Published: 1 June 2008
Air & Space Power
Journal - Summer 2008
The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare by
Michael Russell Rip and James M. Hasik. Naval Institute Press (http://www.usni.org/press/press.html),
291 Wood Road, Annapolis, Maryland 21402-5034, 2002, 448 pages, $55.00
(hardcover).
New technological advances such as sliced bread, indoor plumbing, automatic
machine guns, and blitzkrieg warfare seemed revolutionary at their inception,
but we quickly adopted them and took them for granted—in retrospect, sometimes
we even considered these innovations obvious or inevitable. Such is the fate of
precision weapons and the global positioning system (GPS). The Precision
Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare offers an excellent review of
the history of the GPS and describes the revolutionary impact it had on airpower
during the conflicts of the 1990s. Precision engagement has become so engrained
in today’s Air Force that we can hardly remember the navigation and
weapon-delivery challenges we faced little more than a decade ago. Authors
Michael Rip, a professor at Michigan State University, and James Hasik, a former
Navy officer who now works as a management consultant specializing in defense
issues, increase our appreciation of the GPS’s tremendous value for today and
the future.
They have filled the book with hundreds of photos, drawings, and maps that greatly aid readers’ understanding and keep their interest level high. Chapter 2, for example, contains a brief history of military air and space navigation, focusing on World War II navigation problems as well as radio and radar systems developed to address those issues. The chapter contains detailed diagrams of how the Knickebein, X- and Y-Verfahren, and Gee radio-navigation systems worked, together with pictures of and from the H2S radar system.
The book then rushes quickly through the Cold War satellite systems used by submarines as well as the ballistic missiles launched by those platforms and on to the GPS and the Soviet Global Navigation Satellite System. Barely mentioning Vietnam, Rip and Hasik discuss the first use of laser-guided precision bombs but, unfortunately, do not cover other important, pertinent navigation and weapon-delivery technologies (e.g., tactical air navigation and TSQ-81 bombing radar). Thus, readers seeking a full history of aerial navigation and weapon delivery will be disappointed.
Following an excellent and easily understood description of how the GPS system works, the authors dedicate most of the book to a history of the use of the GPS in conflicts of the 1990s—from Operations Desert Storm to Allied Force—and descriptions of today’s GPS weapon systems together with their capabilities and limitations. They present thoroughly researched statistics and detailed accounts of how GPS aids aerial and ground navigation, precision-weapon delivery, and search-and-rescue missions. Their study makes a strong case that we are in the midst of a “precision military-technical revolution” similar in transformative scope to the Napoleonic, industrial, mechanized, and nuclear revolutions.
Rip and Hasik effectively explain both the technical and nontechnical limitations of both GPS and precision-weapon technology, noting that autonomous GPS-guided weapons have limited utility against mobile and well-concealed targets. We learn why GPS jamming is not as serious a concern since low-power jammers, though easy to build, are easy to counter, and high-power jammers, though expensive to build, are easy to find and destroy. The book examines why precision weapons require precision intelligence, citing examples of how intelligence shortfalls have caused precision munitions to fail to produce desired political effects. Similarly, it discusses the dangers of becoming infatuated with precision technology, noting the “cruise missile diplomacy” of the 1990s, wherein GPS-guided weapons functioned perfectly from a technical perspective but often did not achieve hoped-for results.
The book does not lay out a technical vision for the future of either the GPS or precision weapons, leaving unanswered such questions as how we could make the GPS even more accurate, reliable, robust, and/or ubiquitous, and what military benefits might ensue. Instead, the authors tackle the more difficult question of what precision navigation and engagement mean to the future of aerial warfare. Although written prior to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (the book includes a postscript composed shortly thereafter), the study’s predictions for the challenges the United States would likely face in future conflicts are certainly coming true today in North Korea, Iran, China, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The GPS is one of the reasons that enemies know they cannot defeat the United States in a conventional conflict. Concluding that only nuclear weapons can absolutely guarantee their security, they have therefore increasingly emphasized maskirovka (concealment and deception), mobility, and asymmetric warfare to make targets very hard to find.
Rip and Hasik’s use of hundreds of useful statistics and charts to support their analysis make The Precision Revolution a valuable airpower reference book certain to be used and cited by scholars interested in these topics. Extremely well written and engaging to a variety of readers, it will appeal to anyone who wishes to understand more about the history and analysis of the GPS, its effect on aerial warfare, and the strategic challenges facing airpower as a result of the “precision revolution.” I recommend it highly.
Maj Eric J. Felt, USAF
Air Force Fellow
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
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