Many of the latest weapon systems use GPS to accurately guide the missiles, rounds, projectiles, aircraft, and bombs – this is good because it prevents collateral damage of those who are not fighting, want nothing to do with any wars, conflict, or political impasse. They are just innocent or semi-innocent civilians, and neither side has a beef with them. Of course, if your enemy is using GPS to put a weapon on top of your head, you’d hope they miss, so it makes sense to jam their GPS to ensure they do, or hope they do anyway. Let’s talk.
You see, the US has some of the best GPS, GPS jamming technologies, and anti-jamming GPS technologies, and our enemies and foreign spies want to steal these technologies from us. For two reasons, so they can keep up with our technology or defeat our technology if there is a conflict. That makes sense, as that is the nature of human war machines. Every side tries to get the advantage, and every side tries to mitigate the opposing side’s advantage to their advantage. Let’s continue.
There was an interesting report put out by the GAO in August of 2013 titled; “Next Generation Jammer – DOD Should Continue to Assess Potential Duplication and Overlap As Program Moves Forward,” which discussed how important such systems were to the military, but also how much overlap there was in that regard, especially with regards to airborne electronic warfare systems, and thus, the report’s summary noted the following:
“Redundancy in some of these areas may, in fact, be desirable. However, pursuing multiple acquisition efforts to develop similar capabilities can result in the same capability gap being filled twice or more, lead to inefficient use of resources, and contribute to other warfighting needs going unfilled. Therefore, continued examination of potential overlap and duplication among these investments may be warranted.”
Okay, but, I also believe that lose lips sink ships and that having any sort of collaborative effort gives information away to too many places, and thus, opens the technological secrets for cyber thievery by foreign military cyber commands. The US knows that China is “very interested” in getting better GPS jamming and anti-jamming technologies to upgrade their own military, and that their spies and cyber spies are hot on the trail to steal it.
It might be wise if all these technologies were not out in the open for everyone to see and if some of this stuff were kept secret, and if enemy didn’t have any clue as to which system we’d be using where or when. See that point. Please consider all this and think on it.