On a haul road in the Pilbara, the Atacama or the copper belts of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, GPS underpins dispatch, fleet management and autonomous haulage. When it fails, trucks drop off live maps, drill accuracy slips and safety systems misfire. That risk is rarely treated as adversarial. Yet GPS interference is cheap and portable, and a spoofed or jammed signal at site level would degrade productivity, corrupt data and introduce safety exposure. Neil Cawse’s point is straightforward: for mining, GPS failure is not hypothetical. The issue is operational resilience when it happens – Alejandro Gonzalez, editor.

On Christmas Day 2024, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 lost its GPS signal while approaching Grozny, Russia. Moments later, the aircraft was struck by a Russian air defense missile that could no longer properly identify the aircraft as a commercial flight. Thirty-eight people died. It was the disaster that aviation experts had been warning about for years – and it happened anyway.

Today, GPS jamming and spoofing incidents around the world number in the thousands daily. In the first months of 2026, more than 122,000 commercial flights have been affected, while in the Persian Gulf, signal interference disrupted more than 10,000 vessels – ships have reported navigation systems placing them at airports, nuclear power plants, and ports they never went near.

This is the new face of modern conflict – and it is reshaping the way every global business must think about system resilience.

Technology has rewritten the rules of war

The conflicts across the Middle East and Ukraine have changed the relationship between military technology and civilian infrastructure. GPS jamming was once a classified capability deployed by superpowers; now it is used at every level, from armed groups to truck drivers for the price of a cheap meal.

During the Israel-Iran conflict of June 2025, Israel used aggressive GPS jamming to degrade Iranian precision-strike capabilities, and by month’s end Iran had formally deactivated GPS nationwide. Since the beginning of March, strategic GPS jamming has escalated to next-level intensity, causing major disruption to shipping and aviation.

For companies that move goods, operate fleets, or depend on real-time visibility, this is no longer somebody else’s problem: when GPS fails, vehicles can disappear from live maps, route optimization breaks down, and compliance systems start throwing flags for things that never happened.

The cost of a full-scale GPS outage to the U.S. economy alone has been estimated at $1 billion per day. But the more insidious threat is the gradual loss of trust in the positioning data that underpins modern logistics: the era of assuming GPS will work everywhere, all the time is over.

A framework for resilience

To maintain the integrity of global supply chains, the technology industry must move towards an approach that treats satellite positioning as one of many inputs. Core requirements for a resilient, logistics dependent business must include:

Native threat detection. Hardware should be able to detect and flag jamming as it happens. If interference is invisible, failure is often invisible too. The first step is knowing you have a problem.

Operational continuity. Businesses still need visibility when satellite signals drop out. Losing GPS should not mean losing sight of vehicle health or driver safety. The sky may go dark; the ground should not disappear with it.

Sensor fusion and dead reckoning. The answer to a single point of failure is redundancy. Multi-constellation satellite navigation support can bypass signal interference. Onboard sensors can help systems estimate location when signals are jammed – dead reckoning is

not new, but it becomes very useful very quickly when the map starts making things up.

No-one can solve this alone. Governments need to accelerate signal authentication standards. Industry must embrace multi-sensor positioning as the baseline, not a premium feature. And businesses must demand resilience from their technology partners instead of assuming it is built in.

Last year, fourteen major industry associations, including Airlines for America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called on the US Government to address GPS interference as a growing threat to safety and commerce. They’re right. But the threat extends beyond aviation and shipping to every connected vehicle and every logistics platform that depends on location data.

Sustainable companies will treat resilience as a core design principle built into every device and every decision about how technology meets the physical world. The invisible war on GPS is already under way. The question is not whether it matters to your business, but whether your business is ready for it.