Searching for the White Whale of national security
Brief lessons in celestial navigation have been reinstated at the U.S. Naval Academy. The decades-defunct courses for young naval officers are not being brought back because it's important to look up at the stars from time to time (it is) but because of
national security.
"We went away from celestial navigation because computers are great," said Lt. Cmdr. Ryan Rogers, the deputy chairman of the academy's Department of Seamanship and Navigation. "The problem is," he added, "there's no backup."
Among the fleet, the Navy ended all training in celestial navigation in 2006, said Lt. Cmdr. Kate Meadows, a Navy spokeswoman. Then officers' training returned in 2011 for ship navigators, she said. And officials are now rebuilding the program for enlisted ranks; it's expected to begin next fall.
With rising threats of cyber attacks, the Navy has realized that in a potential cyber attack we could find ourselves unable to perform the most fundamental of maritime functions—figuring out where we are and where we need to point our ships to go. Technology is great but sometimes we find ourselves a little too dependent on it. With the advent of GPS capabilities we got a little ahead of ourselves.
In the 1990s, airmen launched two dozen satellites nearly 13,000 miles above Earth. By 1995, this network, the Global Positioning System, could pinpoint your location within feet.
Since then, GPS has never been shut off, according to the government's website gps.gov.
Today, 31 satellites circle the Earth, each twice a day, costing taxpayers about $1 billion a year.
"The perceived need for sextants was taken away," said Peter Trogdon, president of Weems & Plath in Eastport.
Maybe the Republican Party will just do away with this GPS government
excess and make these lazy Navy bums secure our waters by pulling on their soggy bootstraps?