UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told

Presumably when World War 3 kicks off the very first thing each adversary will strike are their opponents satellites? These are like flying lightbulbs that shine down usefulness from above, so step one is to cut the lights.

Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?

Perhaps the answer is that every tank has a 10lb inertial navigation gyro or some other thingy in it as a backup, and the platoon around it uses the tank as a moving trig point? In that case I can see it being infeasible to deploy that for civilians.

Perhaps-squared it’s just economics — GPS is cool and cheap now, so why burn profit margin on developing an alternative?

It’s probably trying to disrupt the Russian GPS jamming satellites.

Veritasium did a video on it recently https://youtu.be/tz23G_UXCGA

So maybe that's why the UK talks about Israel's "right to defend itself" as a justification for flattening Gaza - they also want to "defend themselves" by attacking other states.

In terms of international game theory, this is entirely expected. No action would be the anomaly.

It should be standard practice to use radio jammers and dazzling lasers against every non-allied foreign satellite that passes over our territory, or any of our military bases or warships. Why give them a free look?

I thought after 60,000 feet MSL a country's airspace ends.

So, who's the UK actually attacking?

one step closer to star wars

Given the “Hybrid” attacks in Europe originating with Russia, the Houthi’s and Iran taking shots at shipping and the likelihood that certain countries are feeding Iran some of the intel… this is pretty understandable.

Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable.

It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.

this should end well

or a whole new technology invented other than radio waves for data transmission

are any satellites using laser downlink yet or is line-of-sight too temperamental with weather and planes?

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The British seem reduced to their historic state of piracy to restore the empire:

“disrupting, degrading and denying hostile threats in space”

Not even pretending to be building and defending anything positive in space.

> Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said daily lives depend on satellites that power everyday technologies like mobile phones and banking apps, adding the loss of GPS would cost the UK economy £1.4bn a day.

Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"