"They are 15 years behind the times": 1,000 ships have lost their GPS during the war in the Middle East because they are using outdated and easily jammed technology

The GPS equipment on container ships, tankers, and other vessels immobilized in the Middle East due to the war is probably less sophisticated than that of the phone on which you are reading this article.

This explains why, since the beginning of the conflict, a thousand ships in the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman have been blinded at one time or another by jamming of satellite navigation signals, unable to determine their location, according to Dimitris Ampatzidis, an analyst with Kpler, a company with antennas around the world monitoring maritime movements. This represents half of the 2,000 ships present in the area, he says. The vast majority are located off the coasts of the United Arab Emirates and Oman. A satellite positioning system is a constellation that sends signals with the time to Earth, allowing the receiver to determine its location. A modern smartphone receives signals from four planetary constellations: the 31 satellites of the American GPS, but also those of Galileo (Europe), GLONASS (Russia), and BeiDou (China). Most use two GPS frequency bands: an older, weaker one, and a newer, more powerful one. A large number of spacecraft are therefore unable to fall back on BeiDou or Galileo if their GPS signal is jammed. It's even worse for airplanes, due to regulations: "No airplane in the world has a GPS receiver capable of receiving and interpreting signals other than GPS L1 C/A. They are 15 years behind," he says. "20th-Century Tools" Jamming a GPS signal is "easy," summarizes Katherine Dunn, author of a forthcoming book on the history of GPS, Little Blue Dot. "All it takes is a radio transmitter broadcasting on the same frequency but louder. It's just a wall of noise." A more dangerous technique, "spoofing," affects the Automatic Identification System (AIS). Every ship transmits, every second on a universal radio frequency, a message announcing its identity, its destination, and... its position. Spoofing manipulates this system: the affected vessel sends an erroneous, or even impossible, position: container ships end up on screen on land in Iran or the Emirates... Today, the GPS signal is not only used to determine positioning, it also powers the onboard clocks, radar, and speedometer, explains Katherine Dunn. Even if ships stranded off the coast of the Emirates or Kuwait were protected from drones and escorted through the Strait of Hormuz, navigating without GPS would remain perilous: "Given the size of the ships, electronic aids have become necessary for maneuvering them," says a merchant marine captain who has piloted container ships in the world's oceans. Crews must therefore "resort to 20th-century tools, such as radar or landmarks," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Intense Electronic Warfare: Jamming undoubtedly comes from both sides, offensively and defensively. Gulf states are directing their systems toward their coasts against Iranian Shahed drones, guided by satellites, at the cost, deemed acceptable, of disrupting their daily lives. This is what the Israelis decided in 2024, and the Iranians after the 12-day war. For air and sea operations, startups are developing alternative navigation technologies, using Earth's magnetic field or inertial navigation. But for current fleets of ships, navigating without GPS remains a distant future.