FOX News/Warrior Maven: Air Force to launch new 'hardened' war satellite by 2022
GPS is a virtual backbone for military operations
What if Air Force fighters and bombers were successfully attacking an enemy with absolute precision and exact targeting data when all of a sudden their GPS signals disappeared or got hacked? What if that threw off the guided missiles and ground-coordinates being assembled on the ground by friendly Joint Tactical Air Controllers?
In a matter of minutes, attacks could be sent off-target, interrupted or simply made no longer accurate. Army-Air Force multi-domain collaboration might collapse. Even further, communications, digital moving maps showing navigational detail and intelligence data sharing could be disrupted or destroyed by the enemy.
The Global Positioning System is a virtual backbone for military operations that is considered essential to coordinated warfare operations. While there are many ongoing efforts to “harden” or better secure GPS, what if it were hacked? Just how hackable is it?
Well, the U.S. military wants to worry about this less by engineering a multiplicity of emerging technologies intended to preserve what’s called Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) in a GPS-denied environment. This is now increasingly becoming possible, in part due to the Air Force’s emerging Navigational Technology Satellite-3 set to launch in 2022.
NTS-3 is an emerging, high-tech space communications system engineered to both provide secure alternatives to GPS and also better secure GPS itself, according to Air Force Research Laboratory developers.
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WNU Editor: In a major war these are high priority targets. It makes sense to better "harden" them. The above video gives a brief description on why Navigational Technology Satellite-3 is important.
