"Two is one, one is none."

That's the saying among emergency responders, preppers, and survivalists.  "Two is one, one is none."

When lives, among other things, depend on a single system--say the Global Positioning Satellite system-wouldn't it be a good idea to have a back up system, just in case?

Evidently, His Imperial Majesty's budgeteers have decided  that $36 million a year is too much to maintain the long-lived--and ubiquitous, in some applications--LORAN-C system.

The (literal) cut-off is today, in some areas.

I've talked a bit in places about Coronal Mass Ejections and Electro-magnetic Pulse rendering solid-state electronics nonoperational.  Satellites are pretty vulnerable, and shooting down enough of them to send folks back to map and compass--or an inertial navigation system, which was always tricky to use¹--is a trivial exercise from an engineering standpoint². 

For $36 million a year they could have turned the thing over to a private consortium and financed it through subscriptions.

Idiots.

***

1.  We had in Integrated Inertial Navigation System in the EH60 Quickfix aircraft, the electronic warfare version of the UH60 Blackhawk. We were trained on using it in "The Course", but never preally practiced it, especially once GPS became common enough in the military to mount on in every cockpit. 


2.  Trivial from an engineering standpoint means that any somewhat-bright high school student could work out the math, if not the actual budget.