Roscosmos in the US? The concerns for and the benefits of better GLONASS guidance

According to the New York Times, US Congressman Mike Rogers of Alabama, chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee, is miffed that the State Department is contemplating a request from Roscosmos to build a series of monitoring stations, for its GLONASS satellite navigation system, across the United States:

     I would like to understand why the United States would be interested in enabling a GPS competitor, like Russian GLONASS, when the world’s reliance on GPS is a clear advantage to the United States on multiple levels.

I can help the congressman with that. With respect to GPS, GLONASS is not a competitive service; it’s a complementary service.

For a product to be competitive, it would have to take business from another enterprise’s product. But the US Air Force, which owns and operates GPS, earns no revenue from it. Rosocosmos makes basically no money from GLONASS. The European Union and the European Space Agency make no meaningful amounts from their joint Galileo project, despite an ambitious plan a decade ago to do so. In short, satellite navigation is a business like lighthouses. There may be a theoretical market for them, as Ronald Coase once imagined, but it’s remarkably lacking in practice. So far, it has only been viable as a public good.

Of course, it’s a pretty important public good. Today, it’s only a slight exaggeration to claim that pretty much everything runs on GPS. Satellite signals synchronize wireless telephone systems. They lo-jack everything from cars to our teenage kids’ whereabouts. They basically fly drones. They’re responsible today in all manner of safety-of-life applications. And as Don Jewell observed in a recent article in GPS World, even the GPS control segment runs on GPS timation. The potential for a single point of failure was a large part of what drove the EU and the ESA to pay for Galileo.

The utility of the stations is also clear. To provide accurate positioning to receivers on the ground, navigation satellites must know their own positions with exquisite accuracy. Finding those requires multiple tracking stations around the world. The USAF maintains more than a few in out-of-the-way locations.

What’s not at all clear is just how the GPS is “a clear advantage to the United States on multiple levels”. Which levels would those be? It’s good for the US, to be sure, but it’s good for everybody, because it’s freely available. Thus, there’s no money in it, so there’s no relative economic advantage. The military advantage of the encrypted Y-code is notable, but that’s a single dimension. It’s available regardless of whether Rosoboronexport sells the Syrian Army or anyone else GLONASS-guided Iskander ('Son of Scud') ballistic missiles.

As it was getting started, Galileo too was seen as a competitor—but only by the Pentagon. Back in 2002, I gave a talk to the annual conference of the Institute of Navigation on why the US Defense Department needed to stop arguing against the EU and the ESA’s joint undertaking (my report is on Slideshare). My analogy was broadly to lighthouses: that the US didn’t control French lighthouses doesn’t stop American sailors from sighting them when approaching Brest or Bordeaux.

After my talk, I was approached by more than a USAF officers wanting to know who I was working for. Not the French, I assured them, for my work was un-financed. To the Air Force, the whole thing reeked of conspiracy. For me, it was just amusing. But the companies involved smelled the actual money to be made. (I admit that I was relatively popular the next day at the show amongst European electronics firms.)

Since the 1990s, satellite navigation receivers in the US and elsewhere have been offering integrated receivers to track both GPS and GLONASS signals. As Galileo comes on line in a few years, receivers integrating all three signals should become widely available too. At least one firm already has purpose-built a receiver that integrates GPS signals with those of the Chinese Beidou system, as that will eventually expand to global coverage as well. Note how I have not even begun to discuss the Japanese and Indian regional systems, each of which have demonstrator satellites in orbit.

Fairly though, as I once told Der Spiegel about Galileo, “if you build a lighthouse, you can hardly claim that it's only good for commercial ships. Naturally, navigation systems are good for both.” Dan Gouré of the Lexington Institute is alarmed at how GLONASS stations in the US could help the Russian Air Force and the Russian Space Forces bomb the United States. If that sounds far-fetched, I share one concern, not quite stated in his article, but perhaps in his thinking.

As Keir Lieber and Darryl Press imagined in their article “The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy,” (International Security, Spring 2006), adding GPS guidance to Trident missiles could improve a hypothetical American stratagem of a possible first-strike against the China’s nuclear forces. With better accuracy, much smaller warheads could be used, limiting the fallout on Chinese cities. It’s a fairly insane suggestion, but it’s possibly one worth considering from the other side. One can then also imagine what could be done for Russian ICBMs with GLONASS guidance and updates from inside the United States.

The plausibility of nuclear first strikes hinge on the availability multiple-warhead missiles; without those, there’s little sense in shooting a nuclear missile at a nuclear missile. Had the START II Treaty of 1993 come into force, Russian land-based missiles would have been reduced to single warheads, but the Duma never ratified the agreement, and dropped it completely in 2002 when the US withdrew from the ABM Treaty.

In either case, better missile guidance with satellite signals wouldn’t help find the second-strike capability on ballistic missiles submarines at sea. But I see the point, and worry along too.

The CIA is also said to be fighting State’s inclination to approve the request, as the spy agency is concerned that the stations could be used for spying. As Gouré put it, “a lot of intelligence collection can be built into large stations with multiple antennas and radiating devices.” Then, in addition to the NSA, we would have the Russians spying on us. OK, the Russians are already spying on us, but one can understand that this shouldn’t be made easier.

Linking authorization of GLONASS stations on American soil to another nuclear arms accord may itself be a far-fetched suggestion. Expecting that GLONASS stations in the US be run by a domestic agency or a company with a US Special Security Agreement seems more plausible. But generally, checking every available lighthouse in the sky makes sense. And to continue the metaphor, in the industrial sense, the ship has already left the pier. Whether GLONASS sets up shop in the US, plenty of other satellite systems will set up shop somewhere. Trying to slow that down is neither a plausible nor a beneficial idea.

Comments

[Dave Foster]

Jim,

As to improving ICBM accuracy with GPS (or other satnav), I'm not sure the near environment missile-atmosphere effects wouldn't significantly interfere with signal reception. This would depend on the placement of the aperture and the properties of it's covering material. Putting the antenna on the tailend would be sensible for terminal navigation but then again that's the hot side on the boost phase. I presume such consequences of missile speed to signal reception have been investigated but I imagine the engineering challenges are greater than for subsonic missile systems.

Good post/thanks.

[James Hasik]

Greater! Yes. I have these problems every time I try to design a hypersonic reentry vehicle.

[Dave Foster]

Indeed.

[Dave Foster]

Jim,

Congress is doing more than huffing and puffing, it appears:

"A proposed Senate amendment (No. 2185) to S. 1197 would limit the construction of satellite positioning ground monitoring stations controlled by any foreign government on U.S. soil. Such construction would require certification by the Defense Secretary and Director of National Intelligence that the stations could not be used to gather intelligence or improve foreign weapons systems. The proposed amendment would also impose a new reporting requirement on DOD, DNI, and USSTRATCOM."

http://www.gps.gov/policy/funding/2014/#NDAA

http://beta.congress.gov/amendment/113th-congress/senate-amendment/2185/