Reliable GPS

On the day the first strikes hit Iran, navigation systems across the Middle East began lying.

Not failing.

Lying. 

And when GPS lies, ships don’t move.

More than a thousand vessels in the Gulf had their positioning signals hijacked—showing them docked in Iranian ports, stranded in desert…

Even sitting on top of a nuclear power plant.

In short…

Ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, through which one in five barrels of the world’s oil flows, were being told they were somewhere else entirely.

The US Navy declared a maritime warning zone, issuing a statement that it could not guarantee the safety of merchant shipping.

GPS was a significant part of the reason why.

Let’s dive in and revisit a problem that’s only going to grow larger from here

The Problem 

GPS works by receiving faint signals from satellites roughly 12,000 miles above the Earth.

By the time those signals reach your phone, your plane, or your missile, they are weak—the equivalent of reading a wristwatch from across a football field.

That weakness is the vulnerability.

A cheap transmitter on the ground can broadcast a fake signal far stronger than the real one. Your receiver believes the louder signal, thinks it’s somewhere else, and has no idea it’s been deceived.

That device costs a few hundred dollars. The information to make such a device is freely available on the internet.

That’s a problem.

But Iran has far more sophisticated systems than that.

That’s an even bigger one.

The Pink Drone Effect

GPS jamming and spoofing have been in military toolkits for decades.

In 2011, Iran captured a CIA stealth drone by—among other things, apparently—feeding it false GPS coordinates and walking it to the ground.

When Obama asked for it back, an Iranian toy company mass-produced $4 pink plastic replicas and reserved one for the president.

So this isn’t anything new.

But until recently, states used these tools sparingly—targeted, brief, localized. Now they’re using them at scale. The scalpel has become the sledgehammer.

For example, in 2023, more than twenty commercial aircraft near Iraq suffered acute navigation failures from Iranian interference.

And since the Ukraine war began, GPS spoofing has increased over 500 percent globally—1,500 flights per day affected at peak, 41,000 in a single month.

The Baltic states warned that Russian jamming was creating conditions for an air disaster. A Ryanair flight aborted its approach at 850 feet over Vilnius in January 2025.

This isn’t a military problem that stays military. 

Organized crime is already deploying GPS jammers inside U.S. borders to disrupt trucking fleets. Civil aviation is filing interference advisories across multiple regions.

The same cheap software-defined radio you can build in a garage is creating navigation blackouts that ripple across civilian infrastructure.

The Deeper Problem

GPS, contrary to popular thought, isn’t primarily a navigation system. It’s fundamentally a timing system that derives position as a byproduct—and timing is the invisible backbone of modern civilization.

→ Financial markets use GPS timestamps to sequence transactions.

→ The electrical grid uses it to balance load across transmission lines.

→ Mobile networks use it to synchronize cell tower handoffs.

→ Emergency services, hospitals, automated ports—all threaded with GPS timing in ways most don’t fully understand.

A 2023 UK government study estimated a seven-day GPS outage would cost Britain alone £7.6 billion.

The US would lose magnitudes more and has no operational national backup. (Congress mandated one by December 2020. It wasn’t built.)

While the US government is lagging behind China, Russia, and even Britain… 

There’s genuine innovation happening in America’s private sector.

The Solutions 

Software-defined sensor fusion—software systems that cross-check GPS against inertial sensors to detect spoofing—is real progress for short-duration military applications.

Problem is, this method tends to cause drift over time.

Over hours, errors grow. Over days, those errors become too dangerous to be worth using.

For a drone on a thirty-minute mission or a missile in flight, the drift is negligible—sensor fusion works beautifully.

But the financial exchange, the power grid, and the telecom network don’t just need navigation for thirty minutes—they need microsecond-accurate timing indefinitely.

For that, you need an independent signal that can’t be taken down the same way GPS can.

One of the most credible systems operating today is STL—Satellite Time and Location—broadcast by Iridium Communications (IRDM) from 66 low-Earth-orbit satellites.

Iridium is an underrated resiliency layer for communications, military applications, and IoT—a company that looks better by the day.

In 2024, Iridium acquired Satelles, the original STL developer, accelerating integration across aviation, maritime, and critical infrastructure.

Where GPS arrives from 12,000 miles away, Iridium orbits at 485 miles, delivering signals up to 1,000 times stronger on a completely different frequency band.

The system covers every point on Earth, is already operational, and is increasingly embedded in commercial chipsets.

Pray For Boring, Win Either Way

This story is no doubt going to get bigger.

The only question is whether the story gets bigger through a slow accumulation of incidents—more aborted landings, more ships sent off course, more timing glitches in financial systems—or through a single catastrophic event that forces the conversation.

A mid-air incident over the Baltics. A cascading grid failure traced to timing loss. A catastrophic collision in the Strait of Hormuz.

The boring version of this story is that governments slowly wake up and fund resilience. The ugly version is that something breaks first and the funding comes after.