GPS Jamming Becoming an Increasingly Common — and Worrying — Tool of War

Within 24 hours of the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran, ships in the region’s waters found their navigation systems had gone haywire, erroneously indicating that the vessels were at airports, a nuclear power plant and on Iranian land.

The location confusion was a result of widespread jamming and spoofing of signals from global positioning satellite systems. Used by all sides in conflict zones to disrupt the paths of drones and missiles, the process involves militaries and affiliated groups intentionally broadcasting high-intensity radio signals in the same frequency bands used by navigation tools. Jamming results in the disruption of a vehicle’s satellite-based positioning while spoofing leads to navigation systems reporting a false location.

Though commercial vessels are not the target, the electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters on February 28, according to a report from Windward, a shipping intelligence firm.

Jamming and spoofing also slowed marine traffic moving through the Strait of Hormuz, a congested shipping lane that handles roughly 20% of the world’s oil and gas exports and where precise navigation is essential, Windward’s data showed. Traffic through the critical waterway has since ground to a near halt, with vessels being attacked and insurers dropping maritime coverage.

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“What we’re seeing in the Middle East Gulf at the moment, is extremely dangerous for maritime navigation,” said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, a senior maritime intelligence analyst at the company. Windward said the interference forced some tankers to reverse course or go dark, a state in which signals from a vessel’s Automatic Identification System, or AIS — which automatically transmits key information about a vessel such as position, speed and rate of turn — are no longer broadcast or detected.

“You don’t know where ships are. The whole point of AIS is collision avoidance,” she said. “When you have vessels thrown onto land or thousands of nautical miles across the sea, it is deeply, deeply troubling and dangerous.”

Windward in its analysis identified 21 new clusters where ships’ AIS were being jammed in the region in the first 24 hours after the Iran war began. A day later that number had jumped to 38, Bockmann said. Maritime data and analytics company Lloyd’s List Intelligence said it had logged 1,735 GPS interference events affecting 655 vessels, each typically lasting three to four hours, between the start of the war and March 3. Daily incidents have more than doubled, rising from 350 when the conflict began to 672 by March 2, the firm reported.

As use of this warfare tactic grows, experts worry the impacts could reach far beyond battlespaces.

Endemic problem

The jamming or spoofing of signals used in global navigation satellite systems, or GNSS, isn’t a new phenomenon. Interference has been a major issue for shipping and aircraft since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during which drones were widely deployed in combat for the first time.

Bockmann described the problem now as “endemic” in certain regions near conflict such as the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and parts of the Middle East, where what she termed “grey zone aggression,” or military activity that isn’t overtly hostile, is commonplace.