Most modern navigation relies on GPS: a receiver reads a satellite signal and returns a location on a screen. That system has been reliable for the US for decades. The US Navy is preparing for the possibility that it won't always be. According to a 2015 Military Times report, the US Naval Academy reinstated celestial navigation in its training curriculum in 2015, seventeen years after the practice was quietly abandoned. The reason? Not some sort of love for the tradition, but because they feared that the satellite grid we all operate within could somehow be rendered useless, and an entire generation of officers had no idea what to do about it.
A skill used by sailors since 1845, gone in a decade
Celestial navigation, which comprises taking angles of stars, the sun, or moon against the horizon to determine one's current position, was a part of US Naval Academy training since the school's founding. In 1998, computers rendered that training largely useless, and the full program was quietly scrapped. It wasn't only Annapolis, either; celestial navigation eventually faded out of all parts of the US Navy's training.
