March 23, 2007:
China is building a satellite
positioning system that they may reserve solely for military use, and only in
wartime at that. This would enable China to jam GPS, or destroy GPS satellites,
while using their more distant (and thus more difficult to destroy) satellite
positioning system. All this came out of what was shaping up to be a
technological disaster.
Chinas foray into military space satellites has
produced a lot of failed experiments, as have their other efforts to develop
high tech. For example, back in 2003, China completed a satellite navigation
system called BeiDou. Think of it as GPS light, and different, and potentially
not very useful. BeiDou only covers East Asia, but not all of China. But it
covers the areas along the coast, and Taiwan. The BeiDou system is less
accurate than GPS, slower, but it does allow two way traffic. This is useful
for sending short messages (up to 120 Chinese characters so, about a hundred
words). Sort of IM (Instant Messaging) class stuff. The system can only handle
a few hundred thousand users, but that would be sufficient for the number of
Chinese troops involved in any major operation. BeiDou also suffers some
reliability problems, and is apparently very vulnerable to jamming and
spoofing. Because of all that, it is believed that BeiDou is just a first
generation system. A training system, one where China learns the ins and outs
of building satellite navigation systems.
China realized that the only way to make BeiDou
into something useful was to keep the system secret. Or at least off line most
of the time. Normally, China uses GPS, and soon the Russian GLONASS and
eventually the European Galileo satellite positioning system. But having a
backup system, in BeiDou, could be a decisive military asset. The BeiDou
satellites are geostationary, and thus farther away from earth (and harder for
killer satellites to get to.) Not invulnerable, just more of a hassle to deal
with. In wartime, even hassles can be useful.