Training for this was discontinued, but brought back in 2016:
* https://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-bac...
Now if only the US (and others) would get their act together and build out a backup system to GNSS. China, for example, has built out an eLoran system:
* https://rntfnd.org/2024/10/03/china-completes-national-elora...
An old USAF video explaining how the theory works (it assumes a geocentric worldview: the Earth is the centre of the universe (but it's not flat :)):
The main principle of celestial navigation is pretty easy to visualize.
Pick a celestial body that's in your sky right now, like the Sun. At any given time, the Sun is directly over a single point on the globe (the GP, or Geographic Position). So if you measure the Sun as being directly over your head, you know where you are exactly on the globe, after consulting your clock and almanac.
But, if you measure the Sun at a non-overhead angle, then you and everyone else with that same measurement must be on a circle whose centre is the Sun's GP. (Visualize the circle as the edge of a flashlight beam being pointed directly downward at the GP.) The rest of celestial navigation is refinements to figure out where you are on that circle.
You can also do it at night using star charts (or as you call it, an "almanac"). That's how most of the digital celestial navigation solutions work, they use the positions of bright stars to determine a fix based on observatory data.
You can try it yourself here:
Might I differ on "easy", from second hand experience of watching my father go through his advanced yachtsmanship RYA Astro Navigation exams and cursing at trig functions? In practice its a lot of paper and compasses.
The USA who just threatened to invade a few NATO allies? People working with USA for the next few years seems pretty foolhardy. Surely everyone else in NATO needs to be getting together and building it defense system that exclude USA.
For (e.g.) eLoran, each chain is independent of every other chain. So the network chain(s) run in the EU are not dependent on the chains in US/CA, are not dependent on the chains in Russia, or the Middle East:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NGA-Atlantic_Loran.png
The chains run by Japan are not dependent on the chains run by South Korea, would not be dependent on chains run by AU or NZ:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NGA-Pacific_Loran.png
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C#Limitations
India, China, and Pakistan could all run their own infrastructure:
* https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Loranstationscrkl.jp...
The only agreement being the technical standards (frequencies) and timing offset for near-by chains.
(And I'm Canadian.)
It wasn't "the USA", it was our incoming president, who everyone knows speaks for no one but himself.
The president speaks for the united states. Brushing his comments off like that is absurd. You act like he got the job in a raffle, the majority of the voting population voted for him, explicitly asking him to speak for them.
The USA technical infrastructure can be shutdown entirely any time EU wants. Hint: ASML Machines and Remote Disable...
I'm pretty sure the threatened invasions are just distractions to change the conversation from the H1B debacle.
If for no other reason than Canada is a country a lot of Americans actually care about (many have relatives there), and without a formal declaration of war congress could step in at any time and declare the whole thing illegal, enabling the military to refuse orders relevant to the invasion.
But as an American who has been a little sick of Europe mooching off of our military overwatch (see various European nations running out of bombs during the Libya campaign), I'm all for an independent European military command with independent capacity. The Cold War is over, the Russian tank hordes that once threatened to roll across Western Europe haven't managed to roll halfway across Ukraine with even reluctant, intermittent, indirect western support. We don't need to be under some monolithic military command anymore, Europe does not (or at least should not) need US strategic overwatch to fend off Russia.
As for the "European militarization has historically led to world wars" argument, the UK, France, and Russia all have nukes. Germany could probably build a few in a long weekend if sufficiently motivated. We aren't going to see a WWI or WWII rematch unless the AI "revolution" actually turns out to be more than smoke and mirrors for dumb money and enables perfect missile defense or something.
So yeah, please get an ex-US NATO off the ground so we can focus on China.
Even if it's just a distraction, countries usually distract from their internal problems by targeting un-allied countries as the source of their problems. For example, when China has some internal issue, they start complaining about Japan or Taiwan. When Iran has problems, they threaten the US.
When countries start threatening those who aren't their active enemies, it's a first step into normalization of the rhetoric and building up support for inhuman actions. Iraq wasn't even in anyone's mind until suddenly America needed to invade and "liberate" it just for some president's personal ego, and the overwhelming majority became convinced that Iraq was involved in 9/11 (it wasn't) and steamrolling the entire country was doing the world a public service (it wasn't)[1]. Nobody was even thinking about Greenland or Denmark in the US until someone with a big ego started talking about liberating it. Now the same political faction that had 89% support for the Iraq War is starting up the same thing.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-...
I think it’s a bit unfair to say Iraq wasn’t in anyone’s mind. Clinton spent the 90s bombing Iraq after coalition forces invaded to stop the Kuwait invasion in 1991. And saddam hussein was regularly declaring America as moral enemy of Iraq. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 but I feel like he was regularly discussed throughout the 90s and so was easy to inject back into the conversation in 2003. This is really different than randomly saying that Canada is Americas hat or Greenland should be liberated.
All that being said, Americans grew up, long before Donald trump entered the political discourse, learning that they live in the greatest country on earth and that everyone wants to move there and become American. This is a core component of Donald trump’s political message of make America great again. So why wouldn’t the average American be accepting the idea that other places want to join in on the fun? Democrat or Republican most seem to buy in to American exceptionalism.
Having personally lived through the 90's and 00's, I can confirm that:
* Sadam Houssein (and Kadhafi, and Khomeini) regularly moaned about the US
* everybody was indeed aware of them
* and everyone ignored them
* for most people outside the US, the second gulf war was perceived a transparent lie
One look at the ridiculous "coalition of the willing" that GWB managed to drum up makes that clear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Iraq...
>But as an American who has been a little sick of Europe mooching off of our military overwatch
Thousands of european soldiers have died because of US war on terror the last decades, not the other way around.
> But as an American who has been a little sick of Europe mooching off of our military overwatch
As a European (now living in the US) I think this perspective might be an oversimplification. Access to EU soil has been incredibly important for US military strategy over the last 50 years. Having bases in Germany, Spain and Italy is instrumental in US campaigns in Middle East or Asia. Not to mention the amount of European lives lost in conflicts initiates or led by US interests.
Maintaining NATO also ensures American hegemony over Europe and potentially the most disruptive global competitor. It may be expensive, but we know that left to their own devices the Europeans are wont to start a war amongst themselves, over some trivial border dispute, and then involve the rest of the world in it. So it's cheaper in American lives and material this way.
That may be the predominant American belief, but I would point out that about over half of Europe — by population, making the zone larger than the USA — now has borders slightly more porous than the ones between American states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_S...
My impression is the US has pretty consistently tried to dissuade the EU from developing any kind of capable military organisation and to instead do it as part of NATO.
Although I have to assume that with Trump as president for a second time a lot of people in europe are going to have to worry that the US can't be relied on in the way it could in the past so I think you might get your wish.
Where that leaves NATO afterwards, I don't know.
> My impression is the US has pretty consistently tried to dissuade the EU from developing any kind of capable military organization
It’s been a policy of the US government to discourage strong independent European militaries since about 1945. Same policy towards Japan, too.
> So yeah, please get an ex-US NATO off the ground so we can focus on China.
If the US does not care about its European allies, it no longer has the economic power to "focus on China". From an European perspective, China is far away and not particularly threatening. If there are no specific reasons to support the US, it's better to not take sides and trade with both sides.
BRICS is already a serious challenge to the Western hegemony. If the US thinks that "the West" has no longer a reason to exist, it will be seriously outnumbered by those who don't share its ambitions.
> BRICS is already a serious challenge to the Western hegemony.
A semi-joke-y observation:
> Pretty straightforward really. You combine Brazil's history of monetary stability, with Russia's respect for property rights, India's domestic tranquility, China's financial transparency, and South Africa's investment opportunities - and hey presto, you've got a new global money.
* https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1665053372402081792
If the 'BRICS currency' is made up of only a small group, then it's not going to be useful, especially the restrictive countries that are in the name.
But if you expand it, sure it could become more useful, but then you've got competing interests and desires and a coördination problem on policy and such.
Further: I've yet to see an explanation of how this thing will actually work. Does each country given up their own currency, Euro-style? Is there a 'theoretical currency' that everyone pegs their own to? What are the consequences for de-pegging (if any)? Are bonds issued in BRICS or the country's own currency?
BRICS is a total joke. Some of the member countries have taken limited unilateral actions to challenge Western hegemony but BRICS as a group has never taken any meaningful coordinated action and never will. India won't go along with anything that benefits China. South Africa is a failed state. Brazil has no global ambitions. And the Russian Empire is bleeding to death in Ukraine; even if they eventually "win" their ability to challenge us has disintegrated.
BRICS is not supposed to be a coordinated power. It's a tool for creating the multipolar world order Putin has been dreaming of for decades. A world where the US is just one power among many and the dollar just one currency among many.
And the best way to achieve that is creating a wedge between the US and its allies.
> It's a tool for creating the multipolar world order Putin has been dreaming of for decades
India and China just barely wrapped up hostilities, and maintain geopolitical contest with each other. India is increasing defence ties with America. Egypt and the UAE host American armed forces.
BRICS is a propaganda tool for leaders who want to blame their failures on a foreign boogeyman. About the best thing for American (and dollar) hegemony would be BRICS continuing to exist. (Versus e.g. China internationalising the renmimbi.)
> And the Russian Empire is bleeding to death in Ukraine; even if they eventually "win" their ability to challenge us has disintegrated.
LOL. USSR had plan how to win war with NATO called «icebreaker» («ледокол»): influence elections or bribe politics in enemy countries to put puppets into powerful seats, then use puppets to start internal conflicts between members of NATO, then support a single side or both sides in the proxy war.
Sowing dissent is relatively easy, so I hope we defend against it.
However, on a military level, Russia is being held off by the Ukrainian people (and 37% of the Ukrainian economy) supported by foreign donations equivalent to the current military spending of any one of the United Kingdom (2.33% of the UK's GDP), Germany (2.12% of German GDP), or France (2.06% of French GDP).
If Poland was both threatened and totally isolated from allies, they could triple their military spend to equal the current Ukrainian forces plus all donations, and do so with only half the percentage of their GDP as compared to Ukraine.
Everyone would rather that this war goes away and they can return to spending money on things that are directly valuable, rather than the necessary but un-productive task of defending all the things we value.
But from a purely military perspective, ignoring how they may sow dissent, my only worry about Russia is that the nukes might not have had all their critical elements sold off in separate black market deals since the end of the cold war.
How you will defend NATO against Merkel, Orban, Fico, Trump? How you defended NATO against Covid-19?
Russia currently is marching forward in Eastern Ukraine, while Ukrainian partners are recommend to use Ukrainian children instead of promised shells.
Poland is ready to 2022 style of war, but not ready to 2023, 2024, or 2025 style of war.
With each passing year, nukes are easier to manufacture. 1GHz switches are not a n advanced tech anymore. WiFi is working on 6GHz. Nuclear isotopes can be separated at home. Gas turbines are outdated. Nuclear reactions inside nuke can be modeled on gaming notebook. No need for testing. More and more nuclear reactors lowers barrier to tech and radioactive elements. Small 2 kWt reactor with size of washing machine can be built to breed highly radioactive elements.
At some point, everybody will be able to produce nukes or dirty bombs using off the shelf items. We are running out of time anyway. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are forgotten.
> How you will defend NATO against Merkel, Orban, Fico, Trump? How you defended NATO against Covid-19?
I'm saying it isn't necessary to do so, if the enemy is the Russian armed forces.
If the enemy is the Russian propaganda machine, that may be harder, but the armed forces are a joke and it's embarrassing that the rest of the world isn't supporting the Ukrainian military to the level required to make the Russian people themselves remove Putin for wasting Russia's own youth.
(Also: Merkel isn't in, nor is she running for, office).
> With each passing year, nukes are easier to manufacture.
They were never hard, by modern industrial standards. The Russian industrial base isn't up to "modern", they have a lot of corruption, and MAD lends itself to visible threats more than real threats, which means there's a decent chance of any given weapon being a Potemkin.
I've heard serious analysts suggest that Ukraine is merely a few months away from their own independent nuclear capability. But also this is a separate question to delivery systems — and the Russian equipment in general looks shoddy and cheap, as if corruption has hollowed it out.
(My guess is that most Russian nukes have lost fusion boost, most of the *nuclear-capable* missiles can't fly, and most of those which can fly can be shot down by very old anti-missile systems; but this all adds up to about a 90% chance they can't start something if they want to, which isn't odds I'd willingly gamble when the stakes are so high).
> 1GHz switches are not a n advanced tech anymore. WiFi is working on 6GHz.
> Gas turbines are outdated.
None of those are even vaguely relevant.
> Nuclear isotopes can be separated at home.
> More and more nuclear reactors lowers barrier to tech and radioactive elements. Small 2 kWt reactor with size of washing machine can be built to breed highly radioactive elements.
Only in the same technical sense that I can make a nuclear fusion reactor at home. (I really should put together that shopping list…)
The requisite isn't simply "doing it", but the scale and the speed of doing so.
> Nuclear reactions inside nuke can be modeled on gaming notebook. No need for testing.
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
This is also important for confirming that, for example, the tritium boost was actually refreshed with hydrogen-3 rather than the much cheaper but chemically identical hydrogen-1, by someone who pocketed the difference and went on to take early retirement in a small island in the Caribbean.
> At some point, everybody will be able to produce nukes or dirty bombs using off the shelf items.
For dirty bombs, that was true years ago. I think we've actually mostly stopped using americium-241 in smoke detectors? We've definitely stopped using radium for glow-in-the-dark paint. I think thorium still gets sold as welding supplies, but no longer for gas mantles.
But a dirty bomb[0] is to a nuclear bomb[1] as a legal and eye-safe laser pointer[2] is to the NIF lasers… if you stacked up about half a million copies of the National Ignition Facility.
There's thermodynamic limits to nuclear isotope enrichment, and while (I assume) all the relevant info is classified, it's reasonable to guess that it would take burning in the order of a million USD worth of energy to make a minimum viable nuclear explosive.
(Ironic risk factor from PV: much cheaper electricity)
[0] continuous radiohazard that can be hundreds of milliwatts/gram, where a gram of material costs ~ $1500
[1] pulse measured in terajoules
[2] ~1mW
[3] NIF laser pulses are about ~2 megajoules light energy per pulse, so half a million copies would get you 1 terajoule, compared to Fat Man's 88 TJ; ~88 laser pointers gets you the same CW equivalent power of ~1000 USD of americium-241.
To be a health hazard, you'd have to eat or inhale a sample. Which has been made to happen, but it looks like poisoning, not like a bombing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko
This is why, despite all the fear of dirty bombs during the War On Terror, we didn't see any.
This European perspective is one of the reasons that many developing countries outside of Europe didn't condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine. As India's External Affairs Minister had remarked, "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems."
> and without a formal declaration of war congress could step in at any time and declare the whole thing illegal, enabling the military to refuse orders relevant to the invasion.
I’m pretty sure that war requires congressional approval BEFORE an invasion full stop. Congress in recent history has been fairly cavalier about letting the executive launch military action and looking the other way, but it’s not actually supposed to work this way.
> The Cold War is over, the Russian tank hordes that once threatened to roll across Western Europe haven't managed to roll halfway across Ukraine with even reluctant, intermittent, indirect western support
This is a gross mischaracterization of the situation that significantly underplays what actually happened I think. Without what Biden did right before the war saying “it’s going to happen” and mustering broad domestic and international support as well as using sanctions to freeze Russian assets and use them to pay Ukraine for reparations, Ukraine wouldn’t exist today.
We’re talking about $70B of military HW and $23B in terms of economic and humanitarian aid and another ~87B for the Ukrainian government to keep the lights on. That’s from the US alone. The international community has also contributed another $100B.
> We aren't going to see a WWI or WWII rematch unless the AI "revolution" actually turns out to be more than smoke and mirrors for dumb money and enables perfect missile defense or something.
It’s a slower burn. Putin isn’t going to try to take everything at once. It’s the Hitler annexation strategy over a longer time period. A little Georgia here, a little Crimea there, now it’s the entirety of Ukraine. Partly because his country is weaker but also because war is more expensive to prosecute than 100 years ago due to technology and the resistance is much better prepared for such an attempt.
Where do you think Eastern and Western European civilians will flee if any of those countries is drawn into conflict with Russia? Conflict forces desperate immigration which then creates anti-immigration counter responses in domestic populations here in the US.
China is important but what are we going to do there? Do you think we’re going to successfully defend an invasion of Taiwan when it happens? Cause that’s going to be their first military action. And if people are complaining about supporting Ukraine, how do you think they’ll fair regarding Chinese nationalists?
Finally, I’m pretty sure the troops and equipment we need there are also fairly different. If China is delivering huge numbers of land troops to Taiwan in the first place I’d say the battle is very lost. It’s going to be a sea/land siege so if the US gets directly involved it’ll be a meeting of the navies.
This is very simplistic way of interpreting what Trump said. I would advice to read a bit about the significance of the GIUK (Greenland, Island, UK) in view of warming climate and growing importance of Arctics - melting ice might provide a much better and faster route for trade.
The problem is who will control the entrance and exit to that route and GIKU is one of them. And here we are on the key problem: Denmark for years totally neglected building any security/military infrastructure on Greenland, which suddenly might become a crucial element of the World economy and trade.
Do you really want sadistic regimes like Russia or China to take control over key parts of the potential trade routes (80% of global trade goes through the sees and oceans)?
Whatever you think about Trump, he will be gone in 4 years, someone else can be elected if Trump/Vance fails to deliver. Do you think we can get rid of Putin and his dreams on conquests Europe that easily? Or Xi, who is speeding with extending military potential of China, including nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers? Try to guess why Xi is doing this.
Denmark is in NATO, US base is already in Greenland and I'm sure Danes would be open to add few more. There is no need to invade it. The moment it happens, Europe is lost to the US as an ally and NATO is gone.
You've not addressed threatening the territorial integrity of Denmark. If you're going to say we've misinterpreted him, please quote him. Verbatim, not cleaned up.
Without touching the argument if the end justifies the means, the master of the deal apparently has communicated very badly what his intentions are. Obviously, nobody in Europe understood him.
But let's just wait and see, actions speak louder than words, although given past actions that is not instilling great confidence in me.
Not to pick on your point about Denmark, but the fact is that there has been no aggressors and thus none to defend it against. The US did try to have a sort of covert base on Greenland many years ago, and in the end it failed.
Yes, someone could invade. But they didn't.
And if they did, they probably wouldn't have been able to stay there for long enough to actually get anything out of it long term, without it turning into a war against NATO.
It is my understanding that it has been agreed a few years ago that additional monitoring should be put in place. I don't think anything else than general tech incompetence of the Danish defense forces has prevented that from happening yet.
But on the hand, as far as I understand the matter, there is still too much ice for it to become a major trade route.
The question was “Greenland and Panama” and the answer was “I wouldn’t rule anything out”. It requires a pretty hard squint to convert that into a threat “to invade a few NATO allies”. This sort of intentional misunderstanding of an exaggeration does so much more harm than good.
A western defense system that excludes the USA is naive at best.
It’s not a hard squint.
If these countries were our allies the answer would be “I have no idea why you would even be thinking that question”, not “we won’t rule anything out”.
Not ruling anything out is not a threat. Panama is not a NATO country. One is not a few. ‘Military options’ is not synonymous with invasion. “Invading” is a funny term for an area currently occupied by several US major military bases. The list continues.
I hate to sound snarky, and I mean this genuinely, but forcing people to defend someone is not a way to generate allies. A decade of “what he actually said was” is enough to turn even the most strident progressives towards the middle at least.
> Now if only the US (and others) would get their act together and build out a backup system to GNSS
They are moving towards quantum navigation (esp subs)
> They are moving towards quantum navigation (esp subs)
How does that help the merchant marine that is part of the logistical supply chain? Are container ships going to get this quantum nav boxes too? The US pays airlines a retainer to be a reserve fleet [1]: will they get these boxes as well in case of emergency?
What happens to all the civilian infrastructure that need navigation and timing signals?
Considering only the "military" ramifications of GNSS disruption is myopic.
> Now if only the US (and others) would get their act together and build out a backup system to GNSS. China, for example, has built out an eLoran system:
What prevents other countries from using these other systems?
Encryption. For example, GPS's P(Y) code is encrypted and only for military use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
But that’s what the three letter agencies are supposed to do. Surely there’s a good guy back door to that encryption /s
> What prevents other countries from using these other systems?
Nothing.
Nothing also prevents other countries from using China's BeiDou GNSS or their eLoran network.
The US government can apparently turn off their GPS signals over certain parts of the world:
https://idstch.com/geopolitics/denial-gps-services-kargil-wa...
the Earth is the center of the universe, though, just like any other point in space
