favored partner against Iran, ignoring his regime’s use of chemical weapons and giving Iraq tens of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments on credit. Now Iraq’s oil revenues were crashing while Kuwait was helping to keep world oil prices low through its own overproduction. America’s demand for an uninterrupted supply of low-priced oil was an unspoken but key motivator for its attack on Iraq. The American-led Coalition forces’ intensive 1991 bombing of Iraq’s telecommunications infrastructure, power plants, water treatment facilities, government ministries, bridges, roads, airfields, ammunition depots, petroleum refineries, food-processing factories, retreating soldiers, and civilians shopping at markets turned out to be the prologue to the later, fuller US destruction of Iraq as a modern nation.

  Here, however, our concern is the ascendancy of the satellite as enabler of war—all kinds of war, from assaults waged by the armies, navies, air forces, and cyber forces of nation-states to the scattershot terrorist acts of an individual propagandized through the Internet and in possession of a mobile phone.

  GPS—the US Air Force’s NAVSTAR Global Positioning System—was a prominent innovation of America’s prosecution of the Gulf War. Today’s GPS is 24/7, real-time, accurate and precise down to a few meters. With input from widely available augmentation systems, those few meters can become a few centimeters.26 GPS is now absolutely ho-hum for most users. But back in 1991 it was an extraordinary idea that American soldiers, whose commanders had seen many more jungles than deserts, would be able to navigate the blowing sands of Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia with the help of orbital assets that included just sixteen participating satellites of the planned constellation of twenty-four; that could provide longitude, latitude, and elevation data for about nineteen hours a day; and that yielded measurements accurate to fifteen meters, at best, but infinitely better than a paper map could offer. Ground troops could even traverse regions that would challenge seasoned Iraqi navigators.

  GPS also assisted pilots. For the initial air strikes on Iraqi radar installations, for instance, Pave Low helicopters equipped with GPS partnered with Apache helicopters equipped with old-style Doppler radar. The Pave Lows led the way and pinpointed the targets, which the Apaches then attacked with Hellfire missiles. Even nonstealthy B-52 bombers equipped with GPS could enter the theater shielded by electronic silence. Early on January 17, 1991, seven B-52G Stratofortresses—described as “flying bomb trucks” by one aviation source—flew nonstop from Louisiana to Iraq, where they launched thirty-five GPS-equipped cruise missiles at key parts of the communications infrastructure, destroying most of their targets. GPS-equipped Air Force F-117A Nighthawks, the first stealthy plane ever used in combat, delivered laser-guided, semi-smart bombs at an average hit rate of 50 percent.27

  When fully functional, GPS has three components: (1) a minimum of twenty-one orbiting satellites plus at least three spares, all of which continuously signal their ever-changing position and the atomic time at that position; (2) the individual receivers, which automatically calculate their own position based on the signals they pick up from multiple satellites in different positions; and (3) the ground control network of monitoring stations and antennas, which manage the satellites’ flight paths and atomic clocks. The satellites occupy six different orbital planes in medium Earth orbit, at an altitude of about twenty thousand kilometers. The signals are sent as radio waves and, as with radar, can be distorted by the electrically charged ionosphere, through which they must pass on their way down to Earth’s surface. To establish its position in longitude, latitude, elevation, and time, a receiver must detect signals from at least four different satellites. If you exclude elevation, it needs just three. The extensive sky coverage of today’s GPS constellation enables receivers to pick up ample signals for all commercial and military applications.

  It would not be unfair to call Gulf War–vintage GPS rudimentary. Six of the sixteen satellites were old R & D units pressed into wartime service; one of the sixteen had malfunctioned two months earlier. Also, as GPS signals made their way down to Earth’s surface, they were susceptible to jamming.28 Then there was the problem of the receivers, specifically that there weren’t enough of them. At the start of the war the stockpile was negligible. In 1989 GPS had an encrypted military channel, with an accuracy of about fifteen meters, and an unencrypted civilian channel, with one-sixth the accuracy. But receivers capable of using the military channel were in short supply, causing not only the Pentagon but also the soldiers’ family members to order thousands of portable commercial receivers for America’s sons on the open market. This, in turn, forced the Pentagon to switch off the encryption, making the now-insecure military channel accessible to all. By the end of the war, some 4,500 commercial and 850 military receivers had been officially deployed to the US forces, plus all those unofficially supplied by loved ones—still far too few to serve the hundreds of naval vessels, the sixteen hundred combat aircraft, the forty thousand tanks, armored vehicles, and heavy artillery, and the half million US troops. The paucity of receivers had grave consequences; as a recent Air Force news story stated, “After the Gulf War, the U.S. Army announced it would install GPS receivers in all armored vehicles to help minimize fratricide, which became a major source of casualties in Desert Storm, most often caused by armored unit commanders lost in the featureless Iraqi desert or out of position during ground attacks.”29

  This was boom time for manufacturers of GPS receivers. Nonmilitary sales had already doubled year over year as hikers, boaters, pilots, and land surveyors learned of the device, which had moved past the experimental stage only at the very end of 1988. Initially, military sales accounted for only one-fifth of the foremost US manufacturer’s total revenues. But as soon as Iraq invaded Kuwait,
the Department of Defense ordered some eight thousand lightweight receivers from just that one company—a sale of more than $40 million, an amount that exceeded its total 1989 revenues. Suddenly the factory was running three shifts a day to meet demand.30

  Despite its limitations, the Gulf War’s GPS turned time-honored methods of navigation into an arcane, archaic craft and forever changed the planning and prosecution of war. Early commentators were blown away by its transformative power. Writing for the New York Times in 1988, at the dawn of the GPS era, science and war journalist Malcolm Browne evoked the momentousness of the neonate satellite constellation in a piece titled “New Space Beacons Replace the Compass”:

  To the captain of a clipper ship, a pocket-size gadget linked to artificial beacons in the sky that could infallibly guide a traveler to any point on earth might have seemed as remote from reality as a winged horse. But next year, anyone with a few thousand dollars will be able to buy just such a magic navigator. . . .

  For the Defense Department, the completion of the Global Positioning System will be a milestone. Guided by the system, a missile traveling to the opposite side of the world could hit within a few dozen feet of its target, Pentagon officials say. The system could infallibly lead an assault team through trackless jungle to an enemy stronghold, a bomber to a single enemy building or a boat to a gap in a dangerous shoal. . . .

  Without landmarks, sextant, star almanac, dividers or the other paraphernalia of conventional navigation, the user of a portable G.P.S. receiver can effortlessly read off the direction and exact distance along a great circle of any of 50 destinations stored in its memory. A glance at the gadget’s liquid-crystal display also tells the traveler his own latitude and longitude to within 100 feet, his speed and course over the ground, and the probable time of arrival at his destination.31

  Browne’s exuberant prose harkens back to the accounts of those who waxed poetic at the power and joy of using the first navigational compass, the first spyglass, the first seaworthy chronometer.

  Greater momentousness was soon to come, when a GPS precision-guidance package would be integrated into smart bombs and not just be part of the bomber aircraft’s navigation system. But in the mid-1990s, when Gulf War–era laser-guided weapons were still the last word in precision—and GPS-guided gizmos such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM, a conversion kit for smartening dumb bombs) and the Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW, a winged, air-to-surface actual weapon) were not yet readily available—military theorist Colin Gray felt it useful to note the obvious:

  Systems that gather and provide information do not themselves fight the enemy. Ultra intelligence in World War II, whose potency as an enabling influence is beyond question, did not in itself sink any submarines or destroy any aircraft, although it did empower tactical combat units to do those things. The NAVSTAR global positioning system (GPS) permits economies of force in mission planning, but NAVSTAR itself can put no weapons on target. . . . It is not always obvious where space power begins and ends when information from satellites augments the potency of naval, air, and terrestrial military operations.

  By the late 1990s, the full-scale GPS system was up and running, ready to direct the first generations of JDAM and JSOW plus an updated, GPS-endowed model of the Army Tactical Missile System. Do these developments weaken Gray’s contention that GPS could not put a weapon on a target? No, he might answer, technology is always ancillary to strategy.32

  Back in 1988, Malcolm Browne’s sources had told him that handheld GPS receivers would start being issued to American soldiers in 1992 and that the first to get them would probably be special forces units. While GPS wasn’t ready in time for the Coalition’s invasion of Iraq in January 1991, it was definitely ready by March 2003, when a now mainly US and British invasion force overwhelmed the country a second time. The reasons, according to President George W. Bush, were “to disarm [it], to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger” and to “remove . . . an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.”33

  In 1995 the system had achieved its full complement of twenty-four satellites; by 2003 there were twenty-eight. In 2000 the practice known as selective availability—the intentional degradation of publicly available GPS signals, implemented for reasons of national security—had been terminated. For a while at least, everyone, civilian or military, would always and everywhere have access to the same degree of accuracy. During the 2003 invasion, in fact, precision improved from just over fifteen meters to just over two meters. That improvement came from updating every satellite’s navigation package each time the satellite began to rise above the horizon of the battle zone. “Errors that accumulated over time—[such as] ionospheric distortion and relativity effects—were driven to zero for a period of time,” enthused one of the space ops commanders who carried out war support long-distance from the 50th Space Wing’s operations center at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado. “We hit them all a half-hour before satellites came into theater, and created this sweet spot over Iraq of less than 4 meters [precision].”34

  Today GPS comprises thirty-one operational satellites plus a few that are decommissioned but still orbiting, ready for reactivation if needed. The twelve oldest ones were launched between 1997 and 2004; the twelve newest, between 2010 and 2016. Next-generation GPS III is waiting in the wings, the first two satellites to be launched by SpaceX. Now that the practice of degrading the signals available to civilian users has been discontinued, GPS transmits on several different frequencies that require different access codes, some of which are strictly or partially military. As essential a public good as roadways and running water, basic GPS nonetheless remains an Air Force program, funded primarily through the Department of Defense, with modest input from the Department of Transportation.35 In itself, that management and funding arrangement shows how militarily indispensable the system has become since its debut in Iraq.

  Although the first, GPS is no longer the only global positioning system, and the names for the system itself are multiplying, two recent acronyms being PNT (position/navigation/timing) and GNSS (global navigation satellite systems). China has nearly completed its own version, Beidou, while the European Union’s Galileo is well on its way. For some years, however, the most important one has been Russia’s GLONASS. As with GPS, its full complement is twenty-four satellites. After becoming fully operational in 1995, the same year as GPS, it languished for several years as some of its satellites ceased operating and were not replaced until President Putin prioritized the system during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Available only to the military until 2007, GLONASS is now a more or less joint operation of the Ministry of Defense and the space agency, Roscosmos. Whereas GPS, as of spring 2017, had thirty-one satellites slotted into six orbital planes, GLONASS had twenty-seven, launched between 2006 and 2014, slotted into three planes just slightly nearer Earth’s surface and inclined at a different angle to the equator—an angle that makes GLONASS more effective than GPS at higher latitudes, where so much of Russia is located. Moscow, for instance, sits farther north than the northernmost point of the contiguous United States.36

  Today, many international smartphones use both GPS and GLONASS for greater coverage. Russia, in fact, has mandated that all its state and security apps use the dual system, although such a mandate could be dropped in response to a deteriorating political climate. But as the head of GLONASS said in 2014, the capability to receive and process signals from both systems increases not only the speed at which coordinates are processed but also their reliability, from 60–70 percent to “practically 100 percent” for ordinary urban conditions. Pointing out how dependency on a single system makes users vulnerable to denial or interruption of service, he argued that no individual country should unilaterally control infrastructure so crucial to every country and every economy:

  The operator of the navigation system . . . has the option of either switching off the civilian signal for a specific area or of desensitizing
it artificially. . . . This is not even about military conflict, as the threat of turning off the navigation switch can in itself be used to achieve political or economic aims. Therefore it is just a small step from a technological dependence on a narrow satellite navigation field to economic, political and military dependence.37

  In other words, the deterrent power of threat must be circumvented by the power of independence. Which is an important reason for the global proliferation of separate global positioning systems—though interdependence can have its own deterrent power.

  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (dubbed “the Pentagon’s brain” by its chronicler Annie Jacobsen) is taking independence one big step further. Having already funded the miniaturization of GPS receivers, DARPA has lately been funding the development of battery-powered, chip-scale atomic clocks that could function even in the absence of a satellite connection. Physicist Robert Lutwak, the program manager for this effort, called ACES (Atomic Clock with Enhanced Stability), notes that precise timing is essential not only for the Department of Defense but also for the infrastructure of everyday civilian necessities such as banking and electrical power distribution. Reducing reliance on signals from satellite-based navigation systems is key to improving resilience.38

  The European Space Agency, too, has an ACES project, except that in this case the acronym stands for Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space, and its material incarnation is a large, peace-loving payload carried on the International Space Station, not a small object sized to fit in a warfighter’s pack or pocket. Its main agenda is scientific inquiry into the fundamental laws of physics, not the facilitation of battle planning or banking.39 But at the heart of both versions of ACES is the atomic clock, a mechanism that tracks the passage of time by registering the frequency of light emitted by a specific quantum leap—a transition—of electrons within the atoms of a chosen element. Currently, the second is defined as exactly 9,192,631,770 cycles of the light emitted from such a transition within the cesium-133 atom. It’s easily replicable in the laboratories that need it, so scientists the world over can be sure their measured second is consistent with everybody else’s measured second.