Satellite Navigation and the Military-Civilian Dilemma: The Geopolitics of GPS and Its Rivals

Abstract

In the early 1970s the United States began development of a satellite-based positioning and navigation system, intended to replace a number of incompatible systems and to be used by civilians as well as by the military. Once fully deployed in the 1990s, the Global Positioning System (GPS) became enormously successful. With some modifications, its basic architecture was copied by the Soviet Union and later the European Union. GPS is now a global infrastructure, crucial to military operations in the Middle East, to management of ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing, to global shipping and to personal uses on smartphones. However, external events, especially the invention of the microprocessor, disrupted the planned civilian-military balance, and the US military had to adjust GPS’s parameters to ensure national security. It remains under tight control by a civilian-military committee authorized by the US government. This chapter discusses the system’s history and concludes with observations about whether the ‘closed world’ of military technology applies in this case.