America runs on GPS. It needs a backup plan

Most Americans think GPS merely provides directions: open the map, follow the blue dot and get where you need to go. But that’s just the consumer application. The national security applications of GPS are much bigger and more consequential. Unless the U.S. government makes this system of satellites surrounding the globe more resilient, however, adversaries can disrupt or falsify information, putting American security and productivity at risk. 

GPS helps aircraft, ships, trucks, emergency responders and military units know where they are. Just as important, it provides precise timing that helps communications networks, power grids, transportation and financial systems stay synchronized. 

GPS doesn’t have the visibility of pipelines, airports, power plants or banks. But it sits quietly beneath (and above) many of those functions. Simply put, GPS technology is one of the critical dependencies that makes modern life work – and our adversaries know it. 

Here’s the point that Washington has to absorb: our adversaries do not need to blow up satellites to exploit American dependence on GPS. Threat actors can target signals, confuse receivers or corrupt timing sources – and the consequences can be severe. If timing becomes unreliable, telecommunications can suffer, financial transactions can lose traceability, power grid operators can lose precision and transportation systems can be crippled.

Jamming is a daily reality in the Baltic Sea, where the Russian military blocks GPS signals across NATO territory so persistently that Finland’s national airline was forced to temporarily suspend flights to Estonia in early 2024. In 2023, spoofed signals sent pilots of at least 20 civilian aircraft flying dangerously close to Iranian airspace without clearance, a scenario that could easily have triggered an international incident. 

The United States still operates the world’s premier GPS system. But legacy leadership is not a maintenance plan. GPS modernization plans have dragged for years and the Department of Transportation lacks a strategic plan to prioritize GPS resilience efforts even as the country’s dependence on GPS has grown. That gap should make policymakers extremely uncomfortable.

For years, the answer was supposed to be the Next Generation Operational Control System, known as OCX. But the Space Force terminated the program in April, saying it could not deliver needed capabilities on an operationally relevant timeline at an acceptable level of operational and technical risk to existing GPS operations. 

Washington cannot afford to shrug that off. The program failed. The requirement did not. The country still needs secure GPS command-and-control, better cyber and jamming resilience, and faster integration of advanced capabilities.

The United States should embark on a three-pronged prioritized GPS upgrade, starting with completing the transition to modernized GPS signals. The L5 signal is an advanced civilian satellite frequency that delivers significantly higher power, wider bandwidth and superior resistance to jamming and spoofing interference compared to legacy bands. It is optimized for safety-critical uses like aviation. 

That does not make L5 invulnerable; no signal is. But it gives users a stronger, more resilient foundation than continued reliance on legacy bands alone. L5 satellites are already in orbit, but their benefits remain largely theoretical as few devices are equipped to receive and utilize it. The federal government needs to validate the “health” of the L5 signal so that civilians and the military can use it. 

The second priority is command and control – the nerve center of the entire GPS system.  The U.S. needs ground systems that can securely operate the GPS constellation, support modern signals, and respond to cyber and electronic warfare threats. The United States needs to upgrade legacy ground control and global monitoring systems and decentralize ground control networks so that they can function and mitigate threats independently. 

The third priority is backup Positioning, Navigation and Timing, the collection of technologies and systems that underpin GPS and satellite networks, and where Washington’s failure is hardest to excuse. Congress already directed the Department of Transportation to establish, sustain and operate a resilient and reliable alternative timing system to complement and back up GPS timing. The law specifically aims to ensure uncorrupted and non-degraded timing signals for military and civilian users when GPS timing is corrupted, degraded, unreliable or unavailable. More than six years on, that backup system still doesn’t exist – DOT has run pilot demonstrations, issued studies and floated timelines, but has yet to build, sustain or operate anything resembling the resilient system Congress ordered.

Space Policy Directive-7 already states that U.S. satellite navigation must support national security, public safety, business and science. It also demands stronger, more secure satellite signals that are harder to jam or spoof. The directive is a strong starting point, but the government needs to act more quickly, hold leaders accountable and actually build it.

GPS is too useful, too exposed and too embedded to remain a single point of failure for critical functions. These updates would push operators to understand where they depend on GPS, what happens when it fails and what alternative timing or navigation sources can keep essential functions running. The goal should be to make GPS stronger while making the country less brittle when GPS is jammed, spoofed, degraded or unavailable.America cannot wait for a major GPS disruption to find out which parts of the economy, military and critical infrastructure fail first without it.

Johanna “Jo” Yang is a policy analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ (FDD’s) Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, where she works on issues related to nation-state cyber threats, allied cybersecurity posture, critical infrastructure protection, and U.S. cybersecurity policy. For more analysis from the authors and CCTI, please subscribe HERE. Follow Jo on X @JohannaYang_. Follow FDD on X @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.