Dr. Reginald Brothers, the former Undersecretary of Science and Technology for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, published an op-ed entitled “Fixing a critical vulnerability in our critical infrastructure.” In this piece, Dr. Brothers elaborates on many of the principal findings of the Report on Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Backup and Complementary Capabilities to the Global Positioning System (GPS) that DHS issued to Congress.
Dr. Brothers endorses commercial sources of PNT to back up GPS rather than having the U.S. Government develop its own monolithic system, and he concurs with the DHS report’s position that open competition is needed to drive innovation. He goes on to state that federal incentives might be necessary to urge critical infrastructure operators to adopt alternative forms of PNT as a backup to GPS, a move that would help protect our national resilience. Dr. Brothers also agrees with the DHS report’s recommendation that alternative forms of PNT should be provided via services that take advantage of existing GPS chipsets and hardware, further suggesting that government standards and industry collaboration are needed to make this happen.