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What’s new: The Senate Homeland Security Committee becoming interested in the topic.
Why it’s important: DHS has a role to play, even if they are not a co-chair of the national executive committee. See SPD-7.
What else to know: DHS has done some great work on GPS vulnerability and such, but they are extremely limited in the resources devoted to this topic.
Senators want DHS to detail efforts to mitigate GPS disruptions
Sens. Maggie Hassan. D-N.H., and James Lankford, R-Okla., expressed concerns that adversarial powers are investing in land-based alternatives to GPS, but that the U.S. has not taken similar steps.
A bipartisan pair of senators are pressing the Department of Homeland Security to release information on the efforts being taken to protect critical infrastructure from GPS disruptions or outages.
In a Dec. 18 letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Sens. Maggie Hassan. D-N.H., and James Lankford, R-Okla., pointed to steps that global competitors — such as Russia and China — have taken to bolster their own navigation and positioning technologies outside of satellite-based systems, like GPS.
Hassan currently chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight, while Lankford is the ranking member of the panel’s Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management.
“We are concerned that the United States is lagging in its efforts to prepare for a potential GPS outage when compared to the efforts of our adversaries,” the lawmakers wrote, pointing to reports that Russia and China have invested in land-based alternatives to GPS.
The senators noted, in part, that both referenced countries “have retained and upgraded World War II era technology” known as Loran that uses long-range radio signals to transmit navigational information, but that the U.S. government “appears to have given up efforts to upgrade its own Loran systems.”
