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What’s new: An experienced and distinguished mariner at Kings College, London, reinforcing warnings about GNSS interference and shipping.
Why its important: Interference with GNSS has already caused:
- Collisions at sea
- Ship groundings
- Environmental damage
- Shipboard fires & injuries
- Deaths in aviation
What else to know:
- The war/conflict/attacks in the Persian Gulf, of which GPS jamming and spoofing have been a big part, have closed down the Strait of Hormuz and increased to visibility of maritime impacts. Though, this piece was undoubtedly written before that all began.
- Tomorrow we will post another article about Russian submarines and jamming in the Baltic.
- The author is a retired French naval officer at a British college. France and the UK are cooperating on an eLoran system that ships will be able to use in the English Channel and North Sea to complement and backup GNSS.
Shipping is sleepwalking to a satellite navigation disaster
Global satellite navigation interference will cause an Exxon Valdez-style incident unless the world wakes up to the threat
For years, commercial shipping has treated satellite navigation the way it treats electricity in a hotel room: invisible, dependable and someone else’s problem. That era is over.
GNSS — Global Navigation Satellite System — interference has shifted from an occasional inconvenience to a routine operational condition in many parts of the world. And the industry’s response remains, at best, casual: a few bridge anecdotes, a shrug and the confidence that: “It’ll come back.”
It won’t. Not reliably, and not soon.
What can you do? How can you help?
PNT is the quiet backbone of everything — power, finance, transportation, defense. Too many leaders still don’t see the risk.
But you do.
You understand the systems, the dependencies, the failure chains. That insight is rare — and it’s exactly what your country needs.
So speak up.
Reach out to government leaders, industry decision‑makers, and your fellow citizens.
Show them why resilient PNT isn’t a feature — it’s the necessary foundation.
And when you get a response, tell us. Every conversation strengthens the mission.
