Opinion: China has an off-switch for America, and we aren’t ready to deal with it. – The Hill

May 26, 2025

Written by Editor

Image: Shutterstock

What’s new: Increasing concern about the vulnerability of almost all of America’s infrastructure  – not just GPS.

Why it’s important: It highlights how fragile systems have become without adequate protections for primary systems or backups if they fail.

What else to know: GPS’s vulnerability and America’s over-reliance on it did not occur in a vacuum. It is part of a larger pattern of striving for greater and greater efficiencies at the expense of robustness and resilience, and perhaps over-confidence being the sole global superpower for decades.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

China has an off-switch for America, and we aren’t ready to deal with it.

Imagine waking up tomorrow and your phone has no signal. Your smart home isn’t working. Your Ring camera is offline. You get in your car, but your GPS won’t route. Worse, every traffic light in town is out. Intersections are a mess of blaring horns and confusion. Sirens echo in the distance. You drive to an ATM, hoping to grab some cash. The screen flickers, then goes black. It’s not just your neighborhood. It’s not just your state. The entire nation has gone dark.
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PNT is the quiet backbone of everything but 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 right now. Contact your government leaders and industry decision-makers and tell them resilient PNT isn’t a feature — it’s the foundation everything else depends on.

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