No one expected that the GPS positioning system of the US military, which is invincible in the Middle East, would have problems in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
I am afraid that few people know that the owner of the US GPS system, which occupies the dominant position of the civilian global positioning system, is actually the US military.
In the 70s of the last century, because the old positioning system of the US military was no longer useful, the US Department of Defense set out to build a new generation of global positioning system for the US military, and so far, the GPS system of the US military has been updated to the third generation. And because of the revolutionary performance of the GPS system in the navigation service, it was soon favored by the civilian market, because of the earliest development of GPS, the highest degree of maturity, so the commercialization and market share of the GPS system in the civilian field is also the only existence in the world.
But no matter how well GPS performs in the civilian market, it can't change its own military color.
In the combat system of the U.S. military, great importance is attached to the construction of battlefield situational awareness, and the GPS system is a very important part of the U.S. military's battlefield situational awareness. In the U.S. Army, everything from tanks and armored vehicles to individual equipment has its own positioning system to determine its own position and facilitate overall command and dispatch.
In many operations in the Middle East, the role of GPS is not taken seriously, and there are even rumors that the first batch of GPS terminals entering the Middle East are civilian products, but in the later review, the US military quickly realized that if it were not for GPS, it would be difficult for the US military to quickly determine the location of the enemy in the vast desert, and from a strategic point of view, the emergence of the global positioning system has greatly improved the combat effectiveness of the troops.
Since then, the U.S. military has accelerated the exploration of militarized applications in outer space, launching a series of spy satellites for reconnaissance, surveillance, and positioning, including keyhole satellites, and the GPS system has also become part of the U.S. military deterrent, but in the recent Russia-Ukraine conflict, this deterrence has been broken by the Russian military.
According to the U.S. "Defense News" website, some of the weapons that the United States has donated to Ukraine use GPS systems, but the Russian army's electronic warfare system has carried out targeted interference with these weapons, resulting in a significant drop in the hit rate of a series of weapons and equipment such as the U.S. military's "Excalibur" precision-guided artillery shells, including a ground-launched air-to-ground weapon that has not yet been announced by the U.S. military.
The website said that this is a "lesson" for the US military, and to a certain extent, the defeat of the equipment of Western countries led by the United States in the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield can indeed be regarded as a "lesson". For a long time, the US and Western armies in the movie lens have been invincible, but judging from the performance of Western equipment on the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield, the so-called "invincible" is just not meeting the "suitable" enemy.
Then again, the Russian army has also helped us "get to the bottom" this time, the electronic warfare system of the Russian army can be said to be the most backward in China, the United States and Russia, in this case, the Russian army can still have a huge impact on some of the guidance systems of the United States, it is difficult to imagine that the US military will become "blind" in the face of the electronic warfare system of the PLA.
In fact, it is not news that the GPS system has drawbacks, in the past, the United States Congressman had issued a warning to the United States Congress on China's Beidou satellite system, it is said that some of the satellites that make up the GPS have been in service for too long, and the deployment process of the subsequent satellites is slow, resulting in a plummeting accuracy of the positioning services provided by the GPS, and compared with the various services provided by the Beidou satellite system on the mainland, the function of the GPS itself has been somewhat backward.
Obviously, the combat effectiveness of the US military is now about to draw a huge question mark.