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Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

It's in the military's interest to limit the freedom and empowerment of the public as much as possible. I would take their opinions with a grain of salt.

With that said, this seems like something that can be easily solved with technology improvements.

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Excepting in this case where the military operates a critical, life-safety infrastructure used by civilians.

I'm frankly more concerned with the FCC acting as a taxpayer-funded telecoms industry cheerleader.

Dear FCC: You're regulators. You're supposed to be regulating. This is what you get for being public servants.

Meh, the military engages in far more life terminating than life saving.

Deterrence is hard to measure, but US military superiority correlates with a period of relatively low global conflict.

Maybe so, but the evidence is weak at best. Some wars (like Iraq, Korea, Vietnam) were a sham. I'd feel more comfortable knowing nobody had nuclear weapons.

You'd feel more comfortable, but is that the same as actually being safer?

You could ask someone who was living in Japan in 1945.

Or someone living in Nanking in 1938.

How many lives has GPS saved? Even if all it did was prevent one KAL007 type event a decade, that's already thousands

edit: Korean Air 007 was an airliner that was shot down by the USSR after straying into their airspace. It had a huge influence on the decision to make GPS available for civilian use.

Usually I'd agree with you, but this is a case of DoD wanting to preserve infrastructure for targeting drones vs corporations seeing $$$ in robotic deployment and automation so they can eliminate jobs. Who knows who will win.

The drones thing is hyperbole because (so far) they drop the bombs overseas, but my point is that they have an interest in preserving GPS domestically.

> It's in the military's interest to limit the freedom and empowerment of the public as much as possible.

This is an unfair view. The National Defense Strategy states:

> Without sustained and predictable investment to restore readiness and modernize our military to make it fit for our time, we will rapidly lose our military advantage, resulting in a Joint Force that has legacy systems irrelevant to the defense of our people.

And

> Another change to the strategic environment is a resilient, but weakening, post-WWII international order. In the decades after fascism’s defeat in World War II, the United States and its allies and partners constructed a free and open international order to better safeguard their liberty and people from aggression and coercion.

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