NATO Exercise Banned From Jamming GPS 260
judgecorp writes "A major NATO exercise off the coast of Scotland has been ordered to stop using GPS jamming technology after complaints that to do so would endanger the lives of fishermen and disrupt civilian mobile phones. The exercise — called 'Joint Warrior' — planned to disrupt GPS for 20 miles around each warship"
Lads, they've taken our GPS...get 'em (Score:5, Funny)
"I am William Wallace. And I see a whole army of my countrymen, here in defiance of tyranny! You have come to fight as free men. And free man you are! What will you do without freedom? Will you fight?” Two thousand against ten?” – the veteran shouted. No! We will run – and live!” Yes!” Wallace shouted back. Fight and you may die. Run and you will live WITHOUT GPS at least awhile. And dying in your bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here as young men and GET A SATELLITE LOCK? Tell our enemies that they may take our lives but they will never take our GPS SIGNAL!”
Re: (Score:2)
fake it (Score:3, Insightful)
why not fake it?
just turn off the red teams GPS's when their with in 20mi of a warship, problem solved.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't that sorta like testing a bullet proof vest by using blanks?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like finding GPS jammers would be a good part of the exercise.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
More dubiously consider the logic of jamming GPS ie obviously your ships can still navigate with GPS jammed otherwise it would be a really stupid thing to do. So if your ships can readily navigate without GPS , then you can be pretty sure that all other military vessels will be able to do the same.
So this is not a military exercise in the normal sense, this exercise is obviously targeted at military actions against civilian populations, where GPS jamming comes into play, along with of course communicatio
Re:fake it (Score:4, Informative)
So if your ships can readily navigate without GPS , then you can be pretty sure that all other military vessels will be able to do the same.
So this is not a military exercise in the normal sense, this exercise is obviously targeted at military actions against civilian populations, where GPS jamming comes into play,
What a load of rubbish.
Near-fleet GPS jamming has nothing to do with ship navigation. Navies have been navigating ships without GPS for several hundred years. GPS jamming is to decoy incoming missiles which use GPS as ONE OF the methods of target location.
Civilians, on the other hand have no critical dependency on GPS. Its largely a toy for the day to day user and a convenient (but non critical) aid for the traveler.
The GPS bands are no where near satellite TV bands.
GPS satellites broadcast at the same two frequencies, 1.57542 GHz (L1 signal) and 1.2276 GHz (L2 signal).
Satellite TV uses the C-band frequencies of 5.4 GHz band (5.15 to 5.35 GHz, or 5.47 to 5.725 GHz, or 5.725 to 5.875 GHz, depending on the region of the world).
Therefore it seems highly unlikely GPS jamming is the cause of any significant TV reception problems.
G-Band (aka C-Band Radar) sits right in the middle of the Satellite TV band, and that is the likely source of any TV interference.
Re: (Score:2)
Civilians, on the other hand have no critical dependency on GPS. Its largely a toy for the day to day user and a convenient (but non critical) aid for the traveler.
Actually civilian aircraft rely on GPS quite a bit. That was one of the reasons why the US disabled their ability to reduce the accuracy of GPS. You can navigate without one but it is less safe because you are reliant on instruments that can drift or fail and on communicating with ground radar.
Re: (Score:2)
Gps on civilian aircraft is very new, having been pioneered by Alaska Airlines less than ten years ago. It is still an auxiliary nav method.
But this story is not about the USA.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No, _this_ story is about the dangerous Scottish coastal waters.
Any mid-range ship-to-shore radio gear you buy these days hooks up to GPS. When mummy and daddy both go down below to fight the engine room fire and they don't come back, little Katie just presses the big red "somebody come help" button like she was taught. The radio transmits the correct identity for the boat, including its description, and its current co-ordinates, with the distress signal and there's a fair chance somebody will come rescue K
Re:fake it (Score:4, Insightful)
Civilians, on the other hand have no critical dependency on GPS. Its largely a toy for the day to day user and a convenient (but non critical) aid for the traveler.
Once upon a time this may have been true, but when there's 1) people out in fishing trawlers/recreational vessels 2) people up on top of mountains 3) aircraft trying to fly about the place it's not really so true. Sure, most of these people could default to navigating the old fashioned ways, but you can bet heavily that one or two of them will not have a compass/sextant/etc with them, and that every so often it *will* cost lives. I'd call that a critical dependency.
Re: (Score:2)
So if your ships can readily navigate without GPS , then you can be pretty sure that all other military vessels will be able to do the same.
So this is not a military exercise in the normal sense, this exercise is obviously targeted at military actions against civilian populations, where GPS jamming comes into play,
I've got a friend in the navy, and he tells me that navigating without GPS is becoming somewhat rare, and something that has to be specifically practiced during excercise to keep enough routine to be confident. Especially when on a minesweeper, like he is.
Civilians, on the other hand have no critical dependency on GPS. Its largely a toy for the day to day user and a convenient (but non critical) aid for the traveler.
I've encountered a lot of people that nowadays are completely lost without GPS. Literally. They don't have maps or anything similar in the car, even touring bus drivers, taxi drivers, lorry/truck drivers and such.
A couple of years ago I was on a bus on hol
Re: (Score:2)
You've assumed "civilians" to mean "Joe Public on land". Believe it or not there are other civilians - the emergency services, scientists and engineers, whatever - in land, sea, and air for who GPS availability is significantly more than "a toy".
Re: (Score:3)
You're describing the way the system should act, ignoring the way it does act. In 2007, a Navy jamming exercise that jammed GPS disrupted cell phone service (and several other services) in San Diego. http://www.gpsworld.com/defense/gps-insights-april-2007-8428 [gpsworld.com]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Then actually be informative?
Re:fake it (Score:4, Informative)
Did you see his sig?
Re:fake it (Score:4, Insightful)
A major military exercise... and they do not close those waters for the week or two these drills last?
Civilian ships should stay the hell out of there. Stay well away from those war ships, they're in exercise, and may perform unpredictable maneuvers. There may be small craft out there. Projectiles flying around.
If a ship comes within GPS jammed range then they're way too close to begin with I'd say. Yes this may cause some inconvenience to some fishermen or other seamen, but the ocean is big. Plenty of other places to sail to.
Re: (Score:3)
Exactly what I was thinking.
What the hell is a fishing boat doing within 20 miles of a major exercise?
Scotland's only 200x150 miles (Score:5, Informative)
>What the hell is a fishing boat doing within 20 miles of a major exercise?
Scotland is only 200 miles x 150 miles in size. A fourty-mile exclusion zone (20 miles radius) would kill the entire marine economy for the western coast of the country.
And the marine economy is pretty much the only economy in western Scotland.
Re: (Score:2)
So why can't the military just test this a hundred miles farther away?
Is there a specific reason they need to be close to civilians to test this?
Re: (Score:3)
Short answer: They are probably simulating the invasion of a nuclear submarine base. This requires: 1x nuclear submarine base.
>So why can't the military just test this a hundred miles farther away?
Because it is difficult to simulate the invasion of a nuclear submarine base using a bunch of pontoons in the Atlantic. The nuclear submarine base in question, at Faslane, is attached to a fixed landmass (the Scottish mainland).
>Is there a specific reason they need to be close to civilians to test this?
Yes.
Fixed it for ya. (Score:3)
What the hell is a major exercise doing within 20 miles of fishing boats?
Mercator Projection: Why Scotland's sea is NOT BIG (Score:5, Informative)
>the ocean is big
Sigh. Mercator Projection [wikimedia.org].
The "ocean" around Scotland is NOT big. The SEA around Scotland is actually quite small. It's as far north as Newfoundland and Labrador.
It just LOOKS big on the map due to two-dimensional maps stretching out the northern and southern extremities of Earth.
Scotland, in particular Faslane, is where NATO keeps its nuclear submarines. The locals live cheek-by-jowl with these submariners and for the most part get along just fine. But closing off all the sea between all the inhabited islands in the west of Scotland just isn't feasible.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You assume that the military exercise actually benefit society more than those fishermen.
Thing is that all of that exercise is funded by tax money and those fishermen pay that tax.
I am willing to fund the military to ensure that I will have my freedom. If the own military starts to restrict my freedom then I don't care if it is the military that I pay taxes to that causes this or if it is a foreign military force, the end result is the same.
So yes, unless you live in a military fascist state (This is not ht
Re: (Score:3)
[...]the ocean is big.
So one option should be to have GPS-jamming exercises somewhere else, someplace where you don't have lots of civilian fishermen around.
Re: (Score:2)
And shut off ferry traffic to the islands, their only means of transport?
Re: (Score:2)
yes this may cause some inconvenience to some fishermen or other seamen, but the ocean is big.
And inconvenience to their families, and their customers, and their customers' families...
There are not enough fishing grounds to go around as it is. Can't they go and play somewhere else? Or is part of the exercise looking at how the UK deals with food shortages?
In other words...
Military ships should stay the hell out of there.
FTFY.
Re: (Score:2)
We hate the military guys enough as it is? We just fought tooth and nail to stop the government moving the military guys away thanks!
Re:fake it (Score:4, Interesting)
a) Lots of soldiers have civilian gear as well. E.g. iPhones. You don't want them to have the opportunity to cheat. You do want them to use the gear in the way that they might without GPS so they have the feel for how it would be.
b) Lots of systems are doing automated switch over; it may not be possible to properly activate that mode in the presence of GPS. E.g. if you have a system which does GPS navigation normally and then switches over to inertial navigation, you want to act as if there was a real GPS jamming.
To be frank, anybody, military or otherwise who's operating GPS gear without a working fallback is irresponsible. What they should do is introduce safety regulations which say so and then give a very large fine to fishermen who complain next time. That will reduce the discussion.
Re: (Score:2)
Or, since the US controls the actual satellites, why not show the whiners exactly how much power they have here, and run the exercise with the GPS system really turned off (if not worldwide, at least in smallest area that will completely knock out that region)?
When the US military (sorry, *cough* NATO *cough*) actually suggests a reasonable, small-scale approach to a problem, we need to encourage them, not complain that they didn't use the bigger gun.
But (Score:4, Interesting)
Weird? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
One of the first precepts in defense is knowing what vulnerabilities your systems have.
"How do we operate without freely available GPS?" would be one of those.
Re: (Score:2)
I mean to simulate an attack on the base you don't actually need to drop bombs on it.
Re: (Score:2)
not if what you want to practice is the countermeasures themselves. You can't track a GPS jamming signal without having a jamming signal to track...
You can simulate it with other bands, but the equipment is not quite the same, so you won't get the same practice. At some point you have to do the real thing.
Re: (Score:2)
But you do. If you want to find out how sturdy a bunker is you throw explosives at a replica.
If you want to find out how effective a missile is, you tend to testfire it and see what happens - yeah you can simulate a whole lot, but in the end, only way to figure out if your guidance is still bolted to the right bit before impact is to fire the missile and see where it ends up.
Re:Weird? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not to practice jamming... it's to practice operating when the Bad Guys are doing the jamming.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure I agree. If it was to practice what happens when the enemy is jamming your GPS, then did any of these geniuses just think to turn the bloody things off, and simply pretend the enemy is jamming them?
Re:Weird? (Score:5, Interesting)
1, There are are a whole lot of GPSes involved. It's a lot more than a nav unit on the bridge, and they don't all share a single off-switch.
2, You don't want to practice "OK, everyone turn off your GPS now and switch to plan B!". You want to practice "Why are we drifting to starboard? Is this an instrumentation failure? WTF is ERROR 7505?", because that's how it happens when you're doing it for real and you need to learn to work through that kind of confusion.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, jamming the stuff at sea during engagement is akin to throwing unexpected input at a function - yeah we know we can comment the bastard out/switch it off, but what happens when it starts producing gibberish and your missiles are trying to use said gibberish for flying.
Re: (Score:2)
They are presumably not testing how middies cope with no nav, they are testing how the equipment itself responds to local jamming. (And whether those middies can tell when their systems are in the jamming zone or not. Ie, how they cope with the cognitive dissonance of unreliable information.)
There's a big difference between "Okay, turn your nav screens off. We're doing a manual nav exercise today!" and dealing with nav systems which might be in error and which respond to signal jamming in different and rand
Re: (Score:2)
Hey Everyone! Quiet!
This random dude here has something important to say about large-scale naval training!
Ok bud, what were you saying?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Look up a couple comments. :) [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
my first impression was testing how well NATO sailors are able to work without it
though trying to figure out the vulnerabilities in your own systems is also a good idea.
.mil or .not? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wouldn't relying on GPS in a nuclear war be a bit crazy unless you were planning a first strike? That is, unless you expect your GPS satellites to survive the first strike?
I would think that LEO would be EMP city not long into WWIII.
Of course, if the submarine updates its position periodically then it would have a moderately accurate fix to start with, but I can't imagine that INS is that reliable with the accuracy of modern ICBMs. Then again, don't ICBMs have star-finders or such built into them once the
Re: GPS survivability (Score:2)
GPS satellites are in a 12 hour orbit, which is fairly high up. That also puts them in the middle of the Van Allen radiation belts. If I remember correctly, they are hardened to about a MegaRad, partly to survive their normal orbit conditions, and partly to survive nuclear effects. So yes, they would survive the start of a nuclear war, it's part of the design requirements.
A nuclear sub's job is to get lost on the ocean. That means to sit quietly underwater so nobody can find it. Coming up to the surfac
Re: (Score:3)
Half and half. It was a U.S. DOD thing, but to make sure they got it funded they included civilian benefits in the bullet points. They even designed a two tiered accuracy into the system so that by knowing the right decryption keys the military units could give more accurate positions.
So it's fair to say that the civilian use was intended from the start.
Re: (Score:2)
Freeloading in which sense? Who pays for the military stuff?
Terrible location (Score:2)
Seriously, guys. Off the coast of Scotland? Why not, say, here? [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Seriously, guys. Off the coast of Scotland?
It's close to a base (saving a lot of transit time) and great for practicing maneuvering in tricky waters. But they should practice being without GPS by just turning the receivers off, not jamming them.
Re: (Score:2)
I picked the most extreme example to make my point, the practical problems are obvious. But seriously to my point: Jan Mayen island, the Labrador Sea... there are lots of places in the North Atlantic which get almost zero ship traffic, are ice-free, and very near NATO stomping grounds.
Navigation at sea (Score:3, Informative)
I recently studied all of this and passed the theoretic exam. Hey, I want to be a seaman.
The practice is somewhat different. You take GPS for granted. You also take the plotter for granted. And the collision warning thingy that goes beeeeep.
I wouldn't be surprised if a disruption of GPS actually will kill people. And I don't blame GPS but the able navigators that probably aren't.
Re: (Score:3)
I wouldn't be surprised if a disruption of GPS actually will kill people. And I don't blame GPS but the able navigators that probably aren't.
Before GPS, a lot of seamen died from poor navigation. Knowing where you are at sea is hard, especially when conditions are less than ideal. The issue is just that there are far fewer landmarks (hah!) and if visibility is obscured by storm, rain or fog, you just don't know where you are. The old methods of navigation (a chronometer, compass and sextant) are only relatively crude. GPS has made a gigantic difference to marine safety, making going onto known rocks, sandbars and other (semi-)fixed obstacles a m
Re:The best part (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Just in case no one else gets it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-88_HARM [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Brilliant! That's right up there in brutal effectiveness and ironic technological failure with my notion (which I really should get around to patenting some day...) of using RFID-enabled passports to ensure that autonomous IEDs only target specific nationalities.
(The lesson for today, kids, is this: The more you fuck with things, the more of a target you become.)
Re: (Score:2)
I like your cell phone targeting system. Traditionally, GSM and CDMA were kind of hard to get into, but kids these days are doing a lot better with those systems using software-defined radios (and I imagine proper military gear can do even better with a set of apt and well-paid hands making it work).
Both the RFID and GPS jammer concepts are very simple, and that's always a plus for basic munitions.
With cell phones, though: Just plant a flying widget (could be a quadrocopter or a conventional drone or an o
Re: (Score:2)
You can target the jammers =) like a great glowing radio beacon.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Depends on where your jammers are. These things are cheap and easy to deploy and floating beacons these days, costing less than few hundred dollars. Army has them too. See http://www.jammerall.com/products/Portable-GPS-Jammer-(GPSL1%7B47%7DL2).html [jammerall.com] and http://www.qsl.net/n9zia/wireless/pics/gpsjam-7.jpg [qsl.net]
And a bunch of them scattered around make it very difficult to target. Further more, while you are wasting your million dollar missiles on hundred dollar jammers, you are giving away th
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on the GPS system. It's one of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, it could go down some time. What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?
Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on mechanical navigation equipment. They're some of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, charts can be inaccurate, sextants can rust, and compasses can break. What happened to dead reckoning, estimating your position by the taste of the water, keeping an eye out for towns on shore, and all the other skills people used to be taught?
Re: (Score:2)
Redundancy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
but what will they do when GPS is down, the sextant is broken, and it is foggy out??!
Re: (Score:2)
Triangulate using the buoy bells and fog horns?
Re: (Score:2)
That can be done fairly well in software given some mikes and a multichannel sound capture device ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?
The innumerable shipwrecks dotting the shores of the British Isles over the centuries suggest that GPS navigation might be a bit more foolproof than those methods.
Re: (Score:3)
Massive WOOSH.
Is that supposed to be the last sound you hear after your ship hits the rocks and the water is rushing in over your head?
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't depend solely on GPS either, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea to *intentionally* disable GPS and force people to use less reliable and rarely practiced methods, even if they all know how to use them.
Re: (Score:2)
It seems like you'd have to intentionally disable/disallow GPS equipment to best (practice/be tested on) working without it.
Have it available if shit gets too real during the experiment.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, if they're in real trouble without GPS, I guess many (most?) would have SARSAT beacons.
Re: (Score:2)
There are digital sextants out there you know. Heck, they are even in daily use on satellites. Called star trackers, even. But there are terrestrial versions, too, and they automatically identify the stars in their FOV and all that. Inertially stabilized, even... as if they were designed for ships, kinda!
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?
They still are taught (certainly to military navigators), but these techniques are only useful for relatively coarse navigation. Fine to get your boat home to port, but not very useful to accurately locate a particular crab pot, trawl a particular area while avoiding no-go zones or known obstructions, hold station over an dive site, oil or gas well head etc.
Re: (Score:3)
Failing to hold station above divers in a diving bell potentially adds life threatening risk but is not likely to cause injury without other factors. On the whole I agree, this is an inconvenience not a threat.
Fishing area boundaries are charted but not typically physically marked and GPS is used by the vessel to maintain licence compliance, and fishery management agencies to monitor compliance. Buoys work in shallow water only and even a fully functional Royal Navy ship can hit charted rocks [professionalmariner.com] :).
Re: (Score:2)
While I agree that all captains (whether you're on a teeny little sailboat or a SuezMax container ship) should know how to use their fallbacks, I think that disabling GPS during military exercises is going to increase the probability that innocent civilians are going to accidentally encroach on those military ships during those same exercises. Seems like a bad idea.
For the most part, the cell phone networks don't need GPS to operate. Just knowing the location wouldn't be good enough for signal beamforming a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
If you go to sea depending on GPS you're an idiot. If you go to sea without GPS, yourte an idiot. You shouldn't depend on it, but it does make things safer.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Map, compass, sextant? Likely as dead as map and compass land nav skills...
Re: (Score:2)
Map, compass, sextant? Likely as dead as map and compass land nav skills...
In other words still practiced by old fogies like me and boy-scouts wanting a navigation badge.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Basically impossible to jam because of the very powerful land based transmitters
Any signal can be jammed, and LORAN has its own weaknesses. A simple jamming or disruption of the signal from a master station would effectively disable LORAN across a huge geographic area. And given that they're ground based, it would be trivial to drive a truck into an antenna tower, blow it up with a small amount of explosives, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, it's been shut down in the US because it's "too expensive", although the cost of running it was neglible. People are insanely stupid.
On the contrary. People can make cost benefit analysis insanely easy.
A few Loran stations, positions well known, fall to HARM missiles in minutes 1 thru 20 of a area wide conflict.
(Its far more likely the operators of any system that vulnerable would have standing orders to shut it down and run like hell).
In the mean time, ships with Inertial Guidance systems (not to mention simple sextants) know where they are without even firing up their radar.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Are we not reading the titles of the articles any more?
Re: (Score:2)
Jamming the signal from the satellites is a completely viable situation. 'Train how you fight' is a core concept. And it would prevent any faking among line troops.
Re:Ungrateful (Score:5, Insightful)
The US military developed, launched, and maintains GPS for military purposes. They allow everyone else to use it for FREE. Now those same users are screaming because the people who PAID FOR GPS want to turn it off for a few days in a limited area. "How dare they stop providing us free service! We demand they continue providing us free, uninterrupted service!"
The US military didn't pay for it. I paid for it. I graciously allowed them to use my tax money to purchase it for their use with the strict instruction that it was also to made available for my own use.
I think maybe you forgot who works for whom.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The strength of jamming that will knock out military GPS receivers at 20 miles is likely to screw with less robust civilian gear significantly further away.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure most warships can come within 20 miles of the coast of their own countries....
Look at a map - near to coast, tourism (Score:2)
Look at a map of the area, a lot of the naval exercises are held less than 20 miles from shore. Islands and west coast of Scotland is prime tourist area, walking in wild places and outdoor sports are big here. Jamming GPS here might mean walkers getting lost (yes I know they should be able to navigate without GPS, but hey, they still come, and they still spend money in the hotels and local shops) and if they do get lost, mountain rescue might have to go out in rain and fog and snow and try to get them back
Re:The US owns the satellites (Score:5, Informative)
This is why:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
No problem. We'll charge you for Galileo too, when it comes up - and more because it's a more accurate system - and encrypt it so you can never use it without paying. Because you know what'll happen if you charge for it now? Nobody would touch it with a ten-foot-bargepole (distance measured by the Galileo constellation) and everyone would start giving Europe money instead (if you have to pay, might as well pay for something decent!).
And most of Europe doesn't have TV licences. Only the UK, to my knowled