Military Satellite System Vital to U.S. Economy, Study Says

What began as an obscure military satellite system to help American troops navigate around the world is now so essential to the U.S. economy that the federal government must continue to provide financial support, according to a Rand Corp. study released Wednesday.

Airlines, computer users on the Internet and the auto industry are increasingly dependent on the system, overshadowing the military applications that originally formed the basis for building the 24-satellite system, Rand said. The system allows a person to determine his or her location anywhere on the planet within 100 meters, as well as the precise time, and is used by people ranging from truckers to hikers.

The satellite network, known as the Global Positioning System, or GPS, will support a $9-billion U.S. industry--concentrated in California--by the end of this decade, but U.S. government policy that governs the system dates back to the Reagan administration.

U.S. policy has not kept pace with expansion of the technology, said Rand study author Scott Pace, which is putting U.S. leadership and foreign acceptance of the U.S. system at risk. Users from Japan to Europe are growing increasingly reluctant to adopt the GPS as their standard and are considering supporting competing systems.

To forestall development of competing systems or to avoid driving industry to use the Russian Glonass system, the White House must adopt a formal national policy that guarantees the United States will provide civilian access to the GPS signal and that it has no intention of charging fees on the signal, Rand said.

But the Santa Monica-based think tank took a conservative position on one of the most controversial issues surrounding GPS: whether the Pentagon should stop its policy of deliberately providing a less accurate signal to commercial users than it does to the military.

Many commercial users of the GPS have been clamoring for a more accurate signal, arguing that the degraded one provided by the Pentagon is forcing them to spend billions of dollars annually on augmentation systems to improve accuracy.

The degraded signal allows for accuracy of about 100 meters, not good enough for automobile navigation systems, for example. The Pentagon’s encrypted signal provided to the military allows for accuracy of better than 10 meters.

The Russian Glonass system already provides the more accurate signals to all commercial users. But the Pentagon has resisted doing the same, fearful that adversaries will develop weapons that use GPS signals.