Going Mainstream - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 124

use by the Army, Navy, and Air Force. 15 Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with
hundreds of thousands of troops and many civilian contractors on the ground
enlarged the radio's mission well beyond locating downed pilots to include
general “personnel recovery.” 16 csel radios, sometimes called the military's
“global 911,” combine a precision-code gps system, a locator beacon, over-
the-horizon satellite data communications, and line-of-sight voice communi-
cations. 17 The gps coordinates and secure digital signal allow search-and-rescue
teams to locate and authenticate missing personnel even if they cannot make
voice contact, prompting csel program managers to coin the slogan “no search
and all rescue.” 18
The military's search-and-rescue needs, illustrated by the O'Grady episode,
provided the impetus to combine compact mobile communications with pre-
cision gps tracking of receivers. Public safety concerns and commercial motives
later drove a similar evolution in civilian telephony. In the same way that devel-
opment of increasingly accurate atomic clocks had made precise satellite nav-
igation feasible decades before, technological advances paved the way for gps
to become a ubiquitous public utility. One was the evolution of techniques to
augment the accuracy of gps signals, providing more precise and diverse appli-
cations; another was miniaturization of gps receivers onto a single computer
chip, enabling their migration to and integration with other devices. However,
technological progress by itself was not enough. The private sector faced uncer-
tainty.
Growing Public Policy Issues
In early June 1995, while Scott O'Grady was evading capture and using gps to
aid his rescue, Congress and the Department of Defense had just received a
report from a yearlong study concerning the future of the technology, jointly
prepared by the National Association of Public Administration (napa) and the
National Research Council (nrc). 19 Simultaneously, the White House Office
of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science and Technology
Council were awaiting delivery of a similar study undertaken by rand. 20 Lead-
ers commissioned these studies to plot the direction of gps policy, recogniz-
ing it had not kept pace with technology.
As commercial interest in gps surged following the Persian Gulf War, policy
makers realized that the system's dual-use nature posed fundamental chal-
lenges for balancing national security needs with the enormous economic
opportunities it offered. Ongoing U.S. military control of gps was a source of