and there are military applications as navigating near the sea floor is greatly facilitated by having accurate maps. I am a bit surprised this isn't an NGA effort.
Seafloor features will likely last millennia.
Iirc the Chinese are a partner in Galileo (the European program).
This is a good thing, hardware will rapidly appear that supports 2 or more of them meaning that either all the partners would simultaneously have to agree to disable theirs or (more unlikely) someone was shooting down the satellites which since that would realistically only happen during a global conflict means I'd have bigger things to worry about at the time.
Has been out for years. E.g. iPhone 4S supported GPS and GLONASS.
Now we have a system where the chinese stopped being a partner, and the US forced us to add a backdoor and reduce the quality. I’m not sure I can see anything good in this.
Jamming is a local action, the US will be able to jzm Gallileo like we are able to jam GPS - again locally.
Frequencies can be switched, if we only relied on the fact that they are the same then the US could switch theirs (and have equipment which is compatible if course) and there goes our security.
I work in security and have worked for 12 years for a huge provider of telecom systems and hinestly do not see any real advantages to match the frequencies.
Also, if we had the same frequency, WE could not jam GPS if we wanted to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_analysis_for_the_Global_...
Honestly, I struggle to find any reasoning on why GPS is shared with the world beyond "Korean Air Lines 007 crashed, so Pres. Reagan made GPS free to (save the world|gain political capital). Later we removed the civilian precision restriction because that's cheaper than maintaining it", which I find a bit weak. Maybe somebody can enlighten me
It slowed the need for other countries to put their own up.
The satellites were not a secret
Their encryption scheme was probably already cracked, so might as well open it anyways.
The idea of government is that it lets us do things for the collective good what we would not do for ourselves individually. The US government, for all its faults, does sometimes follow that idea. It's not much different from maintaining the highway system. True, it covers the world, not just the US, but the nature of satellite navigation means that it wouldn't be any cheaper or easier to restrict the system to only work in the US, so why bother?
This is also why the US said they’d shoot down the EU system unless the EU would construct it in a way that the US could easily jam it. Now it has that backdoor in it. We shouldn’t have let them extort us like that.
Zero, that the militaries care about. Subs and other military craft have been mapping, they won't share.
How many secret villain lairs in the deep?