Most Americans readily recognize the Global Positioning System, ubiquitously referred to as GPS, as the technology that allows them to navigate across the United States on a daily basis.
What far fewer realize is that this same network is also critical to setting a standardized time to a billionth of a second, and also serves as the basis for the functioning of many elements of critical infrastructure, from facilitating financial transactions to ensuring the delivery of fuel to gas stations and water and electricity to homes. Also lesser known is the newest U.S. military branch tasked with keeping GPS online and preventing a catastrophe that could plunge the nation into a dark age.
The GPS signal is taken, and then rebroadcast with a little bit of a delay, which makes one think that instead of being here, I'm a mile and a half away, and this has been cited over and over as a danger to shipping, especially in those really congested shipping lanes.
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Wray, commander of the U.S. Space Force's 2nd Operations Squadron responsible for GPS operations, told Newsweek that, "without GPS, America would be a very different place."
Right now, roughly 11,000 miles above the Earth's surface, 38 satellites are orbiting the planet streaming a constant array of information that allows GPS to operate around the clock. Wray says he needs 24 of them to keep GPS operating worldwide and at least four to compute a navigation solution. The U.S. has four more satellites on the ground ready to launch in short order.
What worries Wray, however, is not necessarily a kinetic strike to take out U.S. satellites operating in a crowded plot of space where foreign GPS equivalents such as Europe's Galileo, China's BeiDou and Russia's GLONASS also operate. Rather, it's the terrestrial threat posed by jamming and spoofing technology, especially in the hands of nation states.
"That's what concerns me," Wray said. "I don't want to say I have the ability to fix all of those, but we can help with planning to mitigate them and try to work around some of those threats."
Wray provided a real-world example of such disruptions.
During the 2018 Exercise Trident Juncture, the largest NATO exercise in decades, he said that Russia employed GPS jamming activity near its border with Norway, where the drill was taking place. Moscow has denied any involvement in such activities.
Wray said that action disrupted civilian navigation, including that of medical services in the region. Reports of such activity have continued to emerge in record numbers as Moscow-NATO relations sharply deteriorated in the wake of Russia's war in Ukraine.
On the other side of the world, GPS spoofing has been detected in the East China Sea. In multiple cases, Wray said "the GPS signal is taken, and then rebroadcast with a little bit of a delay, which makes one think that instead of being here, I'm a mile and a half away, and this has been cited over and over as a danger to shipping, especially in those really congested shipping lanes."
The ability to conduct such jamming and spoofing operations has become increasingly available in the decades since GPS was first put into operation some 45 years ago, long before the founding of Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, alongside the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Coast Guard, in December 2019.
We operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that if there is a short-notice request, we can and will respond within a minute or two.
At the most local level, commercial truck drivers can buy cheap tools to mask their true location, allowing them, for example, to take an unauthorized break on company time. Even accidental configurations or outdated receivers on devices can inadvertently distort communication with GPS satellites.
But there are far more hostile plots being conducted to a greater degree, using capabilities on a scale that only governments could wield.
"If I'm an 18-wheeler driver, I care about blocking the signal that my company can track, which is the non-military signal, and I only care about blocking in the 25-foot radius around where my cab is," Wray said. "But to block the military signal requires more power, more sophistication that's generally at the nation-state level."
Such capabilities have forced the U.S. military to rethink its approach to training, adding scenarios in which personnel operate in a GPS-disrupted environment.
"The Navy, for example, trains its navigators now to be able to use celestial navigation and some of the techniques that it abandoned when we were in a more peaceful environment and GPS was assumed to be reliable in all locations at all times," Wray said.
He said the same caution applies to pilots, including civilian airliners, noting the instance of a jammer over the Iranian capital of Tehran forcing passenger planes to operate with little or no GPS support. When an Iranian surface-to-air missile system shot down Ukrainian Air Flight 752 in January 2020, authorities in the Islamic Republic initially alleged possible electronic interference contributed to the error.
Reached for comment, the Federal Aviation Administration referred Newsweek to the Pentagon.
It was another deadly navigational error that prompted the U.S. government to provide GPS to the public for the first time some three decades ago. In September 1987, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 departing from a fuel stop in Anchorage on a journey from New York City to Seoul inadvertently strayed into restricted USSR airspace, resulting in the passenger plane being shot down by a Soviet Su-15.
The incident was the second of its kind in just five years, and prompted then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan to make a cutting-edge technology once exclusively wielded by the U.S. military available to the masses with limited precision. And yet, even after President Bill Clinton offered military-grade accuracy to civilians in 2000 and the continuous advances to navigational tools that ensued this century, GPS jamming and other forms of interference continue to threaten civilian aviation.
"The same is that much more true for military assets," Wray said. "So, whether it's an aircraft or seacraft, they could have jammers in all different places. The proliferation of remotely piloted aircraft, the proliferation of small unmanned watercraft, wherever it might be, it's very easy to put a jamming device on that, and so one could manifest itself in any different way at any different time."
He stressed that "training is essential," because "someone could turn on a jammer at a moment's notice, and it could be somewhere we didn't know there was a jammer."
The U.S. State Department also addresses issues of GPS disruption.
"The U.S. government takes interference with Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals very seriously and works to provide the most accurate and robust signals from the GPS constellation over the entire Earth, at all times," a State Department spokesperson told Newsweek.
"To underscore the importance of the broad civilian use of GNSS signals," the spokesperson added, "the State Department leads the U.S. delegation to the International Committee on GNSS under the framework of the United Nations, to promote voluntary cooperation on matters of mutual interest related to civil satellite-based positioning, navigation, timing, and value-added services."
The spokesperson also noted that "multiple resources use freely available data to generate maps and reports of likely interference for public reference."
Among these tools is GPS Jam, a daily updated monitor that currently observes the highest levels of global interference over parts of Russia, including near Moscow and other select cities, as well as around the Turkish cities of Ankara and Istanbul and two major zones of disruption along the southwestern stretch of the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, bordering Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. Another pocket of high-level disruption is reported south of Lahore, near Pakistan's disputed Kashmir border with India.
Some of this activity is also being monitored by U.S. allies, including in Europe, where the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (EUROCONTROL), has raised the alarm of rising GPS and GNSS disruption in recent years.
"We do actively monitor GPS/GNSS interference within our area and we have seen interference, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea and the Baltic States," the EUROCONTROL press office told Newsweek.
All three regions constitute areas where both NATO and Russia's armed forces regularly operate, though EUROCONTROL said it was difficult to pinpoint the precise cause of the interference.
"Although this monitoring includes the geolocation of sources," the press office added, "it is not always possible to determine who is producing the interference and whether they are associated with a nation state."
To address these threats, the U.S. military has both bolstered its satellite network through myriad redundancies and empowered Space Force specifically with the capability to manipulate the strength of GPS signals. Wray said that, within moments, he could maximize reception to penetrate dense foliage to help guide precision-guided missiles or support high-stakes ground missions, such as hostage rescue operations.
"Timeliness is important," Wray said. "If we know that there's going to be a military operation in advance, we can plan for it, but we're also capable of responding. That's why we operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that if there is a short-notice request, we can and will respond within a minute or two."
