US Space Force wanted $77M to reinforce GPS – and Congress shot it down A plan by America's Space Force to harden GPS against spoofing attacks may be going nowhere: A request by the service branch for $77 million of public cash to finish the work is struggling to get approval from Congress. The US Department of Defense's overall proposed $833 billion budget for 2025, which is now being pulled …
It's a little more advanced. GNSS uses encryption in PRS to prevent spoofing but Block III GPS M-code uses additional directional antennas. This means a spoofer or jammer has to place their hardware closer to the target, leaving them more vulnerable to anti-radiation missiles.
Please re-read my comment. The jamming resilience relates to the directional antenna (which drastically increases the signal strength in the chosen area), not the encryption. It can definitely still be jammed but it means either using a more powerful jammer (bigger, noisier target) or putting jamming equipment closer to the targeted area (within the reach of more countermeasures).
You can do "fancy" things with waveforms, you can use redundancy in the coding, you can use secret waveform creation(depending on a key) and you can use directional antennas.
All of which helps massively against jammers.
But in the ideal case for the jammer (being very close to the receiver), this does not work. That's true.
Bit suprised it got shot down given current events.
In Ukraine, Russia seems to be having success in jamming or spoofing GPS making GPS guided weapons like the US Excalibur 155mm shell and guided rockets like the GLSDB launched by HIMARS inefffective. Plus complaints that aircraft flying near Russian territory having their GPS navigation affected.
No idea how Russia is doing this, but if they can do it, that knowledge will probably be shared and risks making GPS ineffective. DoD presumably knows this and the proposal is presumably to counter this threat. But like you say, it's hard to defend against jamming. Plus changing GPS would also need changes to any kit like Excalibur to use the new system. $77m suggests it's something that could be done without needing to replace GPS satellites, so maybe it's something that could be done in software for the recievers as well.
Seems a lot cheaper than replacing GPS with a more secure system, plus whether Galileo and GLONASS suffer the same vulnerabilities.
The Russians have been able to heavily disturb GPS in neighbouring Finland and Estonia too.
It's quite obvious there are very good reasons to try to do something about it.
But I suppose it doesn't affect the USA or the fact that the USA is a two party system only.
Actually, I'd guess that the original developers of GPS have retired and knowing how things work here they've not been replaced. We have a tendency in the US to exploit some really clever thinking resulting in this type of system but we're weak at follow on products, assuming that the foreigner couldn't possibly fathom out how to make such a sophisticated system, much less build something better/cheaper/faster etc.
People from the UK will know all about this phenomenon, especially if they're older, because this type of resting on one's laurels while an initial neat product idea is milked and little to no reinvestment is carried out is an endemic problem, one that resulted in the demise of all sorts of industries. (Rationalized as the shift from 'manufacturing' to 'service' industries...).
Anyway, if this follows SOP then there will be an initiative to produce something new and groundbreaking, admittedly at an eye-watering price, which will take for ever and never be entirely finished or functional. It will take an Elon Musk type upstart to deliver this type of capability simply because you need some way of cutting through the crap (and you also need privately held organizations since once the money people get in on the act the focus becomes 'monetization' rather than 'product').
Anyway, if this follows SOP then there will be an initiative to produce something new and groundbreaking, admittedly at an eye-watering price, which will take for ever and never be entirely finished or functional.
Again it's why I'm suprised Congress shot down the proposal. GPS has done well, given it's first launch was in 1978. Technology and the threat landscape has changed though, and $77m is a bargain compared to the costs to develop GPS2.0 and launch new satellites. Then again, I'm wondering if that's something that could just be piggybacked onto Starlink, Kuiper and OneWeb. 3 constellations with a shedload of satellites, all with clocks and positioning capability.
Satnav systems already have the ability to combine signals from mutiple systems, so whether it'd be possible to do the same with broadband satellites. Might need some regulatory pressure and a bung to help with functonality, but one of those things that seems technically feasible.. Even though those words often scare me. But I guess it'd still be vulnerable to jamming and potentially spoofing.
"something that could just be piggybacked onto Starlink, Kuiper and OneWeb. "
All of which could go BK at any second and are not in the direct control of the military. It would mean that if it was being relied on, it would be "too big to fail" and subject to government bail out and the operators would know that. The US government can run a brothel at a profit, how would they take over something like Starlink?
"Russia seems to be having success in jamming or spoofing GPS making GPS guided weapons like the US Excalibur 155mm shell and guided rockets like the GLSDB launched by HIMARS inefffective. "
and, GPS is primarily a military system so consumer units not having the ability to utilize M-Code doesn't enter into it. If there's another big to-do like 9/11, the consumer side of GPS could be turned off abruptly.
The US military can't even properly account for billions in money so what's another $100mn? At least it's not for a large convoy of trucks that a base commander doesn't need or want via an order that's just a payoff to the maker. I used to look at the military auctions and there would be loads and loads of brand new spare parts, specialized tools and buckets of bespoke bolts for vehicles that the taxpayer shelled out millions for going at scrap prices. Some things are sold as "scrap only" and have to be shown to have been melted down by a registered and certified scrap buyer.
So, I'm fine with spending a few bob to study ways to harden GPS.
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