If complete reliance on your GPS is "Plan A" and you don't have any Plan B, your Plan A sucks...
to put it nicely.
Live and learn, kids.

Actor James Doohan famously uttered this line: "The more they complicate the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." His character offers that in the context of a bit of sabotage he accomplished before defecting to his old commanding officer, now turned renegade.

And that's as true in real life as the author of that screenplay suggested it might be in a fictive universe.

In fact, spurious GPS figures prominently in a plot by a modern-day William Randolph Hearst to start a major superpower war just to generate headlines. To defeat him, two secret agents, one from each side, must reason together and figure out what's really going on--and how their true enemy is playing their respective superior officers for fools.

And no one has denied, or can deny, that GPS is inherently vulnerable to such spoofing. But you can't fool the guy with a good pair of eyes, a sextant, and the skill to use them.

The Gimli Glider, of course.

I took a couple of lessons in 1984-1985 but did not get serious until 1993, when I wanted to write a newspaper article about our local airport. Pilots avoid reporters like they avoid doctors. So, I started taking lessons to get to know people. Once I got charts, no matter where I drove or worked, I found a small airport and met their instructors. I probably had 20 instructors, old, young, airline pilots laid off ... Grass strips, Burke Lakefront in Cleveland, lots of county airports, and one close enough to KSC that we could see the shuttle landing strip when we were at altitude. In addition to a slew of Cessnas, I also had lessons in a Boeing biplane, a Schleicher sailplane, some kind of ultralight, and a Piper Tomahawk. I soloed in a Cessna, of course. I had 100 hours, 50 solo when 9/11 happened. The Dot Com Meltdown, and all that, work got hard to find and flying is an expensive hobby, so I never completed the private.

Everything old is new again.

Being a civilian does nit mean a president should not read in areas over which he plans to advocate. Obama has been foe of the military, has dismantled all he could, and has a personal lack of knowledge, as well as poor choices in his closest advisors. If he listened to the military, and engaged with Congress, we would not be in the mess we are in.
As to the every growing technology in the Navy, remember, should we be hit with electromagnetic disaster, those men better be trained in basics or they will find themselves lost at sea. It all comes down to the man and his brain, working with the basics when the going gets tough. My dad and uncle were Navy men, and they learned that lesson well. They also learned the importance of the presence of sea power, something our prez seems to conveniently ignore if he has been advised of it.

I flew for a while for NASA, mostly the F104. As supersonic aircraft go it was more like a Cessna than a 747. It actually had mechanical connections from the controls to the control surfaces! Sure it had some electronics but you could fly it without them, it was just more difficult. I learned to fly in an Aeronca 7EC tail dragger. Talk about a minimum aircraft. No electrical system to speak of, you even had to pull the prop through by hand to start it. You really had to fly the thing. Somehow, I think learning in that kind of machine is what kept me alive as I progressed to more advanced aircraft. When the pilot has to do all the work you get pretty good at it.

Every few weeks the Internet has an outage at my business and home (cox). Who knows what is the cause. They almost never say.

They used to say that "if it floats it can sink". I think that applies to modern electronic systems too- especially with hackers on the loose.

If programming were perfect and they weren't constantly trying to accommodate new features, there wouldn't be constant patches revisions.

The point I am suggesting is that it's important for all of us to have backups if our fancy modern day systems fail- especially when the modern day systems are so controlled by collectivistd

It has been a while, but as I recall, when I prepared for the cross-countries, you had to know the beacons, but were not to use them. It was "good to know" information about instruments, but the test was Visual Flight Rules entirely.

On the note, the crash of Asiana Flight 214 in 2013 occurred during VFR descent. Their pilots are trained from day one for instruments at academies. Private aviation is not big in China. So, they never learned to fly a plane, except on the instruments. When I worked at Carl Zeiss another sales engineer was working on his private pilot's certificate, also. Overhearing us talk, one of the Germans said that it is easier to get a pilot's license in America than a driver's license in Germany.

I will not vote that down because I understand the motivation, but the question betrays a lack of knowledge in several areas.

(1) While a president with first hand knowledge of the Navy -- such as FDR, JFK, Nixon, Johnson, and Carter -- can advocate for much, everything starts in the House of Representatives.

(2) Presidents have advisors for a reason. Eisenhower was Army, of course, and Reagan was a civilian. Do you claim that the Navy suffered during their administrations?

(3) If you read the website of the Naval Institute http://www.usni.org, you will find an interesting avenue for unofficial opinions and recommendations, observations, and evaluations, mostly critical - supportive, but critical in the best sense. It is why military academies and schools train leaders by studying defeats as well as victories.

(4) The mission of the Navy is growing evermore complex. Indeed, it never got more simple, from sailing to steam, ironclads to submarines. The first battles that aircraft carriers fought were against admirals who refused to admit that the battleship had been surpassed as the flagship of the fleet. Now, the Navy has to consider riverine and riparian operations. DARPA claims to be ready to launch a continuously operating robot ship. http://www.darpa.mil/program/anti-sub...

(5) China in the China Sea (go figure…) or Iran in the Persian Gulf, sea power will not go away soon; and may never evaporate no matter how far from Earth our "navies" boldly go. But ultimately, the battle goes to whoever controls the high ground. Saddam Hussein had the fifth largest army in the world, but the zeroeth largest satellite reconnaissance.

I don't think that would have saved the US boat in Iran. The accuracy of celestial navigation is about plus or minus one nautical mile and you cannot get continuous readouts.

I certainly think the skill should be taught as a backup, but it will not solve this problem you cite and it cannot those new gizmos.

Yep, celestial navigation is one of many valuable things that have been thrown out with the babies bath water.
It's about time that someone finally engaged their mind!

Maybe the Navy and our poorly educated prez should all pick up a copy of Alfred Thayer Mayhan's book on the importance of sea power. They still read it in China, and it was good enough for JFK, somehow they think in this administration that sea power and all the skilsl that go with it, are insigniificant.

I do not believe two boats got lost and off course into Iranian waters. The evidence against that is too great. But, I do say making a big deal about celestial nav is a great way to “keep the con” — as they said in “The Sting.”

good to know.

I got my pilots license in the 50's. One of the tests was to navigate a cross country using only charts the compass and a stopwatch. The radio direction finder and other navigation aids were turned off. If you are going to fly an airplane you need to know how to do it even when all the electronics fails.

GPS is a powerful tool but it can fail or be spoofed. Navigation by sextant, chronometer, and navigation charts always works. Self contained systems are more reliable than those that depend on an external infrastructure because that can be targeted by those who wish us ill.

This reminds me of my midshipman cruise back in the stone age of the early sixties, in which we all had to perform a star shot with the ship's sextant around two a.m. (darkest part of the night), then calculate our position and compare it with the actual one to pass the test.
I was so proud that my three shots with the sextant were well-clustered, and were tight, and verified that we were off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean.
The problem was that we were on a cruise in the Caribbean. But at least my shots were tight!
I gained much humility that night.

In a training exercise we went through at Ft. Carson in 1966, it was maps and a compass. My platoon navigated the route at night. Thought we had the other platoon nailed, then found out they had been watching us via IR scopes. Great lesson though.

Yep, having to actually fend for yourself is something that adds to a persons character, confidence as well as knowledge. It also adds in things that are ancillary to the topic, such as astronomy and math. You can use a GPS without a clue as to how it works, but you cannot use a sextant without a clue.

In general aviation, we keep old planes flying. I learned to fly in the 1990s. As I got out of it GPS was becoming more common with more new planes entering the market, and with portable GPSes being affordable. New planes have moving maps on the instrument panel. They are a great convenience for an experienced pilot, but when they fail on a new pilot, the results can be hair-raising, at the very least.

I never bothered. I kept it basic. Even my wristwatch was a wind-up analog. "Never let the plane take you any place your mind has not gone five minutes earlier." When speaking about documentation to software developers, I put up a slide of Sporty's Pilot Shop. They sell 153 tools for flight planning. If programmers were killed by their bugs, they would be more careful.

I do not know how the Federal army trains, but in the Texas State Guard, you have to pass land navigation without GPS. In addition to basic training, we have challenges that earn awards. Again, GPS is not allowed. One of those is called the "Spur Walk" for instance, because you "earn your spurs." Of course, it is not that anyone actually rides horses, but, come to think of it…

Yes, indeed true. We used to use paper charts, SINS fixes, and NavSat for ours (Submarine). It also shows how a lack of understanding of basic skills for just the general task (going to sea) leads to a reliance on a weak link. Goes back to 1941 and the reliance they put on Radar in Hawaii and it's total failure to detect the Japanese, and to interpret data they had (they thought it was a flight of B17s, even though 50-60 planes is a lot more than the 12 they were expecting). Those who refuse to learn from history...