GPS receiver airlift
On the eve of Desert Shield the Pentagon strips the civilian market of nine thousand commercial GPS receivers and air-freights them to deploying troops. Civil GPS, on paper a public utility, becomes a wartime asset overnight.
A working catalogue entry, kept current. Each paragraph is drawn from the publicly documented record.
With Operation Desert Shield underway in autumn 1990, US forces deploying to Saudi Arabia discover they have nowhere near enough military GPS receivers in the inventory. The Pentagon strips the civilian commercial market — primarily Trimble and Magellan handhelds — and air-freights some 9,000 receivers to the theatre.
Civilian GPS, on paper a public utility, becomes a wartime asset commandeered by a single buyer overnight. The episode is the first practical demonstration that a civilian space service which is also a military space service is not, in any meaningful sense, neutral.
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