GPS / eLoran News

Teams in the National Football League have backups. The United States government, military, financial network, wireless communication, and transportation infrastructures do not. Having ridden to election in part on the back of the previous administration's lack of readiness for and response to natural disaster, the Obama administration and Democratic Congress seem willing, if not eager, to commit the same egregious errors of their own.

In 2001, the U.S. Department of Transportation's Volpe Report clearly indicated the vulnerability of GPS to interference, both intentional and unintentional, as well as disruption due to natural atmospheric factors. It also delineated the consequent vulnerability of critical national infrastructure of several kinds, which depend upon GPS for highly precise timing, as well as position and navigation. Since that date, not a single administration finger, red or blue, has lifted in proactive response. Minimal hand-waving has occurred. Now the executive fist, seeking to wring some drop of financial savings from some obscure program somewhere, has clamped on Loran, the sole practical back-up to GPS, and throttled the life out of it.

This in blithe ignorance of the government's own commissioned Independent Assessment Team, which found that "the cost of deploying eLoran technology [an updated improvement on Loran] would be about $100 million, which is about the same cost as dismantling the current Loran infrastructure." The philosophy, if Congress and government are even aware of the thought underpinnings of their actions, seems to be "You've got to spend money to save some," bearing an eerie resemblance to a previous era's operational dictum, "In order to save the village, we had to destroy it." It further portends ill for the overall national infrastructure that the President has claimed he intends to restore, strengthen, and solidify.

On October 28, President Barack Obama signed into law a bill that effectively terminates the struggle to mount back-up system for GPS: Loran-C and eLoran, a system that could prevent national and industrial infrastructure breakdown in the event of various probable disruptions, interference, or intentional jamming.

The President signed the Department of Homeland Defense (DHS) appropriations bill that allows termination of Loran-C in Jan 2010. The U.S. House of Representatives also passed a revised version of its Coast Guard authorization bill, replacing the mandate to convert Loran-C into eLoran with a call for its termination, in line with the DHS appropriations bill. Further details are available at the PNT website.

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