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Updated Tuesday, August 24, 2010 10:39 am TWN, By Robert Karniol, The Straits Times/Asia News Network

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China's satellite is its answer to America's GPS

Ivan Oelrich, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, said in a telephone interview that the “(military) advantage of having access to a navigation and positioning system is huge”. Applications include the navigation of military platforms, targeting of fire and surveillance/reconnaissance. The system is also critical to network-centric warfare — the military doctrine based on networking geographically dispersed forces, particularly to better fight jointly.

But Oelrich points out that there are limitations. Such systems will improve the use of artillery and counter-battery fire, can sharpen the aim of gravity bombs and ensure the pinpoint accuracy of cruise missiles launched against fixed targets. But ballistic missiles can't normally process information from a GPS-type satellite network quickly enough, and the system can't handle moving targets without including a terminal guidance system.

This means there is currently limited utility in linking Compass with the carrier-killer ballistic missile China is thought to be developing, with anti-ship cruise missiles or with the ballistic missiles targeting Taiwan.

There has meanwhile appeared a fairly new activity known as navigational warfare (navwar). The United States Department of Defense has a Joint Navigational Warfare Centre with a mission to protect the positioning, navigation and timing of American systems; prevent an enemy's use of such systems; and integrate capability with other U.S. government agencies and coalition or allied partners.

The GPS system — and Compass, too — involves the dual use of satellites to provide open frequencies for civilian use and heavily encrypted frequencies for military use. Washington initially shielded GPS with a system called selective availability (SA), which dithered the civil GPS signal on a worldwide basis. The military signal was left unaffected but the civil signal was very poor.

SA was eventually found to be ineffective, and on May 1, 2000, the U.S. permanently turned off this scrambling feature. The GPS civil signal improved at least ten-fold and navwar was born.

“Navwar involves local jamming on the battlefield of all navigational signals. Not just GPS but everything except the encrypted military GPS frequency,” the U.S. government source explained. “This gives us an asymmetric advantage.”

And is China following a similar model for offensive and defensive purposes? “They've never said anything about this publicly,” the official responded. “But I'm sure they're fully aware of our navwar strategy and it would be intelligent of them to copy it.”

This suggests that the PLA likely has a critical new element supplementing Compass about wwhich nothing is openly known

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