Image: US Air Force

What’s New: Senior aerospace executive acknowledges DOD does not seem interested in doing anything other than tinkering with better PNT.

What to Know:

The Government Accountability Office issued three reports in 15 months criticizing the way DOD approaches, prioritizes, manages, and leads alternative PNT efforts.

Quotes from article (emphasis added):

“When pressed, Kelle Wendling, L3 Harris’ space systems sector president, acknowledged the incremental nature of the capabilities NTS-3 is supposed to test…”

“We can’t do nothing. Absent [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] saying we really want to re-think PNT and are going to put billions into a new architecture, this is the current opportunity to experiment [with PNT] and that’s how they’ve chosen to move forward. We’re responding to the appetite that the government has now.”

We agree with the author of the article:

“When it comes to facilitating the U.S. military’s basic way of fighting, tinkering with GPS just isn’t good enough.”

 

The American military is almost wholly reliant on a constellation of 34 Global Positioning Satellites to perform just about any mission. The military writ-large says they understand the vulnerability of GPS but the first of the USAF’s priority Vanguard programs does little to address the risk to the crucial navigation system.