“All these soldiers are getting sent to Iraq and their parents are buying them GPS receivers from hiking stores because there aren't enough military-grade receivers. The shoe starts to drop that the civilian applications for this have completely overtaken the military applications.”
The Lawfare Podcast · Policy · November 2026
Context
Dunn is describing the Gulf War, the first conflict where GPS was used for precision bombing. She uses the anecdote to show that civilian demand was outrunning military use by the 1990s.
Transcript
…thought even were a problem, but now you can solve them or you can do them faster. So, yeah, I think, I mean, I'm sure if you ask the U.S. government now, they'd say, oh, no, no, no, we always knew, we always knew. But there was certainly diverging opinions on how useful this thing was going to be.
…put us in the mid-80s, the rest of that decade into the 1990s. Talk to us about how the GPS program evolved. And then, as you noted in tandem, you have private sector engineers and scientists developing their own navigation technologies. So what does that look like headed into the 21st century?
Yeah, so in the 90s, I mean, I say the Department of Defense didn't recognize, maybe, or appreciate how good it was, but there's at least one sign that they recognized that it was more accurate than they anticipated, which is that they're both civilian and military signals, and the military signals are encrypted. And what they did for the civilian signals is they made them worse on purpose. They degraded them. So they were still pretty accurate and pretty useful, but they weren't anything like they are today. So they had this kind of break on it. What you get in the 90s is you get other departments in the US government, particularly the Coast Guard, start broadcasting corrections to these fake errors. So they're literally correcting the errors. They're undoing the work of the Department of Defense. And when they're undoing that work, they're actually making the signals even more accurate. So they're going beyond just a correction, they're improving them. And when you're doing this, you're getting certain private sector markets really embracing it. So farmers start…
The fights over the Controls, selective availability, as they called it, as you write, is certainly relevant to, I think, modern debates as well about, you know, what level of capability should one actor have versus the public. So we could spend much more time on various details and some of the…
Yeah, I mean, I think it was interesting because I was looking at that war not through the prism of a reporter covering it every day, but I was looking at it very much through the prism of somebody seeing the parallels with, you know, however many decades ago. And I think what struck me is this cat…
The speed of innovation is indeed crazy, I guess is the best word. So, I mean, obviously, there are other conflicts going on too. How do you see both reliance on GPS systems, as you're noting, and then all of the spoofing of and interference with GPS signals evolving if you look, I don't know, 6…
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