​In Rules of Engagement by Ward Larsen, the Secretary of Commerce is killed in a plane crash in Turkey when the navigation systems are compromised by a meaconing attack. It’s a chilling techno-thriller setup that feels unlikely in real life. But the present terrifying reality is that the scenario Larsen described is currently happening in the skies over the Baltic and the shipping lanes of the Middle East.

​Our modern world is built on signals beamed from satellites 20,000 kilometers away. We trust those signals to guide our planes, time our financial markets, and keep our power grids synchronized. But that foundation is crumbling. We’ve entered the era of the weaponized GPS, where the signals we rely on are being hijacked, delayed, and falsified by state actors and criminal syndicates alike.

​The FragilITY of GPS

​To understand the danger, you first have to understand how incredibly weak a GPS signal actually is. By the time a signal from a GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) satellite reaches your phone or a plane’s cockpit receiver, its power is roughly equivalent to looking at a 25-watt lightbulb from several hundred miles away. It arrives at a level significantly below the ambient noise of the universe.

​Because these signals are so faint, they are remarkably easy to drown out. A jammer doesn’t need to be sophisticated; it just needs to be loud. But jamming is the blunt instrument of navigational warfare. The real nightmare, the one that brings down planes and lures ships into capture, is spoofing.

​Beyond Jamming: The Carry-Off Attack

​Jamming deafens the receiver, whereas spoofing deceives the receiver.

​In a sophisticated carry-off attack, an adversary starts by broadcasting a counterfeit signal that perfectly matches the legitimate one the receiver is already tracking. Once they’ve synchronized, they slowly increase the power of the fake signal. The receiver’s tracking loops, designed to lock onto the strongest source, latch onto the attacker’s signal without the pilot or navigator ever seeing a warning light.

​Once the attacker has control, they can pull the position away from reality. They can make a plane think it is five miles to the left of its actual corridor, or make a ship believe it is in deep water when it is actually heading for a reef.

​The Rules of Engagement Scenario in the Real World

​In Larsen’s book, the aircraft is downed via meaconing. Technically, meaconing is a subset of spoofing where an attacker intercepts a real signal and rebroadcasts it with a slight delay. This makes the receiver calculate a position based on the attacker’s antenna rather than the satellite.

​We are seeing this play out right now in the Baltic Sea. Since late 2024, the Russian Tobol electronic warfare network in Kaliningrad has been creating massive denial-of-access zones. In October 2024 alone, researchers detected 84 hours of continuous GNSS interference. More than 1,100 flights a day were being affected by August of that year.

​But the most real example of this danger occurred in May 2025 with the MSC Antonia. While transiting the Red Sea, the container ship was hit with a spoofing attack so precise that the crew believed they were safely in the channel. In reality, they were being lured toward hazardous shallows. The resulting grounding cost millions in damages and required a five-week salvage operation.

​From Cargo Theft to Financial Chaos

​Navigational warfare isn’t limited to the battlefield. The democratization of this technology means that the same tools used by the Russian military are now in the hands of organized crime.

Digital Hijacking: In Europe and Asia, cargo thieves have moved beyond jamming (which triggers alarms) to Spoofing-as-a-Service. They place a small device near a truck’s antenna that feeds the dispatcher a fake location. While the dashboard shows the truck moving along its approved route, the thieves are actually driving the cargo to a location miles away.

The Precision Timing Crisis: Perhaps the scariest vulnerability is time. High-frequency trading (HFT) platforms use GPS timestamps to synchronize orders. A time spoofing attack could offset an exchange’s clock by just a few milliseconds, allowing an attacker to see prices before they are officially recorded, essentially skimming the global economy or triggering a spoof-triggered flash crash.

​The Counter-Offensive

​Slowly, the world is realizing that GPS is a single point of failure. The defense against this is being built on three pillars:

1. ​Galileo OSNMA: The EU’s Galileo system recently activated Open Service Navigation Message Authentication. It uses cryptographic digital signatures to prove a signal actually comes from space. It’s a massive step forward, though researchers have already found Time Synchronization vulnerabilities that sophisticated attackers might exploit.
2. ​LEO PNT: Companies like Xona Space Systems are launching satellites into Low Earth Orbit. Because they are 20 times closer to Earth than traditional GPS, their signals are 100 times stronger and much harder to jam.
3. ​The eLORAN Resurgence: In a classic back to the future move, countries are returning to terrestrial, ground-based navigation. eLORAN uses massive towers to broadcast low-frequency pulses that are nearly unjammable. South Korea and the UK are leading the way, realizing that a sovereign, ground-based backup is the only way to ensure stability when the satellites go dark.

​Conclusion

​For decades, we’ve treated GPS as an immutable truth. Ward Larsen’s Rules of Engagement serves as a warning, but the reality is that the warning comes too late. Attacks are already happening.

​Navigational integrity is already a strategic battleground. In a world of autonomous drones and self-driving logistics, our reliance on these signals will only grow. If we cannot verify the where and the when of our world, we lose the ability to safely operate within it. In an era where a $200 radio can disrupt GPS reliability, we must do more to secure it and to provide redundancy.