A Maginot Line In The Sky by Ralph Peters
Quote:
After the carnage of the First World War, France responded to the horrors of trench warfare by building the ultimate trenches - the infamous Maginot Line, a system of almost 5,000 individual fortifications arrayed along hundreds of miles of front to a depth of 20 miles.
Only the Great Wall of China was longer - and the Maginot Line was vastly more complex. A marvel of military engineering, the problem was that it required an enemy who played by French rules.
What happened? Paris poured so much money and effort into its network of fortresses that the generals couldn't believe it wouldn't work - the Germans would simply have to behave as required.
The Germans didn't. France fell.
Now the United States sits in imagined security behind its own array of crucial strategic assets - our network of satellites.
Beat our satellites, beat us.
The Chinese know it. The Russians know it. And religious fanatics are bound to figure it out.
The rest of the article is here:
http://ebird.afis.mil/ebfiles/e20071026556165.html
Ed. by SWCAdmin, for our non-.mil audience, the original link at the NY Post.
Thoughts?
Couldn't read the article but agree
The reliance on satellites, especially GPS without alternatives is dangerous. I've thought that where possible towers and buoys could be used as a backup to GPS. It could be further extended by using positions of ships, aircraft and some ground units with continually updated positions acting as positioning points on their own. It probably wouldn't hurt to have access to the European and Russian GPS systems as well.
Actually, we aren't as dependent on GPS as you might think...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Armchairguy
That's true but with newer rounds like Excalibur, a recent variant of MLRS, guided bombs (that can work in bad weather as opposed to laser guidance), as well as telling where the average soldier is being dependant on GPS. It's better to have a backup that makes these things function as they are supposed to.
JDAMs are GPS-aided weapons. They have a very accurate INS that does the actual guiding. If the GPS never locks on, or is denied, the weapon will still guide, albeit slightly less accurately. However, JDAMs going INS-only have been generally been as accurate as the GPS-aided spec for the weapon.
The same holds true for a number of other weapons.
George
It's not the weapon I'm worried about....
It's the guy calling it in that forgot how to read a map because of his over-reliance on GPS that raises my concern.