About Time, page 21
Nor is the battlefield itself easy to define. Where does war take place? It is no longer confined to the territories of the warring states, even if these can be clearly defined. The electronic technologies of mobility, navigation and telecommunications—guided missiles, drones, robots, satellites, mobile phones, the internet, social media—are taking the fight to new places. Places like high-altitude airspace, where drones can live; space itself, where satellites live; and cyberspace. Cyberspace is especially fertile territory for surrogate war because it is almost impossible to unravel who is really who.
What does this mean in practice? America’s “war on terror,” following the 9/11 attacks, is often considered a war waged in Afghanistan and Iraq, but US military activity in the decade since 2001 was also directed into places including Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Mexico. Moreover, fighting in those battlegrounds was accompanied by singular urban attacks taking the war into the heart of cities around the world as well as the more nebulous territory of cyberspace. It was, and remains, an “everywhere war,” in the words of the geographer Derek Gregory.4
More recently, this war has also included a fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS. In 2014, America began high-technology airstrikes in northern Syria. The following year it began supporting Syrian opposition militia groups with training, equipment and advice. No war was declared, and only a couple of thousand US soldiers entered Syria. The local partners took the burden of fighting. US exposure in human and financial terms was limited. But this was not just a fight with missiles and bombs. ISIS became ruthlessly adept at shaping narratives using the grim spectacle of video, often live, shared around the world on social media.
One ambition behind this shifting of the practice of war has been to take as many soldiers as possible out of the battlefield, in the hope of waging apparently bloodless wars. Another has been to reduce the political risk to national governments in waging controversial wars. Of course, people still die, and one consequence has been that conflict is now all around us, physically and digitally. All this change has gone hand in hand with globalization, in the increasing interconnectedness of global society and politics. The very idea of a “nation” is, in many ways, starting to break down, replaced by the idea of the “transnational.”
IN 1996, ONE year after GPS was declared fully operational, the US National Security Council put out a press notice in which it claimed that GPS “is now being integrated into virtually every facet of our military operations.”5 But it had proved its worth to the American military long before the constellation of satellites was completed.
The US Navy used GPS to find minefields in the shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf in 1987, and the Air Force made use of the satellite clocks in 1989 during Operation Just Cause, when America invaded Panama. In Operation Desert Storm, the Gulf War of 1990 to 1991, GPS played a major—possibly war-winning—role. In Operation Restore Hope of 1993, GPS was used to target food and supply airdrops in Somalia, and the following year US troops used GPS as they invaded Haiti in Operation Uphold Democracy. In the first few years of the system’s availability, a whole range of missiles and bombs became GPS-guided, and attention turned to smaller and smaller rockets and shells that could be fired from the decks of ships, all guided to their targets by GPS signals. The dropping of equipment and soldiers into war zones began to benefit from GPS navigation, and GPS enabled the development of a new family of weaponry: autonomous and remotely controlled robots, including drone aircraft, drone underwater minesweepers and robotic rescue vehicles to recover wounded soldiers. Friendly-fire incidents, which had killed or injured some 250,000 American soldiers in the twentieth century, were dramatically reduced with the assistance of the satellite clocks orbiting overhead.
But GPS had been a hard project to sell; America’s military commanders originally struggled to see how the system would help them. One GPS project engineer involved with developing hardened atomic clocks recalled, “There were lots of arguments over whether the system would even work and we still had the old bomber pilots in the government who were just interested in dropping bombs. I had one retired four-star general asking: ‘who needs it? we’ll just drop a bigger bomb.’ ”6 The general, who went on to oversee the Gulf War air campaign, had initially been scornful about the teams working on space-based systems: “They’re paid to dream. We’re paid to kill.”7 But once the system started producing results, it did not take long for even the most skeptical military general to realize that there would soon no longer be bombs, or killing, without the GPS clocks. Warfare was moving from indiscriminate mass killing with big bombs to targeted surgical strikes with GPS-guided weapons.
In 2004, nine years after the system was declared fully operational, the project leader, Bradford Parkinson, reflected:
If you look at Kosovo, Iraq I, and Iraq II, I think you’ll see that virtually every weapons system relied on GPS. I call it the “humanitarian bombing system.” Because with a GPS-guided bomb you can hit what you’re trying to hit and not hit what you aren’t trying to hit. You can work closely with your troops on the ground and not fear you’re going to hit them, or a mosque, or a hospital.8
He later recalled:
I had great sensitivity to the fact that everything we were doing really related to the warrior. We were trying to put together a system that would enhance and revolutionize warfare. The model that we had—“Drop five bombs in the same hole”—meant, don’t forget the end product of what we were trying to do here.9
The best GPS receivers today can calculate position to within ten millimeters—the length of your little fingernail.
But this is not merely a story of GPS-guided missiles. GPS is everywhere and that means war is everywhere. Globalization has created a web of connections between states, institutions, private corporations and individuals. Any state that fights another state risks harming itself and its interests. Warfare has followed globalization in becoming a web of connections and acts. GPS is global because there is no such concept any more as a singular American military force. Warring states are entangled, as are national and commercial interests.
When Ronald Reagan declared publicly that GPS would be made available to civilian aircraft, following the 1983 shooting down by the Soviet military of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, he was making political capital out of a decision that had been made in the early 1970s as GPS was being designed. It was always designed for use beyond the US military and it has now become a service for the globe. That is the problem.
AS OF 2020, seventy-four GPS satellites have been launched, each carrying three or four atomic clocks on board. Those GPS clocks, and those of the rival systems of Russia, China and Europe, are ticking for all of us. Now, everything from transport networks, power lines, telecommunications and surveying, to agriculture, banking, meteorology and the emergency services rely on the time, position and navigation information that satellite clocks provide. Every aircraft in the skies is navigating, right now, using clocks in space. Every ship on the oceans is making its way using satnav. That Amazon delivery you’re waiting for? GPS tracks it all the way. The lights are on because of the space clocks. The computer on which I am typing this, in my flat in Greenwich a few hundred yards from the prime meridian of the world, is powered because GPS synchronizes the national electricity grid, and it connects to the web because GPS signals keep everything in step. World banking is coordinated by satellite clocks, as is TV and radio broadcasting.
Right now, experts say that 80 percent of the world’s adult population has access to a smartphone using GPS or one of the other global systems. By 2022, it is estimated, there will be over seven billion GPS receivers in use around the world. That is the same number as there are humans on Earth. Almost all technological systems that rely on time have their own clocks corrected by the time signals beaming down from space. In the UK, the BBC’s six-pips time signal, first set up in 1924, has been set using GPS time for the last fifteen years. The telephone speaking clock works out its time from GPS signals. Most cell-phone clocks, most laptop clocks and the clocks on most railway departure boards get their time ultimately from the clocks orbiting Earth on satellites. The hedge funders and high-frequency traders making money on the financial markets are relying on GPS, even those who pay for the higher performance that the National Physical Laboratory provides down its dedicated fiber link. Somewhere in their network GPS will be keeping time. Even NPL itself uses navigation satellites to compare its clocks with those in other countries.
GPS or other satnav receivers are embedded in virtually every mobile phone, aircraft, ship, automobile, telecommunications mast, power substation, TV station, data center and water pumping station. If we want faster data on our computer networks and mobile phones, we need more precise time synchronization. All digital systems, and all infrastructure controlled by computers, rely on clocks to coordinate all the data that flows over their networks. And, right now, the clocks they all use to set themselves to time are satellite clocks. You name it, there will be a satnav receiver locked on to the signals beaming down from those miniature atomic clocks in space. These are the networks and systems that keep us alive, with food on our plates and roofs over our heads. Without them, it is not hyperbole to say that the modern world would grind to a halt.
With all this talk of time signals beamed down from space, you might be thinking about the times your TV signal gets a bit noisy during stormy weather, or when your Wi-Fi signal at home sometimes drops out when you move too far away from the router or a couple too many walls get between it and your device. Maybe you drive for a living and know that the van radio drops out when you go into a tunnel. The point is that wireless signals are vulnerable and can easily be blocked. What would happen if the low-powered satellite time signals, coming all the way from space, dropped out or got blocked? Well, you would be right to be concerned, because that is what makes national governments, commercial leaders and military commanders lose sleep, too.
Satellite navigation signals are vulnerable in four main ways. The first is that they can be affected by errors in the complex system of satellite clocks. In 2016, an error of just fourteen millionths of a second in the GPS time signals, caused by a mistake made during routine maintenance, led to four days of disruption at a major UK telecommunications operator, as well as affecting critical infrastructure in Spain and America. Fourteen millionths of a second—fourteen microseconds—is a lifetime.
The second vulnerability is loss of the signal owing to natural forces. If the Sun throws out too many solar flares or you’re in a city with tall buildings, GPS can be lost. It is alarming how often this happens.
But it is the third and fourth vulnerabilities of GPS and its rival systems that bring civilian use of the system firmly back into the scope of war. The third is deliberate jamming, using simple electronic equipment readily available to criminals or enemy forces. In 2009, tests were carried out on a British ship using a tiny GPS jammer that had less than one-thousandth of the power of a cell phone, to see what would happen to the ship’s systems. A government report later claimed that the jamming device:
caused the electronic chart displays to show false positions. As a result, the autopilot steered the ship quietly off course. The automatic identification system reported those incorrect positions to other ships manoeuvring nearby and to the vessel traffic service ashore. The jammer also caused the satellite communications system to fail. The ship lost its distress safety system, there to raise alarms and guide rescuers. The helicopter deck stabilisation failed. Even the ship’s clocks went wrong. And the usually reliable fallbacks, radar and gyrocompass, both gave warnings, as they too use GPS inputs.10
In 2013, at least 250 commercial airline flights near South Korea’s Incheon International Airport had to switch to backup navigation systems because the GPS service they relied on was jammed by signals believed to have come from nearby North Korea. The signals were so powerful that they disrupted the cell-phone network in Seoul, thirty or so miles away, which relied on GPS clocks to work. The previous year, a New Jersey truck driver inadvertently jammed the GPS signals at Newark International Airport with a device he had installed in his Ford pickup to prevent his employers from tracking his location. A jamming detector installed on the roof of a City of London building that houses financial trading and telecommunications equipment, which requires highly precise time signals, picked up an average of five jamming incidents every day for four years, mostly caused by vehicles nearby fitted with jammers.
But the most insidious problem of all is a practice known as “spoofing.” When your enemy spoofs a GPS signal, you do not know it has been affected, but your receiver thinks it is somewhere it is not. Imagine if that receiver is on a warship, or guiding a missile, or dropping your soldiers into a war zone. In the 1997 James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies, the evil media baron Elliot Carver spoofs a GPS signal that causes the British warship HMS Devonshire to stray into Chinese waters, almost leading to a Third World War. “Are we absolutely sure of our position?” demands the ship’s captain. “Yes, sir. An exact satellite fix,” confirms the navigating officer. Yet the ship was miles off.
It was a remarkably prescient fictional plot, coming fully two decades before the first real major documented GPS spoofing attack. In 2017, twenty merchant ships sailing near the Russian port of Novorossiysk, on the Black Sea, reported their GPS receivers were placing them inland, at the nearby Gelendzhik Airport. The previous year, cell-phone apps in use near the Kremlin building, in the Russian capital of Moscow, had been showing the phones’ position incorrectly as Vnukovo Airport, a little under twenty miles away. Commentators described the spoofing attacks as a form of electronic warfare.
The risks involved in all this are huge. Experts working with the latest electric supply networks, known as smart grids, rely on measuring equipment that is synchronized to within billionths of a second. In one reported case, a test device locked on to a single satellite signal, rather than the several signals it needed to get an accurate fix, and the system thought there had been a major electrical fault, so it shut down two 500 kV power lines. That time it was an accident, but the risk of malicious activity is great.
Our modern world is so reliant on signals from satellite clocks that the scope for attack by jamming or spoofing them is vast. One US politician recently claimed that “GPS is the single point of failure for the entire modern economy.” Another expert was more direct: if there was a widespread outage of GPS, “People will die.”11
12
Peace
Plutonium Timekeeper, Osaka, 6970
It is the seventieth century, in a city once known as Osaka, in a land that the history books say was called Japan and, after everything that has happened since it was buried deep underground, somehow the clock is still here, and still ticking. After all the war and bloodshed in the world; after so many civilizations across continents and millennia have risen and fallen, so many global empires been built and then torn apart, so much knowledge gained and lost, so much of the Earth scarred by humanity’s insatiable greed for resources, this clock has survived: undisturbed, unbroken, alive. Here it has sat, quietly marking time, for 5,000 years, a silent witness to the tumultuous changes that have raged across the world above. But its time is about to run out: the hand on its circular metal dial is about to reach the fiftieth marker on the scale, where each division has recorded the passing of another century.
The clock in question is a plutonium timekeeper, made by the Japanese electronics firms of Matsushita and Seiko, housed in a polished metal cylinder. A single gram of radioactive plutonium in the form of an oxide, wrapped in gold foil, has been steadily radiating helium nuclei into the clock’s gas chamber, which has been expanding like an accordion’s bellows as a result. As the bellows have expanded, they have been pulling the clock’s single hand around the dial, slowly but surely.
Plutonium timekeeper buried at Osaka, 1970
Nobody has seen the clock since it was sealed inside a three-foot-wide, 130-gallon, spherical, stainless-steel capsule, protected by layers of steel, sand, clay and reinforced concrete, and then lowered into a hole forty-six feet deep beneath a public park in Osaka. It is fifty centuries since the timekeeper was set running after the international exhibition held in the city in 1970. But that is in the mists of time; the civilization that mounted the exhibition has long since passed into history. The idea of humans living so long ago seems unimaginable, but now there is a chance to experience something of their existence; to hold things that they held; to examine artifacts they cared about. For today, in the year 6970, the moment has finally arrived for the plutonium clock and its capsule to be unearthed, brought back to the surface, and opened.
What was sealed in Osaka on December 22, 1970, and buried on January 20, 1971, all that time ago, is a time capsule. Besides the plutonium clock, it contains over 2,000 further objects—art, literature, music, preserved life-forms and artifacts—all carefully sourced and assembled in the late 1960s and buried as a message of progress and harmony for humanity in the future. There are believed to be biological specimens, artworks, tape recordings, films, books and items from everyday life held within its compartments. A 1970 version of the ancient Egyptian Rosetta Stone from 196 BCE, this one etched on a steel plate in Japanese, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, carries the message “We who believe in the prosperity of mankind 5,000 years hence bequeath to posterity this capsule as a record of the 20th century.”1 Japanese schoolchildren made paintings for the people of the future—the people of today. A Japanese flag completes the inventory.
