Posts Tagged ‘US’

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.