“This war has nothing to do with NATO. It’s not NATO’s war,” Stefan Kornelius, a spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, told reporters in Berlin on Monday. “NATO is a defensive alliance, an alliance for the defense of its territory,” he added.
My country is a bit towards the south and nobody really knows how our ships still manage to float.
We have ships where the entire navigation suite has been replaced with a commercial GPS.
The guns are fired… Every now and then. Sparingly. We still have ammunition from the 70’s in stock. Some times we even manage to misplace equipment.
Yet somehow we’re considered as the reliable ally, although a bit… wierd.
Honestly, that’ll do just fine in 90% of cases.
Only issues are:
What do you do if some country has maliciously turned off or disabled the GPS satellites?
The commercial GPS unit probably isn’t very EMP-resistant, so it might quickly be disabled if EMPs start going off all over the place … as would happen in a nuclear war.
But as long as you’re not fighting anybody capable of turning the entire GPS system off and the war hasn’t gone nuclear, it should probably be fine.
Sincerely? I’d expect to see astrolabes or sextants being pulled from storage.
Most naval ships actually do carry these old school navigation devices (as well as paper charts) and train on how to use them, just for this purpose. Just in case something disables the electronic navigation.
That is nice to know