Opposition to Obama's call to cancel navigational system growing

Congress and the geospatial industry are voicing opposition to President Obama's proposal to kill a decades-old navigational system that could serve as a backup to the popular and prevalent GPS.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, planned to question Homeland Security Department Secretary Janet Napolitano about the administration's plan to cancel the enhanced Long Range Aid to Navigation system (eLoran) at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.

"At a time when the future reliability of the GPS network is being questioned, it seems odd that [DHS] is obstructing, rather than leading, the effort to fund and deploy this critical [eLoran] redundant system," Collins planned to say in a statement at the hearing.

The Coast Guard operates 24 Loran stations nationwide, known as Loran C, to help operators of ships and planes determine their location. Nineteen stations have been upgraded to eLoran, which broadcasts a data channel to improve accuracy, signal availability and integrity of geospatial information. The system boosts position accuracy to between 8 feet and 65 feet, with availability measured at 99.9 percent and integrity at 99.99 percent, according to the International Loran Association.

A report completed in January by an independent assessment team chaired by Bradford Parkinson, considered the father of GPS, and not publicly released, concluded that eLoran was the only cost-effective back up to satellite-based GPS and it would deter threats to U.S. national and economic security by jamming signals.

The report, prepared for the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded research firm, and obtained by Nextgov, said top officials from the Defense Department, DHS and the Office of Management and Budget concluded after briefings in 2006 and 2007 that eLoran was "the only alternative [to GPS] meeting the technical requirements at a reasonable cost."

Collins, who read the report, planned to ask Napolitano to "explain the administration's insistence on eliminating a program so inextricably linked with ensuring the future safety of mariners, aviators and our nation's critical infrastructure," said Collins' press aide, Kevin Kelley.

The team that prepared the report "unanimously recommends the U.S. government complete the eLoran upgrade and commit to eLoran as the national backup for 20 years." (Author's emphases.)

Despite the report's stern recommendation, the Obama administration did not fund the Loran system in its proposed fiscal 2010 budget, which will serve as the basis for the upgraded eLoran system.

Jeffrey Shane, a partner in the Washington office of Hogan & Hartson law firm who commissioned the eLoran report while serving as the Transportation Department's under secretary for policy during the Bush administration, said he hoped the Obama administration will see the value of eLoran as the most cost effective back up to GPS.

The endorsement of eLoran by a team headed by Parkinson, a professor emeritus at Stanford University who spearheaded development of GPS in 1973 while serving in the Air Force, should be influential because Parkinson was skeptical that eLoran could serve as a backup to GPS.

When the team started work on the report, Parkinson "told me it would come out negative," for continuing eLoran, Shane said.

He said the fiscal 2010 budget did not zero out funding for eLoran, but only for Loran C, which could mean the Obama administration will endorse eLoran as the GPS backup, once it completes an assessment of alternatives. Richard Langley, a GPS specialist at the University of New Brunswick, agreed with Shane and said canceling the Loran C does not rule out developing eLoran.

If Loran C is canceled and the administration intends opts for eLoran, then it will "cost 10 times more" to develop eLoran if those stations are shut down, said Robert Lilley, secretary of the International Loran Association.

He said the White House made the decision to kill Loran C without all the facts in hand, including the Institute for Defense Analyses' report. Once the administration considers the report, it will most likely endorse eLoran as a GPS backup system.

In his budget, Obama said the government would save $190 million during five years if it shut down Loran C. But that calculation did not include the cost of decommissioning the system, which was highlighted in the report, said Zachariah Conover, president of CrossRate Technology in Windham, Maine, which manufactures a combined eLoran-GPS receiver.

The cost to shut down Loran C would cost $146 million, about the same that it would cost to upgrade Loran C stations to eLoran, making the modernization program a wash, according to the report.

Conover said it was "unconscionable" that the administration would effectively cancel eLoran without first releasing the report, which highlights the susceptibility of the high-frequency, low-power GPS signals to jamming and consequent threats.

In early 2007, the Navy conducted a GPS jamming test in San Diego. During the three-hour test the Coast Guard's automated identification system that monitored marine traffic in the harbor was inadvertently jammed and shut down, according to the report.

Cell phone carriers use GPS timing signals to control their networks, and the test jammed two cellular base stations and the operation of 150 others was degraded. A first-responder pager network was knocked out by the test, too, the report said.

But, if eLoran, which uses low-frequency, high-power signals had been in operation, "all of the adversely impacted users . . . would have operated seamlessly through this incident," the report noted.