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It came as an unpleasant shock to Saddam's Iraq, because it allowed US armored forces to navigate accurately through the desert and drive him out of Kuwait. ht
by chiph 7y ago
It came as an unpleasant shock to Saddam's Iraq, because it allowed US armored forces to navigate accurately through the desert and drive him out of Kuwait.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gps-and-the-world-s-first-space-war/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gps-and-the-world...
The NAVSTAR GPS constellation was incomplete at the time, so accurate positioning was only available for 19 hours a day. There weren't enough mil-spec receivers to go around, so some units relied on commercial receivers that parents had bought their sons and mailed them to them.
- coin 7y agoRumor has it that the Air Force temporally turned off SA so that civilian GPS receivers used by US military forces could get high accuracy positions.
- colechristensen 7y agoSA (Selelective Availability) was disabled in 2000 by an act of Congress and according to gps.gov >The United States has no intent to ever use Selective Availability again. I wouldn't be surprised if SA was turned off during that war.
- beerandt 7y agoThey didn't "turn it off" as much as set it very very low, maybe even to 0. But even then, military grade receivers still enjoyed 1-2 magnitudes of improved accuracy. Clinton turned it off after surveyors figured out differential GPS, which essentially made it obsolete.
- chiph 7y agoI was out of the USAF by this time, so I have no direct knowledge. But I imagine they did a risk assessment over the possibility of the Iraqi forces gaining access to GPS, either because they bought commercial receivers, developed their own, or got loaned some from more-capable country who would have liked to have seen the US + coalition fail.