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What’s new: An article about Dr. Brad Parkinson’s most recent presentation which provides a detailed roadmap for how the U.S. can achieve Assured PNT.
Why it’s important: A clearly outlined roadmap can make it easier for political decision makers to move forward.
What else to know:
- Brad says we should address the biggest threats first, which are jamming and spoofing.
- Those might be the biggest threats right now, but that could change very quickly. When Russia puts a nuclear weapon or nuclear powered weapon in space, will that be the biggest threat? How do we address that?
- While most people like to talk about threats, the real concern is risk. Risk is calculated as the probability of something bad happening multiplied by the cost of that bad thing happening. For example, if the risk of a solar event destroying or damaging GPS satellites is .1% per year and that would cause $50T in damage a year for 20 years, then the risk is about a trillion dollars ($1.0T). An investment of $1T or less that would avoid that loss would be a good investment.
- Key to executing Brad’s plan are outlined in this portion of the article:
The Leadership Imperative
Parkinson’s message was clear: Assured PNT will not emerge from incremental programs alone. It requires leadership and includes:
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- Policy reform: Now including the CRPA reclassification, easing ITAR restrictions that long blocked resilience.• Enforcement: Establish national jammer-hunting teams with modern TDOA tools.• Investment: Federal funding and public-private partnerships to scale deployments.• Standards: Shift from advisory committees to measurable assurance.
The U.S. once led the world by developing GPS from idea to global utility. To maintain that leadership, Parkinson argues, America must now designate a visionary leader with authority and resources to coordinate across agencies and industry.
- Policy reform: Now including the CRPA reclassification, easing ITAR restrictions that long blocked resilience.• Enforcement: Establish national jammer-hunting teams with modern TDOA tools.• Investment: Federal funding and public-private partnerships to scale deployments.• Standards: Shift from advisory committees to measurable assurance.
- Another non-technical portion of the article is also important for policy makers:
A Strategic Roadmap
Parkinson outlined a staged roadmap for moving from vulnerability to assurance:
• Short-Term (1–3 years): Define and publish assurance categories, establish jammer enforcement units, ease targeted restrictions, launch pilot tests of augmentation.
• Mid-Term (3–7 years): Roll out prototype LEO and eLoran, establish certification frameworks, monitor assurance levels, explore shared procurement.
• Long-Term (7–15 years): Deploy an upgraded assured PNT architecture, enable GNSS units interoperability with techniques to stay ahead of threats.
The Path to Assured PNT: A Framework for National Leadership
When Dr. Brad Parkinson takes the stage, his authority is unmistakable. He is not theorizing about PNT resilience from the sidelines; he built the original system that underpins it all.
His “Protect, Toughen, Augment” (PTA) framework for PNT reflects decades of lessons learned from both technical triumphs and hard-won policy battles. As he noted in his IEEE/ION PLANS 2025 keynote address: “It is not enough to recognize the vulnerabilities. We must design layered responses. That is the essence of assurance.”
