Wars are not just fought with bullets and bombs. Electromagnetic waves also do battle. Invisible to the naked eye, GPS jamming can cause significant disruption, hampered communications – and potentially deadly accidents, said a BBC report, citing an maritime expert.
Hundreds and hundreds of ships. But they're all in the wrong place. "Oh my goodness," says Michelle Wiese Bockmann, senior maritime intelligence analyst at Windward, a maritime AI company, as she checks the live positions broadcast by commercial vessels in waters off Iran, the UAE and Qatar.
In the Strait of Hormuz, hundreds of ships appear on maps where they should not exist. GPS signals that sailors and tankers rely on to navigate safely are being scrambled, revealing a new battlefield of invisible electronic warfare.
"I'm up to… 35 different clusters," she says, looking at a map of the Strait of Hormuz and surrounding areas.
The clusters she mentions are weird circles of icons layered over the map, with each icon representing a real ship.
But ships don't bunch together in tight, unnaturally perfect circles. And they also don't hover over land – which is where some of the clusters appear. No, their GPS coordinates have been disrupted, masking the vessels’ true locations.
In recent years, GPS jamming has affected aircraft in Europe, including a plane used by the President of the European Commission. And it is a daily feature of the war in Ukraine. Now that conflict has erupted in the Middle East, electronic warfare is spilling over yet more territory, said a tech expert.
What was once a tool for convenience has become a potential hazard, forcing the maritime industry to adapt or risk collisions in one of the world’s busiest oil corridors, stated Faustine Ngila, the AI Editor at Impact newswire.
In recent years, GPS interference has affected aircraft in Europe, including a plane used by the President of the European Commission, and it has been a daily feature of the conflict in Ukraine. Now, electronic warfare is spreading to the Middle East.
12-day war was sample
Bockmann said the interference in the Strait of Hormuz is not the first time she has observed GPS jamming affecting vessels’ Automatic Identification Systems. It also occurred last year during a 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran and has affected navigators in the Baltic Sea. “This is next-level,” she said.
“We cannot over-estimate the huge danger this places to maritime navigation and safety,” Bockmann added. Pakistan’s National Hydrographic Office has also issued warnings about the interference.
Ships use AIS partly to avoid collisions. A 300-m tanker carrying hundreds of thousands of tonnes of oil takes considerable time and distance to change course or stop. If the positions of other vessels cannot be reliably determined, the risk of accidents increases, particularly at night or in poor visibility.
“That’s the problem,” said Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey. “Not you knowing where you’re going – it’s not knowing where everybody else is going.”
There is no official confirmation of who is behind the jamming, but military analysts suspect Iran. The country has also threatened attacks on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, reported BBC.
Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) or GPS jamming tools used by Iran are likely to be domestically produced or made with equipment sourced from Russia or China, says Thomas Withington, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank.
Is US behind the jamming game
He also suggests that US forces in the region are using jamming systems to protect their bases, personnel and vessels from drones and GNSS-guided weapons.
When approached, the US Department of War told the BBC: "Due to operations security we are not going to comment on the status of specific capabilities in the region."
Sean Gorman is co-founder of tech company Zephr.xyz, which has analysed the extent of jamming in countries including Ukraine. Data from aircraft can reveal when GPS jamming is happening but with the airspace over Iran now closed, Gorman has had to find other sources.
In recent days, he used radar data from a satellite to detect jamming in Iran. While the BBC has not independently verified this data, Gorman says that jamming devices leave a trace of the interference they cause in radar signals, allowing him to reveal occurrences of GPS-jamming around the country.
In 2024, he and colleagues used smartphones strapped to drones to study GPS jamming in Ukraine. The drones would fly around while the smartphones recorded GPS information – picking up interference that could then be plotted on a map. "We were looking at the [GNSS] measurements of all those phones," he explains. "You could triangulate to where the jammer was located."
"I was just amazed [at] the level of jamming and how powerful it is," says Gorman.
Anti-jam antenna system
There are various technologies that offer to protect against GPS jamming. Mitigating the problem can include automatically detecting jamming or interference and switching to unaffected frequencies, for example.
Defence giant Raytheon UK makes a device called Landshield, which is about the size of an ice hockey puck in its smallest form. The company says this "anti-jam antenna system" can be installed on different kinds of vehicles – from cars to aircraft – and that it uses multiple channels to overcome jamming.
"We're seeing quite an increase in demand and capacity for our anti-jamming products at the moment," says Alex Rose-Parfitt, engineering director of Raytheon UK.
Australia-based Advanced Navigation has developed systems that determine position using gyroscopes and accelerometers.
Chris Shaw, co-founder and CEO, said the company can also use optical satellite imagery or even star-mapping to estimate location when GPS is unavailable.
"The image processing is very advanced," stated Shaw. "Doing something like star-mapping is very inexpensive," he noted, adding that the methods are less accurate than GPS, which is why multiple forms of location analysis may be required.
Without better protection, GPS will likely remain vulnerable in its current form. Crucially, the signals used by GPS-based systems are very weak and therefore easy to jam, said the BBC report.
It's worth noting that militaries have access to "M-Code" GPS, is a carefully authenticated and encrypted form of the technology that is far more resistant to jamming.
Ramsey Faragher, director of the Royal Institute for Navigation, said GPS jamming in the waters off Iran increases the risk of maritime accidents and could accelerate the adoption of more secure alternatives. "Soon, we will look back on this era where we are using open GNSS signals and think, ‘God, we were mad, that was really not a smart move," he said.
