"John Schilling" wrote in message
...
(Henry Spencer) writes:

In article ,
Dr. O dr.o@xxxxx wrote:

...But with these
agreements I'm not really sure if Galileo will operate (with the same
precision) in the event of a military conflict somewhere.

It is more likely to do so than GPS, because its decision-making process
is not dominated by one nation's soldiers. There may be localized
jamming
of it in the combat zone, but there's rather less likely to be a global
shutdown or degradation of accuracy and/or precision, simply because it's
run by a large consortium that will be slow to make such decisions except
in an obvious dire emergency. This is, on the whole, a good thing.


If anyone, anywhere, builds a batch of Galileo-guided cruise missiles
which
end up killing American soldiers while a large consortium of Europeans are
still arguing about whether to pull the plug, the consequences would be
almost unimaginably bad.

Whether they would be better or worse than having the United States Air
Force
decide to implement a non-consensual shutdown of Galileo is debatable, but
I'd really prefer there be a third option put in place before the hardware
is put in place.

Exactly my thoughts. The potential political outfall of Galileo being used
by adversaries of the U.S. in an armed conflict will only result in the
Euros themselves pulling the plug on Galileo instead of someone else (the
U.S.) doing it for them. Now what use is it to spend billions of dollars
just to be able to say 'I want to pull the plug, I don't want anyone else to
do it for me'? That seems ludicrous to me. I've been argueing this for a
long time but, as always, no one is listening to me.

In short, it means the Galileo system cannot be relied upon for autonomous
navigation (in airplanes or cars) and is therefore all but useless.