Defense Secretary “hates GPS”

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s recent statement “I hate GPS” naturally creates much concern within the navigation community. The July-August issue of Inside GNSS contains his presentation with the reaction from editor Glen Gibbons, plus my own response which delineates
* where the Secretary is badly mistaken, and
* where his concerns are legitimate.
There is a connection between the latter and our industry’s decades-long determined resistance to common-sense improvements in both performance and economy. Steps offering dramatic benefits are further described in material long available from this site. Rather than repeat those descriptions here, I now focus instead on another kind of avoidance: an urgent need to swerve away from another administrative blunder .

Recent history illustrates how the preceding expression is no exaggeration. Loss of LORAN wasn’t permanent, for reasons that were primarily capricious. Planned destruction of vital backup to a vulnerable pillar for communication and navigation wasn’t completed because the government never got around to finishing it. Hundreds of experienced professionals offered testimony in 2009 (including my “two cents’ worth” revisited) — which failed at the time. Administrative action shut down LORAN for years, with intent to destroy it.

Poor judgment, however, is not the sole cause of unwise administrative action. Often it is prompted by poor performance; the GAO-08-467SP report provides a perfect explanation of that. Dismal as it is, it must be believed that even gross departures from responsible stewardship can be corrected. Destroying a critical resource is obviously not the answer.