GPS Denied: Time to Upgrade

The Fragile Foundation of Modern NavigationThe Global Positioning System (GPS) is arguably the greatest dual-use technology ever developed. It saves us trillions of dollars in wasted fuel and inefficient logistics. However, our modern world is built on a system that is terrifyingly fragile, highly vulnerable to jamming, spoofing, and the existential threat of anti-satellite weapons. Recent events prove this vulnerability. On February 28, ships navigating the Strait of Hormuz started appearing on tracking screens in places they couldn’t possibly be. They appeared to be sitting on airport runways, parked on Iranian land, and clustered at nuclear power plants. More than 1,100 commercial vessels had their navigation systems scrambled in a single day following US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran, bringing a waterway that handles a fifth of the world’s oil exports to a halt. A similar crisis unfolded months earlier in the Caribbean. During a U.S. standoff with Venezuela, jammed signals caused commercial flights to experience severe GPS problems, resulting in a near-collision for a JetBlue pilot and forcing a cruise ship to navigate by charts and landmarks for three hours. These are no longer isolated incidents. Today, anyone can pull up independent tracking sites like gpsjam.org—which aggregates aircraft data to visualize daily GPS disruptions worldwide—and view a heat map of the globe bleeding red with active interference. But conflict zones aren’t the only risk. In 2013, a truck driver with a $100 jammer accidentally knocked Newark Liberty International Airport’s GPS offline just to hide from his employer’s vehicle tracker. This system is used by over 6 billion people, yet it can be blinded by cheap gadgets. The Invisible Metronome GPS was designed for military position, navigation, and timing in the 1960s and 70s. Its signals travel 20,000 kilometers from space, arriving 100,000 times weaker than ambient noise. This makes them easily overwhelmed by low-cost eBay jammers emitting stronger radio noise on the same frequency. Crucially, GPS isn’t just a map; it is the invisible metronome for the modern world. The atomic clocks on GPS satellites synchronize cellular networks, timestamp billions of financial transactions, and regulate power grids. Lose the timing signal, and our global digital infrastructure fundamentally breaks down. We’ve wired the heartbeat of the global economy to a whispering radio signal from space. Diverging Strategies: U.S. vs. China The U.S. government has focused its response almost entirely on advancing military resilience measures like encrypted M-code signals and anti-jam antennas. This does nothing for commercial pilots or global logistics networks navigating denied environments. The U.S. defends GPS purely as a military asset. Meanwhile, China has taken a radically different approach. It has poured state investment into the BeiDou satellite system, which achieved full global coverage in 2020 and surpasses the U.S. network in size. In parallel, China has built a deep bench of geospatial experts and backed BeiDou with a layered terrestrial architecture that includes a 20,000-kilometer fiber network and a national eLoran system. By actively exporting BeiDou through the Belt and Road Initiative and achieving full-stack autonomy in domestic navigation chips, China is building an ecosystem with commercial and strategic leverage that will matter as GPS-denied environments become the norm.Moving Beyond GPS 2.0 The private sector is beginning to field alternative positioning systems, but competing against “free” will require game-changing innovation, not just incremental improvement. Inertial navigation systems are expensive and drift over time. Satellite constellations that simply move GPS-like spacecraft closer to Earth carry many of the same vulnerabilities as the system they’re meant to replace. Commercial alternatives must go beyond GPS 2.0 to address both resilience and new use cases that justify adoption on their own merits. Remarkable new startups like EarthTraq aim to fill these gaps by providing new purpose-built constellations paired with low-cost, low-powered devices not dependent on any GPS constellations. Other companies are actively using computer vision or radar to automatically determine positions with what I call “artificial intelligence dead reckoning.” Powerhouse companies like Vantor and Niantic Spatial are going big on high fidelity photogrammetric digital models of the world for precision navigation in denied environments. Other examples, Skyline Nav AI uses computer vision and deep learning to determine a vehicle’s location in real time based solely on its surroundings. Similarly, European startup Vydar uses onboard AI to match live camera feeds of the ground with offline maps, computing highly accurate coordinates even during a complete GPS blackout. Daedalean AI is taking a complementary approach, building visual positioning systems that integrate seamlessly with radar and inertial sensors to operate in challenging conditions like fog or darkness. All of these alternatives offer mission performance that GPS cannot and have great promise to supplement or replace it in a denied environment. We’re all going to have to get used to a world without GPS. The era of implicit trust in a single vulnerable satellite network is over. If we want to safely operate autonomous systems and AI in the real world, we must develop higher-fidelity methods of positioning within the eternal reference frame that cannot be defeated by cheap eBay jammers. Follow Mark Munsell on LinkedIn.The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to [email protected] for publication consideration.Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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