May 19, 2009
Steve Collins
This Fox News story (see first link below) is a further example of the continuing decline of the USA and has huge implications for the military and commercial functioning of the western world.
The story reports that the American Global Positioning Satellite system (GPS) could fail as soon as next year due to the lack of replacement satellites. The US Air Force is responsible for maintaining the GPS system and it is now coming under heavy criticism for jeopardizing this essential global positioning system. It is amazing that with all the money being poured into the Pentagon budget that something so essential could have been neglected. The entire US military (and the military forces of many allied nations) are dependent on a functioning GPS system. The GPS system provides critical navigational and positional information to all military vehicles, missiles, naval ships, etc. Without a functioning GPS, many “dumb bombs” which have been turned into precision-guided munitions via the GPS system, will revert to dumb bombs. Without GPS navigational guidance, will any US missiles be able to find their targets? There are many civilian applications for the GPS system as well. Many civilian boats, cars, etc. have GPS systems which will not be reliable if the GPS system goes down. I’m also wondering if the RFID systems commonly used to track cargos, trucks and even people will cease to be reliable if the GPS system goes down.
The second link reports that a European-based system called Galileo may help take up the slack of a degraded American GPS system. However, to replace the US GPS system, the Galileo system would need to launch a lot of satellites into space to create a global network.
This report highlights how dependent the USA and the entire western world is on satellite technology for the proper functioning of both its civilian economy and its military forces. This is a major Achilles heel for the western world. It was not that long ago that Communist China demonstrated that it can successfully shoot down or disable orbital satellites. If my memory is correct, both Russia and the USA also have such capabilities. Other nations may have that ability too.
You can be sure that as Russia, China, and Iran draw together and form their plans to wage war against the USA and the western world (as Ezekiel 38-39 prophesies is certain to occur at the end of our current age), they will see this Achilles heel in the war plans of the West. It doesn’t take a brilliant military mind to realize that the opening hours of a future World War III will see the Gog-Magog alliance to use Electro-Magnetic Pulse weapons to “fry” the entire electronic infrastructure of the USA and the western world as well as use anti-satellite weaponry to disable the global GPS system. If the USAF can’t even maintain the GPS system in peacetime, you can bet that all US military warmaking plans based on having a GPS system in place will be “toast” when a global war starts. The US military will almost surely have to fight the world war prophesied in Ezekiel 38 without a GPS system in place. Hopefully, the planners in the Pentagon have already recognized this very obvious fact and are implementing a back-up system based on older technology so American and allied military forces can coordinate their activities and guide their munitions without any GPS system. Maybe the US Navy needs to be sure that all its officers can use a sextant and compass. That may be all that works for them in the final war of our age. It won’t matter if all US warships and military vehicles are “hardened” against an EMP weapon if enough GPS satellites are shot down or disabled so the entire network of electronic communications and guidance collapses. Many media reports have also reported that Russia and China are intensely spying on the USA and developing hacking abilities to penetrate and take down the US military’s computer systems.
Russia and China are preparing to attack each vital point in the US military in multiple ways to insure that these systems are taken out quickly in a future war. US warplanners should be planning on defending against these simultaneous and multiple attacks upon the US military’s key systems. However, based on the reports about the USAF’s dubious ability to maintain the GPS system in peacetime, it does not give one much confidence that vital such warfighting plans have been either realized or implemented.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520636,00.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1184550/GPS-satellite-close-breakdown-fail-2010–leading-motorists-straight-trouble.html
