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We just finished the year that marked the 30th anniversary of America’s Global Positioning System (GPS) reaching full operational capacity. What began as a military tool to enable U.S. military forces to navigate more precisely and to support the use of precision strike weapons anywhere in the world has become the invisible infrastructure that powers nearly every aspect of civilian life. So much of our everyday lives, from smartphones and ATMs to aviation, shipping and Wall Street, run on precise timing and location information.
However, that infrastructure is now under duress. Our adversaries are waging a sophisticated war on GPS signals, and the fallout is both significant and frightening. Reports of navigational issues across the Baltic and the Middle East have become a daily occurrence due to conflicts in the region. The impacts have extended into civilian life, impacting air, land and sea.
It’s a miracle the regions have avoided a major aviation disaster, given that navigational warfare and space have become new domains of nation-state confrontation. Russia is spoofing and jamming signals across Eastern Europe. Russia and China are also shadowing military and civilian satellites, performing dangerous dogfighting maneuvers in orbit.
Jamming and spoofing were once rare. Now, they are battle-tested tools in the electronic warfare arsenal, and the U.S. is not immune to their effects. What’s happening in these regions today could happen over Chicago or Atlanta tomorrow.
Similar interference has been detected near major U.S. airports, including Dallas and Denver, impacting nearly 350 flights. Nation-states were not responsible for these incidents, but they prove how vulnerable GPS is to disruption.
This isn’t a Hollywood thriller. A coordinated attack on GPS would ripple across aviation, finance, emergency response, and daily life within minutes, not days. We’ve already seen how quickly systems collapse when digital links are severed.
In 2022, a volcanic eruption in Tonga severed the country’s only undersea cable and blocked satellite signals, plunging the island into an instant blackout. Commerce broke down, and government emergency coordination collapsed. ATMs couldn’t dispense cash because banks couldn’t confirm account balances. Cargo planes couldn’t file manifests, and supply chains froze. Farms and fisheries couldn’t complete online forms, so produce rotted. Pharmacies couldn’t fill prescriptions because their supply systems were offline. The effects were immediate and took months to normalize.
If GPS goes down, whether because of jamming, spoofing, a cyberattack or a natural disaster America is dangerously unprepared. Our widespread reliance on a vulnerable technology should be a wake-up call. A single sustained outage could cost the U.S. economy an estimated $1.6 billion per day.
When I served as commander of U.S. Cyber Command, our team was responsible for ensuring the networks underpinning our military missions were fully operational and secure, and as the director of the National Security Agency, the team was focused on generating deep knowledge of threats to the U.S. and allied operations across land, sea, air, space and cyberspace. In both roles, it became very clear that we needed to protect our positioning, navigation and timing infrastructure, and that one of the keys to doing so was to create layered resilience.
Solving a problem of this magnitude is a massive challenge. But we don’t need to start from scratch. By leveraging existing infrastructure in space and on the ground, we can accelerate deployment, reduce cost and avoid duplication. Speed and scale are essential. It’s not a question of whether the U.S. experiences a major GPS disruption, but when.
Fortunately, the technology already exists. American companies are developing methods to provide positioning, navigation and timing backup via terrestrial 5G networks, offering timing and location signals that are independent of satellites. These solutions are scalable, cost-effective and designed to integrate directly into existing telecom infrastructure such as cell towers. If commercial providers are already exploring complementary backup technologies, why are we still lagging behind our adversaries?
The real barrier isn’t technology — it’s policy. Moving the process forward to make these technical capabilities a reality is the challenge. Getting government bureaucracies to act with urgency is never easy, but the administration and Congress now recognize the stakes.
The Federal Communications Commission has launched an inquiry into strengthening national positioning, navigation and timing infrastructure, including exploring ground-based alternatives such as 5G-powered systems. Now it’s time to follow through and move from planning to execution.
The threats are real; the technology is ready; and the cost of inaction grows by the day. Replacing GPS is not a realistic near-term solution, either in terms of cost or the time frame required to do so. Our focus should be on building a layered, resilient system that provides users with multiple options to react to loss or degradation of our current positioning, navigation and timing structure. One layer of that system should be a ground-based component that takes advantage of the existing infrastructure already in place, saving us significant time and money in creating a solution to this critical problem.
This piece originally appeared on The Hill.
