GPS jamming and spoofing

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.

Elon Musk personally disabled Starlink coverage over Crimea to abort a Ukrainian drone strike on the Russian Black Sea Fleet. A war was shaped by a single CEO's decision over a private network.

On the morning of the Ukraine invasion, a cyberattack attributed to Russia bricked tens of thousands of European satellite modems — including those operating German wind farms — within minutes.

India destroys its Microsat-R in orbit, joining the small club of states that have demonstrated a kinetic ASAT capability. NASA criticises the resulting debris cloud, some of which crosses the orbit of the ISS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

President Clinton switches off Selective Availability. Civilian GPS accuracy improves tenfold overnight. The button, of course, remains in American hands.

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.

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.

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.

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.