Going to War - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 114

This new situational awareness of the location of friendly troops marked
the birth of what became Blue Force Tracking (blue for friendly forces, red for
enemies). After the war, work began on systems like the Force XXI Battle Com-
mand Brigade and Below (fbcb2) program. Combining gps, a satellite phone,
a laptop computer, and special software, the technology displays maps with
blue icons pinpointing friendly units and updates their positions automatically
in real time. Users can communicate by radio, text message, or e-mail. Blue
Force Tracking expanded rapidly in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom and
has evolved into subsequent generations known as Joint Capabilities Release
and Capabilities Set 13, with more than one hundred thousand devices installed
in U.S. armored vehicles, tanks, and helicopters. 52 Although Schwarzkopf does
not use the term Global Positioning System in his autobiography, It Doesn't Take
a Hero , published a year after the war, he mentions the technology in a refer-
ence to the challenges of desert warfare. He writes, “In Europe, soldiers had
been able to orient themselves in relation to roads, towns, forests, and other
landmarks; in the desert, there were no landmarks and even the dunes moved.
So we had to quickly teach the use of satellite navigation equipment , celestial
navigation and dead reckoning” (emphasis added). 53
Celestial navigation, of course, requires clear weather, but the Persian Gulf
War occurred during the worst conditions recorded in the fourteen years the
Air Force had been keeping records of Iraqi weather. 54 Bad weather forced can-
cellation of 15 percent of planned air sorties during the first ten days of the air
campaign and affected operations throughout the war. 55 The ground campaign
began February 24 amid rain and sandstorms and after a tug-of-war between
the generals in the field, who wanted to wait for better weather, and civilian
leaders in Washington, who were managing last-minute negotiations with the
Soviet Union that could have resulted in Saddam Hussein giving up Kuwait but
keeping his massive military apparatus. Absent gps, the outcome of the war
may not have been different, but its duration would certainly have been longer.
The authors of a popular Schwarzkopf biography, In the Eye of the Storm: The
Life of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf , published in late summer 1991, describe
vividly the battlefield advantages of gps. Their use of the plural systems also
highlights the still-evolving use of the term at the time, as well as the trend
toward conflating the receivers with the entire system:
This element of surprise was compounded on the second day of the war by
an appalling sandstorm that reduced visibility to less than a hundred feet.