Army develops chip-scale atomic clock for the field

http://www.c4isrnet.com/articles/tactical-timekeeper-army-to-roll-out-tiny-atomic-clocks?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DFN%20EBB%2010.13.16&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Early%20Bird%20Brief

There were over 800 Chip Scale Atomic Clocks (CSACs) deployed to Afghanistan from Honeywell and Symetricom.  Suddenly placing it in a hardened case and putting a CRDEC logo on this makes it profound.   Well truth of the matter is, that it isn’t. CSACs will only solve local time synch problems.  In a network of networks, depending upon what I am trying to do, CSACs wont hold the same UTC time as an external source…oh and adding a Glonass, Biedau, or Galileo augmentation wont do the trick either.  This could will be a problem in small force signature reachback operations, where most time is driven from a master-slave relationship with the time masters at a non-deployed hub not subject to an EW threat.  The effort to make time universal with a bulge in your pants is laughable.  3/4 G LTE systems require 8 nanoseconds or less of drift between the tower and an edge device.  Good luck with that in a combat scenario….