In July, Iran attempted to make good on its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz. Yet the strait had already ceased functioning as reliable commercial infrastructure long before. Since the conflict started, more than 1,100 vessels recorded GPS and AIS interference in a single day, ships appeared on tracking systems at airports or deep inside Iranian territory, and ship crews navigated one of the worlds busiest waterways by radar alone because satellite navigation could no longer be trusted. Iran did more than threaten a chokepoint. It demonstrated what a determined adversary can do to the satellite infrastructure the modern world has taken for granted.
America depends on a second, invisible choke point: the Global Positioning System. GPS timestamps every credit card swipe and equity trade, synchronizes the power grid and cellular networks, and guides combines through fields, container ships into port, and infantry through contested terrain.
That faint signal â engineered in the 1970s in a different time when our enemies weren’t as savvy â now carries the weight of the entire global economy and our military edge. That world is gone. Global aviation logged roughly 430,000 jamming and spoofing incidents in 2024, a sharp 62% increase in a single year. A basic jammer can be built from off-the-shelf parts for a few hundred dollars.
I know what reliable navigation means in combat. As a Ranger, I never thought about GPS in combat. It located my team, guided the aircraft above us, and synchronized fires without ever announcing itself. We took it for granted. Todays service members enjoy no such luxury. We are sending American forces into contested spaces with a vulnerable system designed half a century ago.
No incremental upgrade can fix GPS. Its weakness is physics, not engineering oversight. A satellite in medium Earth orbit broadcasting at limited power will always produce a faint signal at the receiver. A nearby jammer will always overpower it. Military M-Code offers marginal improvements but does not change the fundamental math.
China has drawn the obvious conclusion. The Chinese Communist Party is rapidly expanding next-generation navigation satellites, including low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations that operate closer to Earth, broadcast far stronger signals and are designed with electronic warfare in mind.
Beijing aims to dominate the navigation layer of the 21st-century economy. Congress has noted this shift in unusually blunt terms, stating in last years defense authorization that the United States is falling behind China in satellite navigation.
The solution is not another slow government program. It is emerging from American commercial industry. U.S. companies have designed and launched navigation satellites in domestic factories using private capital. These systems now operate in LEO, delivering signals up to 100 times stronger than GPS.
They resist spoofing by design, provide centimeter-level accuracy, and work with the GPS receivers already installed in millions of aircraft, vehicles, vessels and weapons. A software update is often all it takes to transition equipment America already owns to navigation that can survive attacks.
The Space Force understands this. Earlier this year, it canceled plans for a government-owned “Resilient GPS (R-GPS)” constellation in favor of leveraging commercial services. The fiscal year 2027 defense bill now advancing in the House would require the Air Force to demonstrate capabilities with commercial LEO provid
