OFW-6: Fragile Precision, GPS Vulnerabilities in Modern Warfare

Hello and welcome to the Fighter Pilot Podcast. I am your host Vincent Ayello, and this week we bring you the 6th installment of On Future War, a monthly series by our friends at Authentic Media in Cooperation with Kubik Defense. In this episode, Scott Chafian, a frequent host of the On Future War series, he welcomes back a long time Fighter Pilot Podcast friend, Brian Sinclair. You remember him from our first 60 or so episodes? Well anyway, Roger and Sunshine as they go by, they explore the critical role of global positioning systems in military operations. They dive into the fundamentals of GPS, as it's called, its indispensable military applications, the ever-present challenges posed by jamming, and the strategies and technologies essential for enhancing GPS resilience in today's complex defense landscape. Whew, it's exciting, it's all here on this month's On Future War episode. Here we go. As technologies and geopolitics change, so does the nature of warfare. Welcome back to On Future War, a series sponsored by Kubik Defense. It looks at emerging technologies and how they may affect peer and near-peer level conflict in the future, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, with a specific focus on military tactics, operations and strategy, and their interaction with the other instruments of national security policy. The future is now. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by a naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. Welcome back to On Future War. We continue today in Phase 2, Tactical Technology, with my guest, Brian, Sunshine and Claire. Sunshine and I will be talking about the capabilities and vulnerabilities of GPS in peer level conflict and those implications to the fight. This is Authentic. Today's episode is about GPS in the mid-twenty-first century. How dependent the US is upon GPS, how vulnerable our systems are to jamming interference and destruction, and what will non-GPS operations look like. Here to discuss this with me is retired Navy pilot and test pilot, Brian, Sunshine and Claire. Hi, Sunshine. How are you doing today? Hey, Roger, doing well. How are you? I am doing great. I know that you and I have talked on our other programming on Authentic and that audience may know you, but for the On Future War Cubic audience, can you go ahead and introduce yourself and give your background? Yeah, you bet. Thanks, Roger. Thanks for having me. I went to the Naval Academy, got an undergrad in aerospace engineering, and from there I went off to flight school. We got to two years in flight school, obviously picked up S-3s, which I didn't even know what it was at the time when I got selected, so I had to do a little research and off I went to San Diego. So anyway, flew the S-3 for one J-O tours, we called it, or three years, and then from there went off to grad school, actually. So I went off to Monterey, got a master's in astronomical engineering, and from there I picked up F-18 Cs and went back to Virginia Beach and flew single-seat fighters and participated in operations and during freedom and Iraqi freedom, so that would be Afghanistan and Iraq. And then from there I went off to my department head tour in Lamor, California and flew F-18 E's, so the Super Hornets. So we were one of the earlier Super Hornets, I would say, not, it was a lot 26, so we didn't have the AESA radar, but we still had a lot of goodness to include the joint helmet mounted to the Q-ing system, and so it was quite a game changer for close air support. From the F-18 E, then I went back to the Naval Academy and taught aerospace engineering and Rick over there the building for about two and a half years until I picked up test pilot school. They sent me off to Air Force test pilot school and Edwards Air Force Base, so the Navy Exchange student, if you will, they've got one Navy Exchange guy and one Marine Corps Exchange guy each year. So I got picked for that and it was kind of funny. So we're in anapolis, my wife is digging the area, she's from San Diego, but she's digging anapolis. I said, "Hey honey, we got orders to test pilot school," which traditionally you would think, "Oh, that's Patuxent River, Maryland, so be quick drive." And instead it said, "Oh, Air Force test pilot school, where is that?" Well, it turns out we didn't know, so we actually had to go on Google Maps, and here's a woman living in anapolis very green, right, and nice rivers and whatnot. And we noticed it's just this little blip in the desert. So anyway, so I moved her out to Edwards Air Force Base. We completed test pilot school, and from there I moved up to Ridgecrest, California, and that's a became part of VX31, so we do basically stores testing, if you will, or munitions, I should say munitions testing. So I focused specifically on anti-surface warfare stuff, so things dropping off F-18s and adversely impacting or affecting, excuse me, ships. My forte turned out to be network enabled weapons. So I worked with Lynx 16 weapons in the developmental phase. I did that for several years as we had a family or a portfolio of any W, or network enabled weapons that were being developed, so I helped with that. And then finally our twilight tour was back in my wife's hometown San Diego. It's the Depot, which is basically a rework facility where they take the old tired hornets, they break them down. Sometimes they really open them up, they do some very intrusive maintenance. And up to five years later, they'll put them back together, and then my job was to ensure that they're airworthy. So the threat had gone from outside the cockpit on the ground traditionally, like in a rack in Afghanistan, the threat was now actually in the cockpit with me. So it was a very different mission set, I'll say, as the senior test pilot, trying to make sure the aircraft were certified, safe to give them back to the fleet. Awesome. And now you work, we won't delve into the details, because we are very upset conscious. But you now work in private employment, as it were, on a lot of the same systems. This dovetails perfectly with what we're talking about today, because you worked extensively, as you said, in the air to surface realm. And these sorts of weapons are coming increasingly, if not entirely, to depend on precision guidance that the United States generally achieves through the global positioning system. I know there's technically a different term for that, but I think for simplicity for the listener, we'll stick with GPS. Let's start, if you don't mind, explain to the layman how GPS works. Absolutely. So yeah, so global positioning system, you have to have at least 24 satellites, they're in a meow or a medium earth orbit, it turns out that was kind of the goal delox of the equations. So diving into a little astro nautics, if you will. So you got Leo, write your low earth orbit, you got your medium, and then you got your geo or geosynchronous orbits. And they did a trade study and realized that, well, it takes a lot of money to get things all the way out to geo. And when they're down in Leo, they move real quickly, so you need a whole bunch of them. So the good compromise was the put them in the middle, which I just call kind of the goalie locks band for GPS anyway. So what you have is at least 24 satellites that can see the earth in different positions. And that provides a four satellite coverage for each position on the earth. Now you need four, as opposed to three, to do what they call trilateration. So it's basically a distance measurement. So what happens is, will there two well-known carrier frequency signals in the L band, right? The L1 and L2. And there's an experimental L5 band, which started in 2014 and it's kind of getting wrong out right now. So it's looking good. I think it will work. But anyway, so you have at least two carrier band frequencies. And then the signal that's carried on the carrier frequency obviously contains three parts. It's got a pseudo random noise code, which is like a fingerprint. So this is the ID for the satellite. It has the ephemera's data, which is going to be the position of the satellite with respect to what we call siderial space or basically where it is in space. And then there's almanac data that tells the user where all the satellites are. So it knows where to look for the next satellite. So basically the signal puts out a timestamp says, hey, this is when the satellite shot out this message, the receiver then obviously receives the message. It hacks its clock and it knows where the source started because of the ephemera's data and it knows the time that it started and it knows the time it received. So it gets a delta in time and a position. So you basically, it's a rate time distance thing. So if you take the delta t, we'll call it the time difference times the speed of light that gives you a distance. You get a distance from three different satellites. If you could picture, Roger, do you remember Venn diagrams? Absolutely. Overlapping circles. Yeah. Exactly. So picture those Venn diagrams, but now we're going to make them spheres instead of circles. So each center of a sphere would be the satellite. And then that triangulation distance of which we just spoke earlier, that's going to be the radius of the sphere. Now you take three of those spheres and you put it, you map it on the surface of the Earth and that gets you a very solid coordinate, but it doesn't give you altitude necessarily. So you get a fourth sphere in there and the intersection of those fourth spheres should provide you with some altitude. So it's basically a very simple, but very robust system. You know the speed of light and then you have a time stamp and as we'll talk about later time is just critical for communications, believe it or not, as well as position reporting or what we call P and T right position, navigation, timing messages, P and T messages. So these things are all be important to that trilateration as we talked about earlier. And then the only thing that kind of is a fly in the ointment when it comes to the calculations is the speed of light, unfortunately, is not absolute. We have atmospheric delays, correct? If you think of the ionosphere, the troposphere, there's this kind of refraction, we'll call it. The light analogy and you think about looking at something through water. So let's say you have a fish tank and you put your hand in the fish tank, you're going to notice a bending of light, right? You're going to notice that, hey, my finger doesn't look like it's actually coming from my hand anymore. There's a similar phenomenon of slowing down, we'll call it of light waves, but in this case, it would be RF or frequency, right? The radio frequency coming out of satellites. So that's going to require a little mathematical manipulation, we'll call it to adjust for the atmospheric delays. And then are you familiar with multi-paths? Yes. At all. Okay. Cool. Yeah. So there's another type of delay. So let's say the satellite signal doesn't come directly from the satellite to the receiver. Let's say it's the receivers in your car, you're in the city somewhere and it bounces off one of the buildings. So the path isn't just directly from the satellite, there's also the same signal that's getting bounced off a building and then coming to the receiver. So the receiver has to be able to discern which signal path is correct. So once again, there's some more math, massaging that goes into removing the multi-path errors as well as those atmospheric delay errors that we talked about earlier. So yeah. It's fascinating because GPS essentially takes everything that we've been doing as humans for several centuries now to figure out where we were on the earth, particularly in the maritime environment, right? Because interestingly, you can look for landmarks when you're out in the ocean and then eventually up in the air, we turned to the sun or the stars and everything you just described is almost exactly the same conceptually of how you do celestial navigation, right? And people are probably more familiar with that. You take three lines and you cut three lines and that's your best fix. We've essentially created our own constellation as it's called of GPS satellites and use computers and our scientific knowledge to remove as much of the human error as possible. Yeah, you're absolutely right. So that is a great analogy thinking back to celestial nav. The only difference I would offer up is that with the GPS satellites, we can actually actively measure or really passively, but we can measure the distance to each of the sources where celnav, we don't measure the distance to the star, but we know an angular distance, right? So I would almost, this is splitting hairs now, but I'd say celnav is triangulation versus trial lateration. So lateration being the lateral, the sides, you're measuring the sides of the triangle versus triangulation where you're measuring the angles of the triangle, but still very much, yeah, very akin processes. Very akin, but it is different and it's much newer. So as I said, we've been doing celestial nav for hundreds of years now, essentially since people could figure out an accurate timepiece. Yeah. Totally. Clearly, GPS has not been around that long. Can you describe for the listener where GPS got its start, how it got its start, and how it's evolved to the current system we have? So you remember the good old Ruskies with, I think in '57, Sputnik, Sputnik, anyway, won't progress into the Michael Myers, but I can. So yeah, so you got Sputnik out there. So the space race was kind of kicked off, I think, by Sputnik, right? So the Russians had the first claim of throwing something into an earth orbit. And while they were trying to track it, and while we were actually, while they were tracking it and we were trying to track it, we also learned something very cool, which was we can use Doppler shifts of the signals to figure out the position of the satellite. So Doppler shift for the folks at home, think of a racing car. So you're at the racing track, F1, NASCAR, whatever your poison is. And as the cars approaching you, now those engines are noisy, obviously. The pitch of the engine is actually going to increase. And it's not because the guy's revving the engine any louder or any faster, excuse me. But it's merely just a perceived compression, if you will, of the sound waves, which is going to elevate the pitch. So bear with me with my terrible sound effects here, but anyway, basically it's going to, you're going to, as right as it disappears. So that increase frequency is going to be closure, the propagation compression by closure, if you will. So the waves get squished together. And then as the thing leaves and goes away from you, the propagation is expanded. And it's not physically expanded, but it's the perception of the receiver, right? So that's Doppler shift and that's in the acoustic realm. There's a very similar phenomenon because there's the same name in the RF as well as the visible light spectrum, right? So anyway, so you can use that Doppler shift to figure out of the satellite signals from Sputnik, you figure out where Sputnik was. So from that, we learned, oh, there's ways we can track satellites using RF or radio frequency. So the, the Wizards went to action, they, they went into their, their windowless rooms on the States, you know, and they're doing some calculations on those giant chalkboards that you see from the, from the different NASA movies, right? And then they finally launched, I think it was called NavStar one back in 1978. And it was the first navigation satellite now one satellite when we've proven empirically that you need about 24 of them, you know, it was a good start, right? So they launched one into orbit as a proof of concept to see if it would work and sure enough, it started working. So the, the big plan originally was just to have GPS for the military. As you can imagine, for troop movements, right, for aircraft navigation, ship navigation, all that stuff as well as tracking targets, which is going to be the big one, right? When we talk about our precision guided munitions. Now there was a big world event in 1983 that shifted the perception of how we're going to use GPS. And that was the downing of Korean Airlines flight 007, right, or 007. And that was a commercial airliner that originated in Alaska and was going to Seoul, Korea. And due to some navigation errors, it wandered into Soviet at the time, Soviet airspace. And unfortunately, it was shot down. So a civilian airliner was shot down by a Sukhoi 15 or a Russian fighter. And so a very bad day, very terrible tragedy, obviously. And Reagan, who was president of the time, said, you know what, we're not going to use GPS just for military. We're also going to use it for the civilians. And so the mission expanded, obviously, into the civilian realm. And then the initial operational capability when it first kind of came online was in 1993 with a full up capability of 95. And that would be providing those P and T's, right, the position, navigation, and timing signals of which we spoke earlier for both the military and the civilians. Now they did want to dial down the accuracy for the civilians. So the civilians couldn't use it for weapons quality tracks, as we call it. So they had selective availability and selective availability is going to be basically a wandering of the signal so that the accuracy is more on the order of several meters as opposed to several feet. But then in 2000 under the Clinton administration, they did turn off selective availability. So to the layman, you could say that civilian and military navigation were more comparable. They were not the same by any means, but they were more comparable. And there's a couple of different things to unpack there. But we'll start with a great explanation, by the way, Shine. So I appreciate that because very, very clear for people aren't familiar with it and a great refresher for those who are. But there's a little bit of that timeline I want to point out to the listener, which is 93 to 95 is when the system really comes online. And 1991 is when the US public first became aware of smart weapons in a very general sense with the Gulf War. So for purposes of this discussion, I think it's important to illustrate that there were ways to achieve precision guidance before GPS totally. They were very costly. Yeah. They were very difficult and I'm not the point of this show isn't to go into those. That GPS tends to be the most user friendly and without delving too much into making this a show about platforms, every precision guiding musician had a different set of software that had to go with it, a different set of procedures. It was easy enough to keep those together on, say, a worship, but trying to fit all of that into an airframe would become problematic, right, to get all these different things. So the US has become increasingly reliant upon GPS for our precision guided effects. I'll say because I'm sure we're going to talk about it. There's a couple of different levels. And for me, the most, I won't say most famous, but the first time I was exposed to this concept was reading about the Israeli raid on the Iraqi reactor, Oto Cyric back in 81, if memory serves. I just remember reading a book, probably as a teenager when I was in ROTC, that described how the Israeli said, well, there are smart bombs, but we can also drop a dumb bomb off a very smart plane and get a very, very small margin of error. They did, dude. So, yeah, they did that, I think, with iron 2,000 pound bombs from F-16s. With low level ingress, right? I mean, that's very low level ingress. Did they ever make that into a movie? That story, you know what I'm saying? Not to the best of my knowledge, but, hey, yeah, we'll sidebar. Or after this, maybe we'll make a screenplay. But I bring this up to point out that the US military still has iron bombs. We still have dumb bombs. We are becoming increasingly reliant upon GPS, though, for everything to make the plane smart, to make the munition smart, and to make the plane munition combination smart. So as a guy who specializes in that shine, talk to us on the unclass level about how dependent the US military is on GPS at this point. Yes. So they are still very dependent. We have robust systems, and we'll talk about how we harden. We'll call it GPS. Our GPS receivers against both spoofing and jamming, and we'll dive in the principles of those, obviously, here shortly. But we still identify, we be in the leadership, identify, I guess, our dependence on GPS, and it is a crutch. But our, because of things like ring laser gyros, our technology for our INS, our inertial navigation systems, are becoming pretty darn good. So I would say very accurate and very precise, if you will. So two different terms, obviously, there. But precision is what we're really worried about as we want to make sure it stays stable, right? And so ring laser gyros is opposed to mechanical tumblers, we'll call them. Definitely provides more robust solutions. But without a doubt, I mean, I was, you know, I was on the, the IK and the Red Sea. They asked me to come out and do us help fix a weapon system, if you will. And I learned something new. They, being careful what I say here, at a point, there was some GPS denial for me sitting in the aircraft. I didn't fly an aircraft, but they gave me a jet to get this weapon system to work. And I was surprised that if the jet doesn't receive some GPS signals, how it can adversely affect the weapon systems. So bigger picture of those, definitely staying on the unclass side here is when you think of a kill chain and kind of warming it system up and getting it ready. So you've got to find a target. The jet needs to know where it is in space. And then it can transfer that information to the bomb as a starting point. And then the bomb knows where it is in space. And then from there, because the bomb knows where it is and you know where the target is. So the bomb knows where the target is, it can get there. And that's kind of the overarching 30,000-foot view will say a GPS guided weapon. It's amazing just how reliant we still are on GPS. I guess I'll leave it at that. Yeah. And so yeah, to sort of bring it back and again, staying on the unclass level, GPS can make the jet very smart about where it is. Or it can make its launch platform say the aircraft carrier very smart about where it is. And then the aircraft can translate that even manually. Much like if you see an aircraft shelter at a military air base, the lat-long coordinates are stenciled on the inside of the shelter specifically. Yeah. Yeah. Totally, dude. And so you know exactly where you are. So you can do that. And then you have the ring laser gyros. You have the various INS systems that keep the aircraft aware of where it is in space. And it can translate that to the weapon. And then, of course, as you said, you can then drop a weapon. But if you're not giving the weapon some sort of guidance on board guidance from your launch platform, you're either relying completely upon either ballistics. Or if it is a powered weapon, just the idea that it's accounting for wind and gravitational differences and anything else just through a little bit of debt reckoning, or the weapon itself has to use GPS to fine tune its location. So at the end of the day, we could work around this. But as you said, it's a little bit of a crush. And anytime you have an easy system, it's always a challenge for any organization to ensure they train to the worst case scenario, not the best case scenario. Am I on point there? You are totally on point. Yeah. So we have something called pace. It's just an acronym for primary, alternate, contingent, and emergency or contingency, I guess. So P-A-C-E. So it's just basically a four tiered or four level planning system. And as you can imagine, our primary would be with GPS. Our alternate may be laser guided, whereas contingency may be some kind of iron bomb. So hey, we've got a smart jet that knows the kinematics of the weapon, like how it's going to fall off the airplane and where it's going to go. And then emergency might be something like dropping a fuel tank or a machine gunning the target or something. Yeah. So you're absolutely right. So the reason I bring that up, it may be sorry, convoluted. But is, yeah, we have to practice for contingency ops. That is a foot stomper in military ops, but especially in military or naval aviation as we have to know when everything goes to hell in a hand basket, what systems are we going to have to rely upon? And it's traditionally going to be plain old. I got a plug in a waypoint zero, meaning an initial spot on deck of where my aircraft is to your point of stenciled coordinates on a tent, right? And then from there, I use my IMU, which is a inertial measuring unit and all that does is measure accelerations, it doesn't measure any kind of velocity, it doesn't measure any kind of position. So you have to go through some math, some integration, right? To go from acceleration to velocity and integrate again, to get position. Well, what it senses is an angular acceleration. And what it's really sensing is the almost the acceleration of the earth. So as you're sitting there, it's kind of the tangential acceleration. So I have to plug in a waypoint zero and what it really cares about is the north. It wants to know how far above the equator I am. And then from there, it's going to sense an acceleration to one side, meaning as the earth rotates, you know, and I'm on the earth, it's going to start an acceleration. So from there, it's able to divine, okay, if I'm this far away from the equator and I go through my math of what the earth is shaped or mathematically modeled, then from there, I should know basically where north is, if you will. And then from there, once I start taxing and then flying, there's different accelerations and it can then incorporate that into my position to get a velocity, if that makes sense. So it does. Okay, cool. It's complex, but you do a great job of explaining it. Oh, thank you. And I want to, I want to make a note so that we could circle back because I don't, we could talk about it now, but I don't want to talk about it now because we're planning to talk about what things would look like in the GPS denied environment. So we'll circle back to those questions that came. Oh, perfect. Yeah. From here, I do want to ask one question though, is this a completely passive system from the point of view of the receiving unit, be it the aircraft or the bomb? Do they have to send an interrogation signal or is this a constantly broadcast signal that you just receive on the unclass level? It's just going to be a passive signal. And so yeah, it's just your receiver. So you can't detect a GPS receiver if that makes sense because it's not emitting anything. And I bring that up because obviously fifth gen technology, stealth technology, one of the key cornerstones is you don't want to emit. So just so everyone understands, stealth aircraft use GPS because it's a very good way to remain stealthy. Even things like a radar altimeter, I'm going to use a very extreme example under the right circumstances, very correct circumstances could be intercepted. Anything else that needs a signal from the aircraft could be intercepted? Yeah. And you bring up a great point and perhaps in another on future warfare episode, we'll talk or you will talk about this, but that would be LPI LPD, right? So low probability of intercept, meaning hey, I've got the signal and now I could spoof it and change it or LPD, low probability of detection. And to your point about rad out, so radar altimeter, it's going to send out a signal. It's going to bounce off something and come back and it's going to once again use the time delay, times the speed of light gives you a distance. Now if that aircraft were to roll up to a certain angle of bank and the radar altimeter, which is traditionally underneath it, now shoots a signal and it shouldn't these days, they have some logic to suppress that. But anyway, it could send the signal, you're right. The radar altimeter signal could be shot a couple of miles out, right? And then it alerts the bad guys. Yeah. So great segue, right? Because we're talking now about the bad guys and how they want to exploit any advantage they can. So understanding how reliant the US is on GPS and also understanding that for the past 30 years, I guess, it's just about 30 years, no organization, no country has had success going toe to toe with the United States military, right? Like if you remember back to 1990, 1991, there was, you know, the DOD was ordering tens of thousands of additional body bags because we didn't know how desert storm was going to go. Okay. And it set this tone for American, God, I don't like using terms that can be taken politically, but American exceptionalism in the military sphere. And admittedly, we have not faced a pure adversary in this 30 year time. You could argue Iraq was perceived as a near peer because of the size at the time. People were sort of like, well, maybe, but we're looking at a peer or near peer level conflict in the Indo-Pacific region. So why am I bringing up the past 20 to 30 years of unconventional warfare? Because what was seen to work was fighting from our opponent strengths against the American weaknesses. That's whenever our opponents had the most success. So understanding that we are so reliant upon GPS, an enemy would likely want to set the conditions on the battlefield to remove those advantages from us. So let's talk about the opportunities as seen from the, quote, unquote, enemy side or risks from our side of GPS. How can it be overcome or to be specific? How can the GPS system be overcome? Okay, so let's dive back into the concept of operations, if you will, and the physics of it. So you have this satellite up there at Mio, right? So he's probably, or it, I guess, is really about 12 and 1/2 thousand miles away, right? Spinning around. And then it's only putting out, you know, it's got a limited power source, obviously. So what happens is it's a very weak signal. So if you think of DVMs, like a visible milliwatts, if you guys are into that, which was always hard for me to wrap my head around, but it's minus 125 DVMs or 1.01 Pharaoh, so I mean, it's tiny, tiny, there's like a decimal with a whole bunch of zeros and then a one. So perhaps more realistic or practical, I would say, I guess, explanation would be that the signal is about 400 times weaker than the background noise in space. It's a very extremely weak signal. So how the enemy could capitalize on that, why they're jamming or spoofing that we'll talk about would be just have to overpower it, right? So if you can overpower a weak signal, so let's bear with me here. Let's analogy. Let's say, so you're in your house, Roger, it's dusk, all right? So the sun hasn't set, you know, it's still, you don't see the street lights yet kind of thing. And now six houses down, the guy has a window in the front of his house and in the window is a candle. And so it's pretty flipping far away, six houses and there's a little, you see a little light out there and that's your signal source is that candle. So keep that in mind as we kind of step through this spoofing and this jamming if you don't mind. But so it is a very weak signal out there. And do you want to start with jamming or do you want to do spoofing? Let's do jamming. I think that's an easier concept. Okay. Yeah, fair. So jamming here. So we got that weak candle, the weak signal source out there. And all I have to do really is either a, overwhelm the receiver or b, at least drown out the GPS signal. And that would be considered jamming. So I need a, as you could imagine, a stronger signal. So once again, you're in your house, you see the candle, six houses down the road. It's a dusk, you know, so it's, you can still see a lot of background light, but you're focusing on that. Now, all of a sudden, there's a dude who happens to have his headlights turned on and he aims his headlights right at you as he's driving down the road, right? So all of a sudden, ah, you're kind of wincing, you're squinting, you're thinking ask, you've overwhelm the receiver. So that would be one way to jam is just provide a signal that's obviously L1, L2 or L5, right? It has to be the correct carrier frequency so that you're sensitive to it. And then you're just going to overwhelm the receiver or let's say you just want to drown out the GPS signal. So you could have basically a flashlight that's really close to the candle down the road. And you just can't perceive or discern really the candle anymore. You just see the flashlight next to the candle, right? So that would be another way to do that. So that's kind of the Lehman's terms for I was kind of the lowest common denominator, the knuckle dragger at test pilot school. So the knuckle dragger with the aeronautical engineering and was it arrow, ah, Celeste, you know, I do. I see I'm not even smart enough to remember what you'll scratch you degrees in, but in the funny thing is, I don't even remember what they're, I got two masters and I forget what they're about. You know what I'm saying? But well, I think the analogy is great because that makes it really clear to everybody that you can either focus on overwhelming the person or system receiving the signal. Or you can simply make something close to the source that is so much stronger in your analogy, brighter, greater energy than the source signal. And now it becomes imperceptible without a lot of specialized tech that is something we're not going to get into other than to say it's very expensive. It's very exotic and believe it at that. Okay. Yeah. That sounds good. So then out of the analogy back into the kind of technical realm. So there's broadband noise jamming and then narrow band noise jamming. So what happens is jamming or really transmitting takes on multiple frequencies. So broadband takes a whole lot of power, right, which is energy and you need a battery or some kind of power source for that. So broadband is, hey, I'm just going to scream and try to cover all the frequencies or narrow band as it's more directed because even though we talked about L1, L2 and L5, those carrier frequencies, there are modulations of the carrier frequency. So there's actually other frequencies in the neighborhood will say of L1, L2 and L5 that actually contain the information. And so you have to be able to target those individual side bands to effectively jam. So it becomes this kind of balance or compromise between how much power you have available and the distance you want to, you know, where your receiver is and then what frequency you want to jam. So it's not easy. And if you think of let's take an aircraft carrier, for example, right, the aircraft carrier, it would probably notice if there's a GPS jammer close by. So if it's floating in the water, we could probably remove it. We could neutralize it, we'll say, or if it's a GPS jammer's flying overhead, we could probably neutralize that also. But in this case, it would be very difficult to consume a lot of power to have a GPS jammer on, let's say, mainland China, since we're talking South China Sea. And to affect or influence a GPS receiver on an aircraft carrier over by the Philippines. That is, I don't know how many nuclear power stations it would take to power, the, you know what I'm saying? So what happens is the physics of it is easy, I would say and that is you just have to or at least straightforward, very straightforward, better way to put it, great. But the actual implementation, you got to be real sneaky about how you do this kind of thing, right? So. And to go back to an analogy, people might be a little more familiar with. We have in the pure RF radar detection realm, you have standoff jammers, you have escort jammers. And it's all about how much power can you use? How much power do you want to use? I go back to, even though hard to believe it's 40 years old now, but anyone who really wants sort of a basic primer on US military technology, the foundations of what we use today in an entertaining format, red-red storm rising, right? Because you'll sort of get everything, because you'll get the fact that the closer you get to something that's jamming you, the better chance you have of burning through that jamming because of your power. So it's a bunch of different relationships of time, distance, and energy. You're right. And if you don't mind in your example, which is spot on, and I love the Tom Clancy series, not one is ghostwritten, but when it was really him, is I think the jamming of which you speak there is more active, or you're jamming an active sensor, like a radar, so did you get close? Yeah, I'm totally with you. So jamming is the same. Yeah. And then the same concept between active sensors, if you will. And in this case, a passive receiver GPS. So yeah, very good question. So a quick question before we move to spoofing, right, which we mentioned, and spoofing is different from jamming, communications, and even some of our RF sensors, radars, will use frequency hopping to become less jam susceptible or more jam resistant is probably the right way to say it, or lower potential for being intercepted in communications. Is there any frequency agility in GPS for the military that we could talk about? There is. It's not quite like how our link 16 works. So let's anchor a little bit on frequency agility. So that would be to our point earlier, we said, hey, you got to invest your jammer energy in a specific frequency, right? So you want to jam the carrier wave, if you will. So well, but if the target moves its carrier frequency around, then the jammer has to follow it, and the carrier is going to move around based on some pattern that, you know, the target, if you will, is going to bounce around its frequencies, and I'm pretty sure the jammer is not going to know the frequency hopping pattern, we'll call it. So it turns out to be, it's a kind of, that's a great way to harden our F systems against jamming is by bouncing around, if you will, but that bouncing around requires time because it's a temporal thing, it's based in the time domain, it changes. And so what happens is a lot of our comm systems that have frequency agility rely upon GPS time because we need some kind of ecumenical clock or a universal clock, you know, like an atomic clock or something like the GPS guys have. So our comm systems that are frequency hopping, they do require some kind of a time standard. There you go. You see it can come from GPS, but GPS itself doesn't do that frequency hopping, like we think about for our comm systems, it has other like binary phase shift key and also there's another method that it can encrypt, we'll say not through algorithms, but it can kind of transform the wave and have it bounce from one side of the sideband to the other, and I'm trying to talk around topics here, but there are certain digital encryption where we can bounce around the signal amongst a bunch of frequencies to try to make it frequency agile. Okay, great, yeah, great point, I think at the beginning of that, which is that everything we talk about now with frequency agility uses a time standard from GPS. So GPS itself can't, it's like defining a word by itself in that self, right? Your English teacher is going to give you a zero on the project, so which I'm used to actually if I come to think of it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we both are, but all right, awesome. So let's pivot from jamming in that idea, which is just outright denying the signal to spoofing what in some people may be familiar with spoofing in different RF terms. Let's start from the beginning with what is spoofing at all and what then what is GPS spoofing? Okay, yeah. So spoofing in general is going to be how I'm going to create a counterfeit signal that somehow is more enticing than the original signal. So maybe stronger, you know what I'm saying is traditionally the way they do it is just by sheer power. So they're going to produce they be in the spoofer, we'll call it right, not the spoof e, not the receiver, but the spoofer is going to create a stronger signal that has very similar characteristics. So probably the satellite ID that we talked about earlier that pseudo random noise and perhaps they're going to mess with the ephemeralist, they're going to change it a little bit tweak it somehow and say, hey, this is actually the time instead of the real time or they'll change the position and then or maybe they'll change the almanac data. So they're going to change the information that's contained in the message, but yet make the message more enticing to the receiver. There's a couple pieces of gear you can do that. Have you heard of a software defined radio? Cool. So it's kind of the new thing and some of my day job lends itself to that when we talk about traditional radios have have hardware and they have physical filters, diodes they use right to trim out certain frequencies or amplify other frequencies, well, they can actually remove a lot of the guts now, the hardware and they can replace it with circuit boards and they can modulate everything digitally. So that way if you want to tweak the radio, you don't have to remove and replace a physical part anymore. You just go into the app, we'll call it and you're just going to change some of the metrics or parameters. So it's a lot more flexible design for radios nowadays. And so you can change the the oscillators if you will or the filters or whatever you want digitally. So it's kind of the new hotness, I would say. Yeah. And military history is replete with stories, particularly at the sort of dawn of the use of radios. Yeah. Large scale in World War two of units with the wrong crystals, not being able to communicate with one another and you had to physically change something. Whereas here, a lot more latitude. Yeah. Okay, crystals, I think of Pizio or Pizio, however you want to say electric. Yeah. So the resonator, the circuit resonator. Yeah. And now it can be done digitally. So it's literally, I'm going to grab this little menu, pull down menu and change the, you know, the slide, the digital slide. Yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry. So software to find radios or it is dedicated GPS simulators are the type of gear they use with, usually with high gain antennas, right, because they want to put out that juicier signal. So it's going to be high gain. When I say high gain, it's very directed. So you're going to kind of point the jammer at the target you're trying to jam. If you will, in this case, GPS, yeah, too. So that's, that's GPS spoofing is a counterfeit signal that's more enticing, right? There are a couple techniques of how to introduce this more enticing signal because a shock doesn't always work. He can't just, well, here, let me back up a little bit. So there's intermediate spoofing. So that signal, maybe you don't want to turn it on right away and kind of be a shock to the receiver system. Oh, whoa, whoa. What am I looking at? Why is it different? So you're going to bring it in very gradually. So what I mean by that is perhaps you started a lower, even though GPS is already weak, you're going to start an even weaker power. And then you're going to slowly dial up the power into you basically have the same power. And then you're hoping for a little kind of bait and switch. And then eventually you're going to continue to climb that power, perceive power in. And then ideally it's going to be stronger and have the good ID. So it looks like it's the correct signal coming from the crack satellite, but then you change the message. So that's intermediate spoofing is a gradual introduction of this counterfeit signal. Or something that I experienced in Iraq here, replay attacks. So replay attack is where no kid and they don't, they're not going to gradually introduce it. It's a lot easier to implement. They're just going to take old recordings of signal. So like, let's say it's a five hour old signal or something. They're going to retransmit it. All right. So it really is the same signal with the same ID. It has a femoris from five hours ago, in my example, and has the Almanac data from five hours ago. But anyway, so now you're going to confuse the dude, the receiver, because he's going to see two signals that are adult of five hours. And then how does he discriminate that, right? And how are you going to pick out which one is real? So the way I saw that in Iraq was actually not over GPS, obviously, because I couldn't perceive that. But over the radio. So there would be a couple of times when we're going in the clear or in the red we call it. So we're not transmitting the encryption or encrypted radios. And the Iraq is, it was pretty slick and it was very effective. They would actually take recordings of allied aircraft communications and they would re-broadcast it on the frequency later. So believe it or not, one time Roger, I actually heard myself over the radio, and it wasn't me. I mean, it was me, but it was me two hours ago or something. Man, that really messed with my awareness, because you can imagine, you know, comms in the combat environment, very scripted and very time sensitive, we'll say. And then all of a sudden, to hear some other dude, who's actually me, but it's two hours ago with different information, I'm like, well, what the, it was a very, very effective. I'll say that. And in your case, I'm not sure if it's better or worse, because it's probably a little inside the Udalupe, if you will, unsettling, we wait, wait, that's my voice. On the other hand, what if it's a squadron mate, who's like, wait, I didn't think Shine was flying right now. Hang on. And it's all about getting inside the Udalupe, or the Observorian Decide Act, the famous Boyd development. Yeah. And you're almost bringing the Udalupe to a grinding halt when you do that, because it kind of explodes the observer portion of it, right? What the, right? Right. Right. And if we're talking about GPS type signals, or we're talking about high performance aircraft, or weapons that are either propelled or just dropped at terminal velocity, or are now dropping at terminal velocity, you don't have to completely fool the person forever. You just need to delay the system enough that it doesn't have time to adjust to what it wants to do. In other words, hit the target right now. Dude, you're a spot on. Yeah. And the thing is, because a lot of weapons nowadays is you launch the weapon with a point of interest of, hey, it should, you know, your targets generally in this direction. And then it's got mid course guidance. So in other words, the weapon just on board is fine without using its on board sensor necessarily, like an optical sensor. Let's say. And you're trying to drive the weapon to a sensor basket where it will open its eye and then take over and acquire the target visually, we'll call it and then prosecute on its own. But it's that mid course portion that you really want to mess with the weapon. Yeah. So that it never arrives in the sensor basket to be able to perceive the target. Yeah. Spot one. So we're going a little off topic, but it's germane, which is the sooner you introduce angular offset to any traveling body, the greater the effect of that offset. Right. So that's a long flute way to say, if I can induce one degree of error into a weapon a hundred miles from the target, I get a much greater offset than if I induce that at 10 miles from the target. Absolutely. It's a triangle, right? So versus where you send it, yep, the delta gets much bigger. Yeah. I want to circle back just for a second for those of you who like me went to public school and did not get atrophysics degrees. Hold on, hold on. I have public schooling, enable academy, monitorate, fair enough, so thank you, taxpayers, for my education. Yes. I guess tactically, right? The Roxy scholarship. So thank you, everyone, listening for our respective degrees. So the way spoofing was explained to me is because you explained it perfectly, but if people aren't familiar with radar theory and range gate pull off and things like this, the way they introduce this to us at the very beginning was imagine, and this is, I'm going to try and incorporate everything shine just talked about. I'm sure you will. If you're in the pool and you're playing Marco Polo, right, you go back to when you're playing Marco Polo with you yesterday, and yeah, there you go. And whoever's replying with Polo, right, the person chasing his close their eyes, they have to use sound only. They're going Marco and you're supposed to say Polo and they have to come find you. Now imagine if the spoofer, if you will, was going to start right behind the Polo person, and every time he said Polo, he'd say Polo, just a little more quietly to start. And then every time the Marco request came, the actual person would say Polo, but then the person who spoofing, we take a half step to the right and a half step forward and just a little bit louder go Polo, and you continue this process, taking a half step to the right and a step forward and getting just a little bit louder. And eventually the person going Marco is going to be like, wait a minute, I thought I heard it directly ahead of me, but now they're moving to the left and they're a little bit louder. I'm going to start going that direction. And they're just going to be completely pulled off of the actual target. And it's important that they start quiet, because if you've been playing for a while and it's like, I say Marco, and giant says Polo, and then someone 20 feet away goes Polo, I'm be like, that's somebody messing with me. I recognize that. I'm not going to bother with it. So that's how this this subtle spoof pull off works. Yeah, that is perfect. And so intensity rise is kind of the technical term for it, but yet you're absolutely right. You want to slowly innocuously introduce it, right, and then bring it up to full power and then trump the power. Yeah. So the piece I missed that you hit and they actually told us was the guy doing the spoofing instead of just saying Polo is cupping his hands around his mouth and going Polo. So it's you're getting very directional and you're getting more perceived power out for the same use of energy. Absolutely. So that spoofing and that's how spoofing would work, but military guys, right, what do they pay us for to kill people and break things, right? So all this is great ways to not necessarily in that order, but not again, not necessarily in that order. There's always the solution of don't jam it, don't spoof it, destroy it. Yep. Yep. Right. So could this constellation 24 satellites that we need for worldwide coverage be destroyed? Yes. And we need 24 and we have some backups and I won't get any kind of numbers, but you need 24 to make the geometry of total coverage for satellites for each position work. So we have 24 plus X. So two ways to kill or two categories of ways to kill satellites. There's kinetic and non kinetic, right? So kinetic, I tend to think of using kinetic energy. So I'm throwing an object to impact the satellite, rather it'd be a missile that goes high order or a bullet that just smashes into a kind of thing. So back in 85, just talking from the US perspective now back in 1985, they had a successful test of the ASM 135, I think it was, which was an anti-satellite missile off of an F-15. So it shwacked an older satellite that was about to die anyway, right? But it did work. So yes, so the US has demonstrated kinetic kill vehicles, we'll call them are missiles as well as Russia, China and India. So we all have ways to have air launched missiles take out satellites. You can also do like a co-orbital interceptor. So you could launch your own satellite that kind of sits up there and he's kind of like an assassin with a knife. He's going to hang out near the satellite. And then when commanded, IE, when they fire a thruster, if you will, then it can actually run into the satellite at the appropriate time and take it out. So you got the co-orbital interceptors. Almost like the way that in theory, at least, we might have had fast attack submarines shadowing Soviet boomers during the Cold War so that if the moment came, you'd just shwack them. Yeah. Totally. The dude in the trench coat with a knife, right? And he's just kind of waiting in the shadows and then, yeah, maybe he is. Maybe he isn't. It's that ever-present threat that you can't do anything about because there's not an open war yet. Yeah. And the power of deterrence, too, is just a, yeah. So we've talked a little bit about the vulnerabilities and I don't think I of the US system in particular, I don't think we want to go too far down that route just because of reasons of opsec. I think we've demonstrated what vulnerabilities would look like. Is there anything in that venue we want to talk about that we haven't already? Just if you don't mind. So destroying the satellites, you got the kinetic and then the other one is the non-kinetic. So directed energy, right? I'm thinking of lasers. So there'll probably be a ground-based laser because it takes a lot of power or microwaves. And then, finally, if the satellite has the ability, which it usually does, to receive transmissions and update based on those transitions, so, so update software on board, you can actually hack it cyber-wise, right? So there could be some non-kinetics. But the last bit about it, though, if you don't mind with this destruction of satellites, high-altitude nuclear explosion or Hain, H-A-N-E. So back in the 50s to 60s, they did some experiments with actually detonating nuclear weapons up at altitude, so kind of a high atmospheric low space, kind of altitude. And they discovered the effects of electromagnetic pulse, EMPs, and basically, they call it radiation belt pumping or basically putting a whole bunch of ion-so-charged particles into space. And then, basically, these satellites would fly through this charged particles and it would crush their electrical systems. So we got the EMP, which comes out of the detonation, you know, energy. It's going to fry electrical circuits, or you could have a residual effect, which would be making your own kind of van Allen belt, which we can talk about later. So I thought that was kind of interesting for non-kinetic destruction. So, and we didn't talk about this beforehand, so we can shy away from this, if need be. Can you physically displace the GPS satellite, say through some sort of mechanical mechanism, and then make it essentially, its signals are invalid, because it's not orbiting where we thought it was orbiting? Oh, yeah, so non-cooperative moving of the satellite. Yeah, and they have these parasitic satellites, so they're kind of like a co-orbital interceptor kind of thing, where it hangs out close by, or sometimes could actually, in theory, attach to the satellite. And then what it can do is via gyros, so spinning metal, if you will, usually something big that has inertia to it, it can spin up like a gyroscope. It can spin it up and actually throw off the guidance and control of the satellite. And this would be at an inopportune time, so basically the bad guy would attach this parasite to the satellite of the good guy, we'll say. And then when the good guy wants to use it, because he's waging a war against the bad guy, then the bad guy says, okay, parasite go, and it spins up and basically starts a weird wobble, or could actually throw the attitude and guidance, if you will, into a tumble. So there are ways to spoof to GMGPS, the constellation could be degraded or destroyed. What would non-GPS operations for the US military in the mid-21st century look like? Great question. And there's a lot of money that gets thrown at that still as they try to make it more robust if you will, the nav, so with a lack of a P and T message, that position navigation timing, you're going to have to rely on inertial. As we talked about earlier too, so inertial navigation, so acceleration, so back in the days of my training flights, I didn't have GPS, that would be in the T-45 and the T-34. And we had to plug a waypoint zero, so a starting point into the jet or the plane. And then from there, it knows where it is on the earth. And then inertial measuring unit, all it does is measure accelerations. It doesn't measure velocity or position, so it goes through some math, some integration to get the velocity in the position from there. But it needs a starting point, so it needs initial conditions, so you plug it in. And then what will happen is it does not need any kind of GPS aid at that point and it can just through accelerations and math can figure out where it is, where it's going. Nowadays, so they used to use physical rings tumbling, right, or spinning, if you will. And those things can process or kind of move and they kind of get slimy with their rotations if you will. There's a lot more precise, there's a lot more accurate, okay, meaning true to the measurement. And it's also more precise meaning it doesn't wander, it's very stable. So we do have that. We also, for anti-GPS, so if they knocked out our constellation, there are other constellations we can rely on. Depends on who bad guy is of the day, you know what I'm saying, but the Russians have GLONASS that you has Galileo and the Chinese have Beto, Beto, Beto, I guess, so perhaps we reference one of their nav systems. It may not be as tight as our encrypted GPS, but at least it's something, right? Right. So there's other options out there. And as we sort of alluded to before, we do have weapons that don't completely rely on GPS. Oh, totally do. Well, I think of your tea land days, right? Turcom. Turcom and Dismatch, right, which was touring comparison and digital scene mapping area correlation if memory serves, which is, yeah, thank you, which is basically, you know, Turcom is looking at, don't quote me, it's been a lot of years, but I believe Turcom is basically looking at what the missile is flying over compared to some pre-stored maps. Yep. And Dismatch is similar, but it works in a different method. And then at night, it also had a celestial component, it could use it. So there are alternatives out there. It's not like the US war machine is going to grind to a halt without GPS. But the thing that comes to my mind is we will probably lose some of that precision that you were talking about in weapons delivery. Yeah. And when you do, it usually means your weapon, the target pairing will call it or the, you know, prosecuting target. It's going to be less efficient. So you're probably going to throw more weapons at it. It's like you read my mind. That's exactly what I was drinking. Perfect. Yeah. Fair. Good. I mean, it's still under though. Yeah. No, no, you're not sealing my thunder at all. I, hopefully, it just proves the point that this is, this is the thing then that would really worry people or that people need to be thinking about is not GPS goes away and the US war machine grinds to a halt. No, no, no. It's that this refined system that we've been using for almost 30 years of weapon nearing, which is the process of assigning weapons to gain an effect, right? Because we don't think if you go back to World War II and you think about fleets of bombers dropping thousands of bombs, you didn't want to blow up a thousand things with a thousand bombs. You wanted to blow up one thing, a ball bearing plant or an engine factory or a bridge or whatever it was, and it just took that much. We've gotten to a point now where you can sometimes assign one bomb to one target. I go back to Vietnam, right, where was it the Paul Dumay bridge that we tried to hit for years and years and years with multi plane strikes dropping multiple bombs and hundreds of bombs per strike couldn't take it down. But when we started using PGM precision guiding munitions, they could hit the exact support we determined would drop the bridge. We dropped it in a strike. Yeah. Perfect. Totally agree. What we lose here is we have to adjust our weaponry ring to a non GPS reality. Yeah. So maybe you throw more weapons at it as we mentioned earlier or use a different kind of a queueing source. So let's think of top gun two or top gun Maverick, right? Everybody hopefully has seen that and they talk about, hey, there's GPS denied environment. They're not going to use the F-35. They're going to use the F-18 and that was really just because logistics of it, they couldn't put cameras in an F-35 at the time. Anyway, point BN is that movie storyline is very accurate. It's very interesting. Now, we may not execute the mission in that sequence of events, but a low level ingress. So through the canyon and that's going to be visual navigation. Those are pilots, you know, just going up the riverbed or whatever you want to call it. And then using laser guidance for the weapons, right, which there's no GPS required there. So I in the aircraft, I'm going to designate. I'm going to shoot a laser out that returned energy. The reflection will call it the target reflection is going to be the guidance method for the weapon coming in. So you get that. Or I even think of slammy R, which is kind of an older, you know, weapon, not use much anymore, but it's got a TV camera in it. And I quite literally command the missile to put the crosshairs in the camera on the target. No GPS required. So there are other methods besides just the dumb bombs, if you will. But dumb bombs can still be pretty darn accurate to your point about the F-16, the Israeli strike against the reactor in Iran Iraq, excuse me. Thank you very much. Yeah. We don't want to be responsible for starting the next in your peer level conflict. There's that. Yeah. And then finally, you could also duplicate the concept of GPS, but on the ground, you could use fixed radio navigation towers. We have like a tack in, right, go back today's a tack in where you basically have a distance in an azimuth reporting method, if you will. And then you take three different tack and stations and you basically can find a fix, if you will. So there are other ways that yeah, to your point though, the military is not going to come to a grinding halt without GPS. It'll just take a little more effort. Awesome. So that is that is GPS. And I think we've covered everything we wanted to talk about. Any closing thoughts on GPS, anything you feel like the listening public should know in terms of how GPS or its lack thereup would affect a peer level conflict? For peer level with the research, there once again, throwing a lot of money, the DOD, the United States, DOD is Department of Defense throwing a lot of money into the anti spoof hardening. And I think of, so there's something called sasim, selective availability, which is no longer used in the anti spoofing module. And they threw a encryption so we can encrypt the signal so you can't spoof it because you don't really know what it says. So encryption, authentication, excuse me, or even redundancy using different signals or different satellites, like we talked about earlier, we already have the US, excuse me, already has a robust strategy for GPS tonight environments, but we're always looking to make it better. And really, so we have an effective solution. But now I think we're looking for a more elegant solution or efficient solution. Awesome. Well, I think we'll wrap it up there. Brian, I appreciate your time, this has been a great discussion of GPS. Thanks for joining me. Yeah, it's always fun chatting with you Roger. Yeah, absolutely. We'll be back next time. Our next episode wraps up this phase of on future war, which was talking about tactical technology and we'll be talking about future ship design, which in a lot of ways is integrally involved with GPS that we've just discussed. And then after that, we'll move into the phase of strategic support and episode eight. We'll talk about supply chain and weapons attrition, which directly flows off of what shine. And I were just talking about is if we have to rewicker, if you will, our weaponry ring, it's going to take a lot more weapons than we had thought historically. So that's what's coming up on future war. I'm Scott Roger Chaffey. And with Brian, Sunshine and Sinclair. Thanks Roger. It was fun. Thanks to Sunshine for his time and that great interview. I'll be back next episode to round out phase two of on future war, discussing future ship design. If you've enjoyed this program, you can find additional commentary, interviews, and in-depth series on current affairs and military aviation at Authentic Media on YouTube or on your podcast provider of choice. Sun Future War is brought to you through partnership with Cubic Defense. For over 50 years, Cubic has been facilitating warfighter readiness to prevail on night one and beyond.