Fears of Enemy Tampering Could Sideline New Sensors

By Stew Magnuson

FearEnemy The Army is preparing to begin testing new high-tech sensors designed to operate unattended, behind enemy lines.

But the project could hit a major roadblock because Pentagon officials fear that the global positioning system technology used in the sensors would be susceptible to enemy capture.

The sensors are part of the Army’s overarching modernization project, the Future Combat Systems. They could be fielded as early as 2008 if the Army can get around an impasse with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, said Col. Michael Williamson, program manager of FCS network systems integration.

“We’re having a little gunfight with OSD now … because the type of GPS we want to use we can’t leave unattended on the ground,” Williamson said at an Institute for Defense and Government Advancement forum.

FCS will employ manned and unmanned systems linked by a common network. The Army plans to roll out the technology in phases as it matures, rather than waiting for the entire system of vehicles, sensors and other combat gear to be fully developed.

The technology for unattended ground sensors is ready, Williamson said. Disagreement over whether they can be “unattended” as their name suggests, and therefore vulnerable to capture, is one sticking point. The FCS concept calls for the sensors to be fired, dropped or placed in forward positions, or behind enemy lines, to gather seismic and acoustic intelligence.

“OSD is engaged and we have a great dialogue with them. My issue is that you just have to tell me at some point before I go into production,” Williamson told National Defense.

The codes and abilities of the U.S. military’s version of the global positioning system differ from those found in the commercial marketplace. Commercial GPS technology could be used in the devices but would not be as accurate for targeting, Williamson said. Furthermore, a Joint Chiefs of Staff directive in 2002 prohibits the military from using less secure commercial GPS technology. Non-military GPS is vulnerable to “spoofing,” which is the transmission of false signals by enemies.

James Hasik, an Austin, Texas-based management consultant, and author of “The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare,” said the Pentagon might be too overprotective of the technology. The possibility of handheld devices falling into enemy hands has been a concern for years. There are currently “self-destruct” mechanisms incorporated into handheld GPS units that make the devices inoperable if someone tries to break in to do reverse engineering, or extract the codes. How a handheld unit destroys itself is classified, he said.

“Can we really be assured that it really is tamper proof?” he asked.

The prototypes being worked on now are intended to be placed and removed by hand instead of the “fire and forget” version as FCS conceived, Williamson said. They currently do not have tamper-proof technology.

The European Union’s plans to launch its own GPS system, Galileo, by 2010 may make military superiority in GPS accuracy a moot point, Hasik said. The U.S. military will not have the ability, for example, to control Galileo use in battle spaces as it can now.

“Trying to guard the technology too closely is ultimately going to be futile because whoever the bad guys are, sooner or later, they’re going to have access,” Hasik said.

Meanwhile, Williamson said he won’t seek a waiver to use commercial GPS on the unattended ground sensors. “I would not try to get around the policy,” he said. “I would suspect that our design for [the sensors] would have to incorporate an approved for military use GPS variant.”

If the Army can come to an agreement with the secretary’s office, the technology could be validated in 2008 and fielded immediately afterward, Williamson said. The experimental brigade combat team, a unit based at Fort Bliss, Texas, tasked with trying out FCS technology, could begin training with the sensors as early as 2007, he said.