GPS: Military and Civilian use

Table of Contents

Military use of GPS The civilian use of GPS GPS Project costs The Future Reference List

Military use of GPS

To make a successful maneuver in a battlefield, a commander must know the answer to two questions: Where is the enemy, and - even more important - where am I?

It is known that in the history of war, these two questions were not always answered correct. This lead to terrible casualties when for example a defending flanking unit got lost in the woods. In the time of the early accurate terrain mapping (at the beginning of the 18th century) armies tried to escape from this dilemma and tried to teach their young officers the art of map reading and navigation. But the results were often more than disappointing. The rapidly advancing space technologies in this century made it possible to use satellites for navigation. These first prototype projects were however limited in their use for the military because especially the receivers had huge dimensions in size and cost a fortune. A broad supplyment of the troops was impossible. The demand for an easier-to-use and cheaper solution ended up in the development of the NAVSTAR GPS system. The first field test for GPS was the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Everyone still remembers the first nights of the war, when mainly Cruise Missiles hit targets deep inside Iraqi territory with extreme precision, making the Gulf War a so called clean war. What you probably don't know is that many of these Missiles were guided by GPS. I would like to start in the late August of 1990 when special forces teams infiltrated the Iraq. They weren't only carrying their weapons, but more important for us and our topic, GPS receivers. Their mission was to take readings and to fix waypoints in the desert. This data was used by officers back in the United States to program their own GPS receivers to guide them and their men to places and road junctions which even the local inhabitants couldn't find. One report has it that an Air Force Officer, operating under diplomatic papers while it was still possible, flew to Baghdad in the same time with nothing more than a briefcase, containing a GPS receiver. Once there, he was driven to the US Embassy, and went to the courtyard to sit on a particular bench to wait for the GPS satellites to fly overhead to take one single waypoint (because at that time, there were only six satellites in orbit). However, once this had been done, he got up, went back to the airport, and flew home with this one waypoint in the memory of his GPS receiver. From that one geographic fix came all of the targeting coordinates for the Tomahawk Cruise Missiles and F-117 Stealth Fighter targets that were hit early in the war. Another need for precise navigation was during the ground offensive. Imagine the following situation as it took place in one night of February 1991: if you are maneuvering four armored divisions with close to 2000 combat vehicles on a front of only 120 kilometers and you have weapons with traveling speeds of 1000 meters a second which are still lethal in a radius of 2000 meters you surely want precise navigational fixes for your units to minimize any chance of shooting up your own people. In other words: without GPS, that massive and devastating sweep into the Iraq could not have taken place. Now that the system has been completed, the US Army as well as other services are installing GPS receivers in almost everything that moves. Tanks, helicopters, airplanes , guided missiles, trucks, infantry and even cooks are all being equipped with this technology. And just to give you an idea, how many GPS receivers were used during the operations Desert Shield and Storm: only the US troops had about 17000 units in use. This means (statically of course) that every eighth soldier was carrying a GPS receiver.

The civilian use of GPS

Now you know, what the military is using GPS for. But what is the civilian use of GPS? GPS is in use in many different branches. The classical example would be the use in shipping traffic on oceans, seas and rivers. Many ships of all kinds of sort are equipped with GPS receivers already today to determine the exact location and bearing of the vessel. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for example are going even further beyond with their experimental oil tanker "Cosmo Delphinus" in the bay of Tokyo: their goal is to link the GPS techniques with the Inmarsat Weather Satellite System. While GPS gives the computers onboard enough information about the current location, speed and bearing, Inmarsat is verifying the weather in the area and ahead of the oil tanker so that the computers onboard the "Cosmo Delphinus" can - if necessary - alter the course of the ship to avoid storms and other dangers. When in the final step these two satellite systems are linked up with other surveillance systems onboard the ship (by the year 2001), this vessel will carry the smallest - and after a testing period no - crew but will offer the highest safety standards when it is moving in the ship traffic of the world. Similar projects and techniques are running for an "Automated Highway" in California and even in Germany with electronically guided passenger trains. Also other security aspects have to be newly defined in combination with GPS. My first example comes from the airplane industry. Big air companies have equipped their planes with the ILS (the Integrated Landing System), which is supporting the pilots in the landing phase of the flight, especially during the night and in bad weather conditions. But when this system is linked with GPS data, the landing phase will be performed by the autopilot and will become as safe as the rest of the flight. The reason for this is that the autopilot is comparing the optimal position (provided by the ILS) with the actual position which is provided by GPS receivers. So all the human pilot has to do is to monitor the landing phase and in case of an emergency (for example an engine malfunction) the pilot can take over control of the plane. The second example describes a new way to protect your car from robbery. There are two ways how this protection can be activated: Either the thieve is using brute force to gain control of the car which is registered by a computer inside of the car or the owner can report his car as stolen by calling a control center. In both ways, however, specialists in this control center are able to track down the stolen car because the computer in this car is transmitting the current GPS coordinates via the GSM protocol (which should be a synonym to everybody who uses a cellular phone) to this control center. Another, totally different use of GPS, was invented by the University of Birmingham in England: Blind people no longer need a special trained dog to guide them through their environment. The blind simply has to enter the desired target (in other words: the address) where he or she wants to get into a laptop and a special program calculates the best way how to get there, using a digital map. Now the blind person puts headphones on and is ready to go. The laptop in his backpack uses a build in GPS receiver card and therefor "knows" where its carrier is located at the moment and gives instructions when the carrier has to turn left or right. The latest software and maps are even supporting public transportation systems. All these and many other improvements in life-style, safety and protection were impossible only a few years ago. But now that the costs for GPS receivers are as low as never before, the public and not only the military can take advantage of this technology. This leads me to my next point:

GPS Project costs

As I've mentioned earlier, the prices for GPS receivers are as low as never before. The cheapest models for civilians cost about 250 DM and weight no more than walkman. Of course, these receivers offer only the "pure" GPS data (the current location), but therefor can store up to 100 waypoints. If you want to spend more money and get more features like your current speed, distant to the next waypoint, traveled kilometers, a graphical interface and digital maps of the entire world instead of coordinates, you might be interested in the GPS III (manufactured by Garmin, USA). If you consider the possibilities of this little piece of high tech even the price of 1000 DM seems to be justifiable. Even more features cost more money. Receivers used by the military are even more expansive since they are providing more accurate data. The standard "Small Lightweight GPS Receiver" or "Slugger" for short, which is in use in the US Army costs approximately 5000 DM. And this is still a bargain compared to other GPS receivers in the service. Costs are ranging between 15000 and 60000 DM for one single unit. The cost of the project itself is hard to. But: 27 satellites, each one equipped with state-of-the-art espionage technologies, a control center operation 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and many specialists maintaining the project just have to eat billions of (tax) money.

The Future

Probably the most exciting development at the moment is the GIS (Geographic Information System), also invented by the US DOD. While GPS tells you are at point X,Y,Z , GIS can tell you that X,Y,Z is for example a tree or a spot in the river A with pH level of 4.5. In other words: GPS tells you the "where", GIS the "what". GIS itself is a large database, filled up with the information gained from satellite pictures and manually entered data. And this is the reason why it will still take a few years until GIS will be operational because first the whole world has to be photographed and to be cut in many layers and second, all this data has to be stored. Unnecessary to say, that this storage will require very large resources which today's media simply cannot offer. Because of these problems, the DOD has not yet announced a schedule when it is planning to complete this system.

Reference List

Tom Clancy. Armoured Warfare Harper CollinsPublishers, 1996 Brockhaus Enzyklopädie F.A. Brockhaus GmbH, 1990

Peter H. Dana. Global Positioning System Overview www.utexas.edu/ , 1990

Peter Moosleitners interessantes Magazin April 1997, March 1998, April 1998 Gruner + Jahr AG & Co