Posts Tagged ‘military’

Last week, the military went through a massive signal blackout, rendering all their GPS based equipment useless. The signal was only lost for about 10 minutes, but this begs the question: how vulnerable were we for those 10 minutes?

The military is in possession of over 10,000 GPS receivers, which they use on almost all of their equipment. “Anything that moves uses a GPS to track it” says our unknown source within the military. “GPS is so central to war that we just can’t leave home without it”.

According to the Air Force, this signal blackout was due to defective software in conjunction with capability problems. They also stated that none of their weapon systems were harmed from the blackout.

The military uses GPS systems on bombs, armored vehicles, ships, aircraft, and many more defense systems vital to the survival of out soldiers, and during this blackout, we were left near defenseless. What if our enemies gained the technology to duplicate this, causing all our GPS based equipment to be rendered useless. We would be unable to relay positions to one another, unable to know where our vessels were at all times, and we would not be able to drop precision guided missiles.

There have even been attempts in the past in doing so. In 2003, Iraq attempted to use a massive radar jamming machine in the hopes of cutting off the United States’ ability to drop air strikes on them. Luckily, US soldiers were able to get to the weapon and destroy it before it was ever activated. “Our GPS systems have never been breached before, and we are confident that it will never be breached in the future as well” said a spokes person for the military. “We are extremely confident in the safety and security of our GPS systems from all enemy attacks”.

With the growing conflicts in the Middle East, especially with Iran attempting to arm itself with nuclear power, we should all cross out fingered that malfunctions like this never happen again.

This past Wednesday, at approximately 4:30 A.M, NATO forces accidentally called in an air strike on their allied Afghan soldiers, mistaking them for dangerous enemy militants. Five soldiers died as a result of these bombings, which left many more injured in need of serious medical treatment. This tragic event could seemingly have been prevented if NATO had supplied the Afghan forces with GPS systems in order that they should be able to recognize their allies via GPS satellite uplink.

Through the eyes of the predator drone – NATO’s UAV, or unmanned aerial vehicle – all Afghan forces look identical, making it near impossible to distinguish between friend and foe. According to policy, Afghan forces allied with NATO are supposed to be outfitted with GPS tracking devices, allowing them to be instantly geo-tagged, which would prevent horrible mishaps like these from happening. NATO apparently did not supply any Afghan soldiers with these GPS units because they evidently thought that this kind of technology would be useless in the hands of soldiers untrained in the use of such equipment.

In America, technology is often so abundant that its use can at times be akin to common knowledge, and we take our early introduction into the advanced world of computers for granted. Being, however, that the people of Afghanistan are not equipped with much technology – and most of what they have is comparatively antiquated and outdated anyway – NATO believes that Afghan soldiers would not be capable of using the GPS equipment supplied to them, and teaching them would take far too much time and cost far too much money.

Acquiring its name from the code phrase for allies, “blue force”, this GPS technology is called Blue Force Tracking, and it is a constant, real-time, geolocator. In the past, this type of GPS based technology has proven very effective in today’s modern battlefield. Even veteran war expert General David Petreaus commented on how essential Blue Force Tracking can be for preventing friendly fire and allied casualties in a combat scenario.

There’s a problem, however; while this kind of technology might seem basic in the hands of the average American, in the hands of an Afghani, it could very well be alien machinery. An additional problem NATO faces with giving Afghan troops Blue Force Tracking is that if enemy militants in Afghanistan were to defeat allied Afghan soldiers, it would be easy for them to steal their GPS devices. As a result, they’d be able to disguise themselves as allied Afghan soldiers and easily infiltrate our bases.

This is challenge that NATO and the US military need to overcome before it becomes too late.

Developed in 2004, the Joint Precision Airdrop System has been used by the military to manually drop ammo and bombs onto battlefields with knife-cutting accuracy. Only recently, however, have they started dropping something else of great importance: blood. By as early as 2011, the Armed Service Blood Program will be teaming up with the US Marines to begin airdropping blood for wounded combat soldiers who are in desperate need of blood transfusions.

In the past, if a soldier was badly wounded, he or she would need to be airlifted by helicopter into a safer combat zone, and would be medically treated there. Sometimes, however, in situations of intense combat in which it would be too difficult to land a helicopter on account of incoming fire, it would be near impossible to get those wounded soldiers to safety without risking the lives of the people in the helicopter attempting to rescue them.

Now, thanks to the joint efforts of the Armed Service Blood Program and the US Marines, blood will simply be able to be dropped from the sky, parachuting down to the soldiers’ position below using a GPS based guidance system. As a result, these wounded soldiers will be able to acquire the immediate help they so desperately needs instead of waiting for what could be hours to arrive at a hospital, which would put them at risk of bleeding out before they can even get there.

New C-130’s and other unmanned aerial vehicles can be equipped with these blood drops, and they can deliver blood to a wounded soldier in less than 10 minutes. Blood loss is the number one cause of death in the military, and thanks to this new GPS based technology we’ll hopefully be able to save more of our soldiers from an early grave.