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The GPS Wars Have Begun (techcrunch.com) 210

Where are you? That's not just a metaphysical question, but increasingly a geopolitical challenge that is putting tech giants like Apple and Alphabet in a tough position. From a report: Countries around the world, including China, Japan, India and the United Kingdom plus the European Union are exploring, testing and deploying satellites to build out their own positioning capabilities. That's a massive change for the United States, which for decades has had a practical monopoly on determining the location of objects through its Global Positioning System (GPS), a military service of the Air Force built during the Cold War that has allowed commercial uses since mid-2000 (for a short history of GPS, check out this article, or for the comprehensive history, here's the book-length treatment).

Owning GPS has a number of advantages, but the first and most important is that global military and commercial users depend on this service of the U.S. government, putting location targeting ultimately at the mercy of the Pentagon. The development of the technology and the deployment of positioning satellites also provides a spillover advantage for the space industry. Today, the only global alternative to that system is Russia's GLONASS, which reached full global coverage a couple of years ago following an aggressive program by Russian president Vladimir Putin to rebuild it after it had degraded following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Now, a number of other countries want to reduce their dependency on the U.S. and get those economic benefits. Perhaps no where is that more obvious than with China, which has made building out a global alternative to GPS a top national priority. Its Beidou navigation system has been slowly building up since 2000, mostly focused on providing service in Asia.

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The GPS Wars Have Begun

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  • by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @05:12PM (#57850700) Journal

    Kind of funny that the Chinese don't trust the Russians either otherwise they'd be using theirs.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The multiplication of satellite positioning constellation is about securing access to the military-grade signals and chips.
      Europe has spent 10B€ to avoid depending on ITAR control of military GPS and how access to these devices, and fair price competition, is critical for many arm sales.

    • by nojayuk ( 567177 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @05:55PM (#57850864)

      The US GPS, Chinese Beidou and Russian GLONASS are all positioning systems intended primarily for military use but which offer a degraded lower-accuracy signal for commercial and private users. The EU's Galileo navigation system offers precision to within a few cms, effectively military-grade accuracy, to paying commercial users as well as open but less-accurate position data similar to the "free" GPS, GLONASS and Beidou systems.

      • by LBt1st ( 709520 )

        If I recall correctly, Clinton disabled the lower-accuracy for non-military. Possibly because civilian devices were being used by troops.

        Also the US is currently deploying satellites for it's own next generation GPS system with higher accuracy than anything out there.

        • by nojayuk ( 567177 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @06:52PM (#57851058)

          Selective Availability was a deliberate degradation of the non-military positioning accuracy, "fuzzing" the reported position data. This has been switched off but the most accurate GPS signals are still encrypted and intended only for military and government use, even in the new more accurate GPS satellites being launched.

          The Galileo system provides that level of military-grade accuracy (to within a cm or so) to commercial customers, not just the military forces of participating countries and allied forces. It is still encrypted and requires payment and vetting of customers. Galileo's Open Service is accurate to 1 metre, a lot better than GPS' equivalent free service.

          It's entirely possible commercial pressures will mean higher-accuracy GPS signals might be made available to civilian users in the future but at the moment only Galileo can provide that sort of service over-the-counter.

      • by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @06:38PM (#57851014) Homepage

        It's not really true any longer that the military signals provide better accuracy. DGPS approaches, including SBAS (FAA's WAAS being the first), can provide approximately the same accuracy as the military PPS, while also providing integrity assurances (in that domain's jargon, integrity means you have a bound on how wrong your calculated position is). The main advantage of the military signals now is improved availability, both in terms of anti-jamming and anti-spoofing measures.

        There is some advantage for military receivers in that they can use L2 to estimate dispersion due to the ionosphere, which is easily the largest source of errors for SPS receivers, but an increasing number of satellites transmit civil signals on a second frequency or use "codeless" approaches to make the same estimations using the military encrypted signals on L1 and L2.

      • by Strider- ( 39683 )

        The funny part is that civilian users need more accurate systems then the military. When you're dropping a 2000lb GPS guided bomb, 6 for accuracy is more than enough. When you want to know what Lane your car is in, it ain't.

        • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          In military terms, GPS is in reality pretty useless because the single band is well known and can be jammed across a broad scale. In defensive only terms to secure a country, satellites are a waste of money, radio towers make more sense, defensively you only care if it works in your country and along your coast. So cellular network systems can be tweaked to provide very accurate data, with the persons phone handling the processing. This lets you run local positioning for local needs and when a citizen leave

      • by Kohath ( 38547 )

        How about when you use them all at the same time? The accuracy of the position must improve considerably, right? (I don’t know the details on how they work, so I’m only guessing.)

        • by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @07:44PM (#57851184) Homepage

          All else being equal, if you use N times as many satellites to compute a position/velocity/time solution, your expected accuracy improves by a factor of sqrt(N). But it's not quite that good when you have a multi-solution due to uncertainties in the system clocks between the constellations.

          Even in the ideal case, you can usually get more improvement from other techniques than just averaging more inputs. The first thing to attack is ionospheric delays, then a suite of several other errors that are similar in magnitude: GNSS ephemeris (position and velocity) errors, errors in the satellite clocks, other atmospheric delays, etc.

          Simple differential approaches use a receiver at a known location to compute (the sums of) several of those errors at each time of interest. Because a single receiver can't distinguish certain errors from each other, those corrections become less accurate over distance. More sophisticated approaches use a widely separated set of receivers to break the errors down into the individual components, so that the corrections can be applied over a wider area.

          • by mlyle ( 148697 )

            > All else being equal, if you use N times as many satellites to compute a position/velocity/time solution, your expected accuracy improves by a factor of sqrt(N)

            To the extent all the errors are uncorrelated. If there's something that's equally wrong with all observations, e.g. the ionosphere delay model is bad for a direction, adding more observations doesn't eliminate that error.

  • Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday December 23, 2018 @05:13PM (#57850704)

    We just pay for our own satellites with our taxes and use all the other ones for free, just like everybody else.
    More satellites, more precision.
    I miss the 'war' part of the article.

    • The "war" part comes due to national mandates, such as China demanding that any device sold in China use the Chinese sat network. Or the US actively prohibiting the inclusion of Chinese chips due to national security concerns. This may mean fragmentation in certain markets, which creates problems for vendors wishing to sell a single device to both markets.

      From a technological standpoint, there's no real problem, of course. The issue is political. Then again, if the issue *weren't* political, we wouldn't

      • Not a very big problem, though, since there are 2 systems currently in active worldwide use: GPS and Glonass.

        PLUS, there are at least two systems in development, scheduled to be fully deployed by 2020: China's Baidou and UK's Galileo.

        Current (newer) chips are already able to make use of GPS, Glonass and Galileo.

        The West really doesn't need Baidou. At all. GPS by itself was pretty good but now we have 3 systems we can use, even without it.
        • Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)

          by digitig ( 1056110 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @06:01PM (#57850888)

          Thanks for crediting us here in the UK with Galileo, but it's an EU project, not a UK one, and we appear to be shut out of it because of Brexit.

          • Well the UK put $1.4 billion pounds into the project which, apparently, isn't good enough to have any say or special access. If it were me I'd ask for the money back but apparently May isn't interested.

            • Re: Payment (Score:2, Interesting)

              by guruevi ( 827432 )

              The whole Brexit debacle is being handled by people that are bungling it purely out of spite. The UK is to the EU as the US is to NATO - pay for everything all the time but get bullied by your only reason and biggest dependent - Germany

              • Re: Payment (Score:5, Informative)

                by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @08:13PM (#57851294)

                The UK is to the EU as the US is to NATO - pay for everything all the time

                Uh, what? Yes, the UK does net pay into the EU, as one would expect from one of its richer countries. Germany however, has a net contribution over twice that of the UK (larger as a share of its economy, too). France, too, gives more. This is largely due to the fact that the UK gets two-thirds of its net contribution back as a special rebate. In fact, if you look at net contribution as a share of the national economy, the UK comes in ninth.

                • Taking care of my four-year-old daughter costs about $25,000/year.

                  I spend about 25% of my salary on stuff for her ($25,000).
                  She spends 100% of her $12 income on herself.

                  By your reasoning, I'm not supporting her, she's supporting herself.

                  • The UK has not done that poorly with their deal with the EU. It is the countries in the Eurozone that are in the shitter. The UK is not in the Eurozone.

                    In fact the UK, since it joined the EU, has finally become independent in food production, thanks in no small part to EU farming subsidies. Which is quite a feat consider that was not the case like over a century.

                    • That's interesting. On the other hand, I'd rather be a senior software engineer than a subsistence farmer. Growing your own food is good if and only if it's better than what they had been spending their time and resources on.

                      You mentioned it's largely because of subsidies - the taxpayer paying them more than the value of the goods produced. That sounds like an inefficiency, a bad thing.

                    • by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 ) on Monday December 24, 2018 @04:02AM (#57852274)
                      In fact the UK, since it joined the EU, has finally become independent in food production, thanks in no small part to EU farming subsidies. Which is quite a feat consider that was not the case like over a century.

                      This is utterly incorrect. We import 3/4 of our food (the official figure is 66%) - which corresponds to 100% in the winder and 50% in the summer. Britain has not been self sufficient in food since the industrial revolution, and prior to then depended on large scale starvation to keep the population down. Our climate and geography make it impossible to grow food for much of the year.

                      Most of the imported food (by volume) comes from the EU (on account of the Americas and Australia being a long way away).

                      The main consequence of a no-deal Brexit will be no food in England. However, Boris and Rees-Mogg will be away in their holiday homes abroad, so they don't care. The impact on the rest of the EU will be fairly minimal except in a few industries. (Eg Farming in Spain will suffer a bit).

                      Disclaimer: I spend 10 years working in food distribution in the UK.

                    • by dryeo ( 100693 )

                      It's better to be inefficient then depending on a foreign power for your food.
                      Previous government here was arguing that we could buy our food from China (how the world has changed) and that the free market would take care of food safety, those Chinese would never have unsafe food as it would be bad for business. Now, half a dozen years later, the Chinese are really pissed off at us and would possibly cut us off if we were that dependent. Our allies such as America are undependable as well.

                    • > It's better to be inefficient then depending on a foreign power for your food.

                      Certainly you wouldn't want to be dependent on a single foreign power for the majority of your food. That does NOT mean it's bad to buy bananas from India and coffee from Brazil. The United States imports more food than it exports, we are not self-reliant. We are also not at the mercy of any other nation for our food. Choose any country and we could stop importing food from them and it wouldn't hurt us much - and it would pro

                    • It also occurs to me that sometimes the UK has a draught (comparatively, for the crops they grow), severe storms, or other other issues that cause a growing season to be largely unproductive. The land area devoted to farming in the UK is small enough that a bad season can affect most of it.

                      I would much rather have diverse food sources.

                  • By your reasoning, I'm not supporting her, she's supporting herself.

                    Not in the slightest. As I mentioned, Germany is putting in over twice as much in absolute figures. So the analogy would only hold up if she was spending about $12,000 on herself. (there are other holes in the analogy, but that's the biggest one).

                  • By your reasoning, I'm not supporting her, she's supporting herself.

                    The UK got pulled out of the deepest of economic shits by joining the EU and now just wants no part of it.

                    Think of it this way. Your daughter rebelled and left home. Then when she got into financial strife after being kicked out by her boyfriend she came home for support. You put her on her feet, and then she buggered off again.

                    That bitch!

              • The whole Brexit debacle is being handled by people that are bungling it purely out of spite. The UK is to the EU as the US is to NATO - pay for everything all the time but get bullied by your only reason and biggest dependent - Germany

                Talk about deluded. The Brexit negotiations were done by professionals on the EU side and by unprepared amateurs on the UK side - no wonder they got their ass handed to them. And what you call "spite" and "being bullied" should have been the simple realisation that the EU negotiators act in the best interest of their member states - and the UK isn't one.

                • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                  Even with professionals the UK couldn't have got a good deal from the negotiations, simply because of the political situation in the UK.

                  The UK didn't know what it voted for or what it wanted. All sorts of nonsense was proposed before the referendum, none of it at all realistic except for the "Norway model" that was immediately rejected within hours of the result. So all the UK had left was cakeism - the strategy document literally said "have our cake and eat it".

                  Naturally the EU simply stuck to the basic pr

              • bullied by your only reason

                WTF is that even trying to mean, you fat cunt?

            • Heheehe I just realized i said $1.4 billion pounds. I guess that's like £1.4 billion dollars.

            • isn't good enough to have any say or special access.

              Of course it's good enough, but the problem is not what's logical, it's what the two world leaders in bureaucracy defined in legal contracts at a time where no one expected someone to leave the EU.

              It's not a case of "wants, or asks" it's a case of piling through a metric shitton of legal documents to see what at all is even possible.

              I will bet you a dollar that within a few years the UK is back in the Galileo program as part of the post Brexit trade agreements.

          • Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)

            by johannesg ( 664142 ) on Monday December 24, 2018 @03:31AM (#57852236)

            Actually the UK is being shut out because _the UK_ demanded that non-EU nations would not have access, back when Galileo was being set up. In other words, it is the UK's own bloody fault for making that demand in the first place.

            • It seems a large amount of the shitshow is our fault. If you find that one grain of truth in the owner of less abouth about bent bananas, you'll find that it was actually British rules that the EU as adopting. Apparently this is reason to leave.

              • Even if the bananas rule was suggested by British supermarkets, the EU was under no obligation to comply.

                What if they'd suggested jumping in a lake?

                • But they did comply which made it easier for our industry to trade in Europe.

                  Vegetables generally have a class 1,2,3 or unclassified rating. For better or worse people like buying nice looking vegetables. Most countries in Europe had standards for such things. This is good because if you want to buy a box of veg for general sale, you can buy from anyone (rather than a known vendor) and you know what you'll get. Likewise if you're putting them in things instead, you can buy a lower grade and not overspend.

                  Co

        • Oh, I'm not disagreeing with that assessment. I certainly don't think this is a big problem by any means (and as I said, there's literally no problem from the technology side). Calling it a "war" is rather overblown - just pointing out the potential area of contention the article was postulating on.

        • So, soon there will be 4 or 5 GPS systems operating simultaneously.
          How many Satellites will this be in total ?
      • > This may mean fragmentation in certain markets

        It may, by I don't really see any reason it should in most cases. Since a GPS receiver is basically just a radio receiver + computerized signal analysis, it makes multi-network compatibility really easy - all you need is a receiver that can receive signals across all the frequencies used (probably not an incredibly expensive upgrade), and somewhat more complicated software that can calculate your position from any of the networks (which has no inherent per

    • by novakyu ( 636495 )

      You clearly missed the point about the Chinese having ability to shoot down satellites some while ago. /sarcasm

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)

      by digitig ( 1056110 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @05:59PM (#57850876)

      I miss the 'war' part of the article.

      Back in the 1990s, the US DoD put out a statement that in the event of a conflict, GPS augmentation systems (which would now include things like the EU's EGNOS) would be considered a valid military target whether on friendly soil or not. It's part of the reason other States started to develop their own systems (except Russia, which was already well established with GLONAS by then).

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The people who have great jobs in France supporting Ada doing new "space" work for France and the EU.
      Precision and bespoke rockets from France.

      Thats decades of new work making GPS French.
    • Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @06:15PM (#57850938) Homepage Journal

      There are a few of issues.

      When it was just GPS it was easier to jam/spoof. Now we can compare data from multiple systems to detect spoofing. Other services can provide greater precision than the US wishes civilians to have, or remove other restrictions like the maximum altitude and speed limits.

      It's a good thing.

      • Other services can provide greater precision than the US wishes civilians to have, or remove other restrictions like the maximum altitude and speed limits.

        These are generally intentional artificial export restrictions necessary for US companies to make chips with GPS capabilities available outside the US.

        It's perfectly legal to get GPS receivers without the restrictions in country. It costs too much to differentiate just for US market so most everyone ends up with lowest common denominator crap in their cell phones and computers.

      • all of the systems currently are VERY easy to block

        hopefully the UK system might have some Point to Point information or mitigation
        being able to get to the raw sensor data on a receiver is crucial as well as calibration

        you can see a list of android phones and their capability here :
        https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/sensors/gnss

        Apple need to step up in this regard and offer L5 Support, SBAS and BeiDou with offsets
        Currently apple supports GPS (GALILEO which is compatible) GLONASS and augmentation fro

    • More satellites, more precision.

      Nope, doesn't quite work like that beyond a certain (rather low) number of satellites.

  • by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @05:33PM (#57850780) Journal
    Begun, the GPS wars have...
    • by Kohath ( 38547 )

      Midichlorians! No more Star Trek references or I'll say Midichlorians again. I'm serious.

    • Wasn't GPS the original system, thus making the others.... clones?
  • by satsuke ( 263225 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @05:39PM (#57850804)

    The synopsis left out a critical detail .. the fact that the US can either intentionally degrade the accuracy of the resulting signal by hundreds of meters.

    Or they can disable its functionality completely over a certain area.

    That's all on the whim of the US government. They haven't degraded the signal for decades, but they can and would in areas like a war theater or over an arbitrary "enemy" nation / region.

    Under normal circumstances I would never expect the US to do so, but with the current government being as erratic as it is, you never know, and that uncertainty is certainly enough to have other nations redoubling their efforts to build competing systems.

    • Why is this such a terrible thing? Of course they are going to degrade the civilian signal in a war zone, so the enemy can't use it to target them. Why is that in any way surprising? If you are in a war zone, the last thing you should be caring about is getting your fucking cell phone location services to work.

            I absolutely, positively, guarantee that the Russian and Chinese systems have the same capability.

      • Why is this such a terrible thing? Of course they are going to degrade the civilian signal in a war zone, so the enemy can't use it to target them. Why is that in any way surprising?

        It's not surprising, but part of the issue is how precisely they can define the area over which the degradation can be applied. If you're a friendly State near a war zone, and the US cripples your aviation and/or shipping as collateral damage because you're in the degraded area, you might not stay friendly for long.

      • by Altrag ( 195300 )

        It's a terrible thing if you aren't the American side of the conflict.. it means they'd have accurate data (the high-precision encrypted signal would still work) but the other side would be stuck using civilian grade signal.

        Countries that are potentially hostile to the US don't want to be put in that situation, and putting up their own system is a hell of a lot easier than breaking strong encryption (especially if they have to do it repeatedly, which they almost certainly would since the US military isn't s

      • If you are in a war zone, the last thing you should be caring about is getting your fucking cell phone location services to work.

        I would not dispute that. However, degrading the accuracy of the enemy's weapons is likely to have the effect of killing a lot more people on my side. It is the kind of foot-shooting we have come to expect from Trump supporters - so, yes, we do need to worry about this kind of thinking.

    • >"Under normal circumstances I would never expect the US to do so, but with the current government being as erratic as it is, you never know"

      ? The "government" is really no more "erratic" now than the year before, or the year before that, or before that, on and on. There is zero reason the GPS signals would be switched off or to "degraded mode" unless there were a credible threat.... and even then, you can bet it would be cautiously seriously considered before doing so, and then probably only under are

  • by Tyger-ZA ( 1886544 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @06:12PM (#57850922)

    Another fine example of how competition leads to duplication of effort: the world only needs one constellation of positioning satellites, but has more than that already, and with more to come (because WE can't trust THEM. Insert your own candidates for WE and THEM)

    This also demonstrates how the idea of a nation state is not compatible with space faring civilisations: we need to have more that one of everything because we can't trust the other groups on this one planet.

    How would that look when we occupy more than one planet? USA.Earth vs China.Earth vs Muskia.Mars vs Bezostan.Mars all fighting over the same space rock containing vast amounts of water ice?

    Will all the nations of one planet band together to fight/compete with the nations of other planets? Everyone.Earth vs Everyone.Mars?

    • You talk like duplication of effort is a bad thing. Having just one constellation of positioning satellites leads to a single point of failure. I dunno what the "correct" number of positioning systems is, but it's not "one" like you seem to think.

      Having different systems is also necessary for redundancy. The Japanese incorrectly thought having multiple backup generators at the Fukushima nuclear plant constituted redundancy. It does not. If your backups are identical, they're all vulnerable to a comm
      • by Tyger-ZA ( 1886544 ) on Monday December 24, 2018 @12:25AM (#57852028)

        Your entire response is a blind reaction to someone telling you that competition isn't always a good thing, built upon the strawman that redundancy does not feature in what I'm talking about, because I didn't explicitly write it down for you.

        This was an opportunity to think outside your box and you opted not to, so I'm going to break it down for you:

        The point I was trying to make is: "Competition can be counter productive for certain use cases", and this is one of those use cases.

        If your GPS goes down today, and for example you think everyone can just switch to a competing platform, go ahead and switch to BeiDou, Galileo or GLONASS right now and see how that goes. It may or may not work, depending on satellite coverage and/or the manufacturer of each device (most will likely be phones where they all support GPS but only a subset support a competing standard); therefore, your competing location services idea might not work for you as an individual, and certainly does not work for the entire group of people who depend upon GPS today. When shit happens, you'll find yourself using printed maps from a convenience store.

        Now for an alternative example that might work if the competitors could trust each other enough to collaborate, and if these collaborators could operate in a non malicious manner (the non malicious and trust aspects are the root problem):

        Instead of redundancy from many networks built around the premise that one could just switch to a totally alternative network, consider that at the hardware level a failure might look something like a satellite going down over one region, but there can be many replacements already in orbit ready to serve the exact same purpose for the same region, built by many different companies and/or governments, but built to work on the same communication protocols.

        Once that's in place the next step might be for the collaborators to design a "Next Gen" service together that may or may not be backwards compatible with their existing system. Some of the competitors might even want to start supporting some other frequency as a form of "let the market decide which technology is better" by having their new satellites support both the global standard and their own side show project.

        Consider how many satellite launches would be needed for such a system vs doing the same thing over and over for competing systems, along with all the other requirements for supporting it (such as ground stations for managing the satellites)

        Your internet is already a collaborative system that works (in the sense that you send bits on a wire without thinking "My bits can only go on the Verizon wires" ) yet you are arguing for the equivalent of this for your location services. The same applies for your road network (The Fords and the Teslas share the same road) and for your airlines (Different planes and airlines share the same airports)

        Your Fukushima example doesn't even make sense within the context of competing, or for preventing that specific failure in a reactor. Would multiple generators of the same bad design at Reactor A all failing at the same time, be solved by having Reactor B next door built by a competitor with a better design? No, Reactor A still fails and causes an environmental disaster. Your redundancy example only serves to provide backup sources of power if Reactor A goes down

    • Competing systems provide REDUNDANCY.

      If you've three alternative GPS signals and one is shut down, you still have two alternative systems.

      • Competing systems provide REDUNDANCY.

        If you've three alternative GPS signals and one is shut down, you still have two alternative systems.

        As stated above, try and toggle between BeiDou and GPS for example and see how that works out for you. If that idea is going to work during a failure it ought to work right now. It should work on Pixel 2 for example, but your phone manufacturer may not have included support for the other systems

        • by dryeo ( 100693 )

          My older cheap Moto E handles all 4 systems, or at lest sees all their satellites. Currently sees 18 satellites of which 6 (4+2) are not GPS. Once all the competing systems finish coming on line, it should work good enough.

  • by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @10:33PM (#57851736)

    Because each new GPS satellite adds accuracy to the existing set of constellations, it’s technical cooperation, not war. The only reason why any country needs to add its own GPS constellation is to assure that it can never lose the ability to navigate, whatever other countries do.

  • by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Monday December 24, 2018 @10:47AM (#57853324) Homepage
    No, the GPS wars will begin with an enemy destroys GPS satellites, leaving driver-less cars stranded.

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