This series, Space in Focus, explores key space trends, challenges, and policy issues that will confront the next administration as well as offers recommendations for how to navigate them.
All Americans rely on the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) for position, navigation, and timing (PNT) services. While GPS is widely used for navigation on phones while driving, PNT plays a much more critical role in the economy and society: U.S. GPS satellites provide timing signals for the internet, for cell phone networks, and for credit card transactions. Police, fire departments, and emergency medical services all rely on PNT services to get to the right place at the right time, as do buses, trains, planes, and ships. PNT is essential to the U.S. economy. PNT is also essential to U.S. military operations, whether in peacetime, crisis, or conflict.
Prior to the U.S. invention of GPS, the world used terrestrial-based infrastructure for PNT services. For example, the U.S. Coast Guard operated a system of antennas that transmitted low-frequency radio signals called LORAN (short for long range navigation) that ships and planes could use to navigate. But GPS provided far better accuracy than those older terrestrial systems, and over the last 25 years, the United States has divested itself of virtually all other PNT infrastructure: LORAN-C was decommissioned by the US Coast Guard in 2010; an even older terrestrial-based system, called Omega, was shut down in 1997. As a nation and as a military, the United States is now clearly over reliant—and in many ways wholly dependent—on GPS for PNT services.
GPS has provided the U.S. joint force with a significant battlefield advantage for decades, strengthening deterrence. It has also been an amazing economic growth engine that has returned far more to the U.S. economy than the investment to build and operate it: a 2019 estimate placed the value of GPS in the U.S. economy at $1.4 trillion since the 1980s. But space is no longer a sanctuary in the current era of great power competition, and the United States’ overreliance on this single space-based PNT system, for both military and domestic purposes, is increasingly becoming a liability. The United States needs a more resilient national PNT architecture in order to strengthen deterrence against both China and Russia.
The U.S. military is aware of its own overreliance on GPS and is actively pursuing more resilient PNT solutions for use on the battlefield. Resilience can come in many forms. The GPS constellation itself can be made more resilient: the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)’s proposed Resilient GPS satellites seek to do just that. Continuing the long-planned and promised upgrades of the GPS constellation (both the new M-code signal for the U.S. military, to help fight through jamming, as well as the new L5 signal, for civil and commercial aviation navigation improvements) will help improve PNT resilience while also helping maintain U.S. space-based PNT leadership on a global scale. And some commercial space operators are developing alternate space-based PNT solutions that may improve resilience as well.
While modernizing the PNT space layer is a necessary component of resilience, that alone is not sufficient. In order to blunt the U.S. military advantage that space provides, the United States’ potential adversaries continue to develop ways to target U.S. satellites through a variety of means. The most egregious is Russia’s pursuit of a potential nuclear anti-satellite weapon on orbit, which has made it exceedingly clear that relying solely on space for essential services is the wrong approach. In order to be truly resilient, the United States needs to stop considering space as the only potential source of PNT services and go “back to the future” to develop and deploy a modern, resilient terrestrial layer as well. A combined space and terrestrial architecture, one in which the different layers have no common dependencies, would both strengthen deterrence and devalue attacks against the space layer in the first place.
Interestingly, China has realized the need for and is already investing in a resilient PNT infrastructure of its own. According to the U.S. National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board, in addition to developing and deploying its modern space layer—the Beidou constellation—China is also developing and deploying both an advanced terrestrial-based radiofrequency PNT service, and is deploying thousands of miles of fiber and hundreds of ground stations to provide resilient timing services across their country. China is ahead of the United States in this regard.
One of the main problems the United States faces in modernizing its own PNT infrastructure is that the entire nation has come to rely on the PNT services that the DOD provides through its GPS constellation. Those services—which are essentially free to everyone except the DOD—have unlocked tremendous innovation and value for the U.S. economy. But the DOD’s focus must remain on fighting and winning the nation’s wars, and there is no reason to expect that the PNT solutions the DOD needs to be able to counter China in the western Pacific, or Russia along its NATO border, will align with the investments needed to ensure domestic PNT resilience for the U.S. economy. The United States’ national reliance on PNT services runs so deep throughout society that every executive branch agency has a stake in a more resilient architecture, from the Department of Homeland Security to the Department of Commerce to the Department of Agriculture and more. A modern, resilient, national PNT infrastructure can therefore not be the sole responsibility of or burden on the DOD.
With so many parts of the government needing different things from a modern PNT infrastructure, developing and deploying new infrastructure is a “seam issue” for the executive branch. Seam issues of national importance need to be resolved at the White House level, and solving this new challenge will require a new governance mechanism for White House–level coordination and resourcing across multiple executive agencies, with industry input. One possible mechanism to do so would be to stand up a new national PNT council tasked with developing a plan for and ushering in a modern, resilient national PNT infrastructure for this era of great power competition. This would also serve to drive home the importance and urgency of the problem. Close coordination with Congress will be necessary for success since any solution will inevitably require a commitment of taxpayer dollars to complete. As the United States has seen with GPS, the long-term value to the U.S. economy of a modernized, more resilient PNT infrastructure is likely to be many times any investment.
John Plumb is the former assistant secretary of defense for space policy at the U.S. Department of Defense in Washington, D.C.
