Blog Editor’s Note: Good thought piece from our friend and former colleague Jules McNeff.  Hard to disagree with him. And it is understandable that the DoD PNT Strategy says they plan for future PNT development to be increasingly classified.

Yet if someone is now in the process of inventing the next interenet, or a brand new communications system, or establishing a new PNT system – we wonder if they wouldn’t be able to learn from the last twenty years of hard-won lessons. Cyber-security, authentication, and technology generally have come a long way, as has our appreciation of how there will always be some people who try to pervert any good thing for their bad purposes.

We wonder if the expertise in these areas resident in the Department of Defense couldn’t be leveraged in some ways to help with national security concerns beyond military operations. 

Jules is absolutely right. We can’t go blythely forward doing things the same way we always have and expecting different results. That’s the definintion of insanity.

GPS and GNSS: confronting dual-use realities

September 28, 2020  – By 

I welcome the opportunity to contribute and congratulate GPS World on your 30th anniversary. Over those 30 years, I have watched GPS influence how the world works. Early on, along with its vital contributions to U.S. and allied military operations, there was great optimism that sharing civil GPS technology openly would bring improved safety and efficiency to people around the world. However, that sense of optimism has dimmed as GPS, and the GNSS construct and PNT enterprise that it spawned, confront evolving real-world events.