People on social media have reported strange events on delivery and navigation apps—drivers appear to be in the middle of the sea, or a 10-minute trip home suddenly jumps up to 30 minutes. For residents of countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, where life has more or less resumed despite Iran’s ongoing attacks, this is a subtle reminder that there is still a war being waged overhead.
These problems are widely linked to electronic warfare. In today’s conflicts, disrupting satellite navigation is a common tactic. By interfering with GPS, militaries make it harder for opponents to guide drones, missiles, or surveillance tools accurately.
But the same satellite signals used by the military also power civilian aircraft, shipping, infrastructure, and everyday navigation apps. When those signals are disrupted, the effects ripple out to airlines, shipping routes, logistics, and digital services that all depend on accurate location and timing.
These disruptions generally happen through two related but distinct techniques: GPS jamming and GPS spoofing. Understanding the difference explains why navigation sometimes stops working and, at other times, looks normal but shows the wrong location.
How GPS Attacks Work
GPS satellites are about 12,400 miles away and beam down approximately 50 watts of transmit power, so by the time the signal reaches Earth, it is relatively weak. This makes GPS surprisingly easy to disrupt. A small, inexpensive jammer bought online and powered by a battery can knock out navigation and timing across a local area.
GPS jamming happens when someone deliberately drowns out the weak signals from GPS satellites with a much stronger noise signal. “It’s like saturating out your eyeball: you’re trying to see something really far away, and someone comes by you with a flashlight, and now you can’t make sense of it,” says Jim Stroup, head of growth for technology firm SandboxAQ’s navigation product, AQNav.
GPS spoofing, meanwhile, is when someone broadcasts fake GPS signals that imitate real satellites, tricking receivers into calculating an incorrect position. When a spoofing attack occurs, navigation appears normal but shows the wrong location. Spoofing is more sophisticated and more “insidious,” Stroup says.
Instead of just blocking the real GPS signal, a spoofer tries to impersonate it. It listens to the real signals from satellites, then quickly rebroadcasts fake signals so that a receiver on a drone, ship, or aircraft thinks a new satellite has appeared.
The receiver adds this fake satellite to its calculations. Because the spoofer provides slightly incorrect distance information, the system drifts off course. This can quietly push a drone to a different location or move an aircraft’s position on a screen without setting off alarms.
“You can actually take a drone and steer it off course. And to the drone and to the pilots, everything on GPS will look like it’s operationally just fine,” Stroup says. He gives an example: A bad actor could spoof a drone over its own border, making it cross the border and potentially cause a geopolitical incident.
More Than Maps
For most people, the effects of GPS attacks go far beyond maps on your phone. Health care systems, power utilities, and even nuclear plants rely on GPS for precise timing to keep everything running smoothly. Their clocks are synchronized across facilities to make sure that every single calculation is precisely timed.
If GPS is disrupted for long periods or over large areas, it’s not just about glitchy Uber rides. It can mean grounded flights, energy grids under strain, and hospitals where clocks and safety systems are suddenly out of sync.
“Many of these scientific and utility places, health care places, it’s not so much that they just need to know what time it is,” says Stroup. “It’s the fact that they have 18 disparate, highly sensitive technical systems that need to run on Swiss‑like precision and need to be perfectly in line with what the time is. If there’s one thing that’s slightly out of alignment, that can cause catastrophic issues.”
A Better GPS?
There are other systems besides GPS and similar technology, which insiders call alternate PNT (position, navigation, timing), but “not everything in the alt-PNT space can solve all three of those tasks,” Stroup says. “Some will focus just on the P and N, some focus just on the T.”
Some of the stopgaps are intuitive but limited. One group of techniques, known as visual navigation (vis‑nav), is a higher-tech version of what pilots did before GPS. “They looked down, and they had a map, and they said, ‘OK, well, there’s the Eiffel Tower, here’s the Eiffel Tower, I must be here,’” he says. Today, computers can perform the same function faster.
