11 incidents on the record
GPS jamming and spoofing
GPS — and now GNSS more broadly — is the quietest critical infrastructure on the planet. It also happens to be the easiest to disrupt. Every incident here is a moment when civilian aviation, shipping, banking timing or a battlefield was reminded that the signal is owned by someone else.
Incidents
- Sustained Baltic GNSS jamming — Russia · NATO · EU, Jan 2025. Sustained GNSS jamming, attributed to Russian sources in Kaliningrad, forces commercial airlines to divert and disables civilian receivers across the Baltic. The EU and NATO file formal protests; the jamming continues.
- Galileo PRS lockout — United Kingdom · EU, Nov 2018. After Brexit, Britain — a major financial and engineering contributor to Galileo — was barred from the encrypted Public Regulated Service. The UK has since spent close to £100M studying its own sovereign GNSS replacement.
- BeiDou-3 goes global — China, Mar 2015. China activates BeiDou-3, beginning the constellation's global expansion. By the end of the decade BeiDou will have more visible satellites in the sky over much of the world than GPS itself.
- GPS jamming over Georgia — Russia · Georgia, Aug 2008. During the brief Russia-Georgia war, Russian forces jam GPS and satellite communications across South Ossetia. Civilian aviation in the region routes around the interference. Tbilisi takes the lesson to heart.
- BeiDou regional service — China, Jan 2004. China activates BeiDou-1's regional service. The technical justification is operational; the policy justification, repeated openly in Beijing, is that GPS is operated by an adversary that may switch the lights off.
- Galileo, by Council resolution — European Union, Mar 2002. The Council of the European Union formally launches the Galileo programme. The justification, written down explicitly, is freedom from American GPS as a strategic single point of failure.
- Selective Availability ended — USA, May 2000. President Clinton switches off Selective Availability. Civilian GPS accuracy improves tenfold overnight. The button, of course, remains in American hands.
- Kargil GPS denial — India · Pakistan · USA, May 1999. During the Kargil war, the Clinton administration denied India access to GPS over the conflict theatre. India responded by funding NavIC (IRNSS), a regional positioning constellation that became operational two decades later.
- Selective Availability — USA · Iraq, Jan 1991. During Desert Storm the Pentagon deliberately degrades the civilian GPS signal worldwide — Selective Availability — so that any adversary navigating with off-the-shelf receivers wanders by an order of magnitude.
- GPS receiver airlift — USA · Iraq · Kuwait, Aug 1990. On the eve of Desert Shield the Pentagon strips the civilian market of nine thousand commercial GPS receivers and air-freights them to deploying troops. Civil GPS, on paper a public utility, becomes a wartime asset overnight.
- KAL 007 and the GPS gift — USA · USSR · Korea, Sept 1983. A Soviet Su-15 shoots down KAL 007 over Sakhalin with 269 aboard. Two weeks later Reagan announces civilian access to GPS — a gift wrapped in a clear assertion of who owns the signal.