UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told

this should end well or a whole new technology invented other than radio waves for data transmission are any satellites using laser downlink yet or is line-of-sight too temperamental with weather and planes?

• cheschire · 15 hours ago

  Let’s launch hard drives back and forth between earth and LEO. Like sneakernet in space.

  • chris_va · 15 hours ago

    never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes reentering the atmosphere

    • ErroneousBosh · 10 hours ago

      I have just decommed an old datacentre that we're moving out of and this is basically what my 30-year-old travel-worn farm truck Range Rover looks like right now.

    • saltcured · 10 hours ago

      The hard part is getting an IO card with built-in hardware decelerator

  • ck2 · 15 hours ago

    railgun microSD but seriously, the first spy satellites used to drop film rolls and they had a crazy way for the military to track and catch them via planes * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)

    • jasomill · 1 hour ago

      What's crazier is that there was a similar system to retrieve people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery...

  • pixl97 · 15 hours ago

    Been there, done that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite) They'd drop their film back down to earth.

  • GolfPopper · 15 hours ago

    U.S. spy satellites were returning film payloads to Earth as late as 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon

    • a4isms · 14 hours ago

      That was the McGuffin for the 1963 book "Ice Station Zebra" (and the 1968 film adaptation). A satellite with pictures of every missile launch site in the US malfunctions and is knocked off its planned orbit that would overfly the Soviet Union, so the race is on to figure out where they would drop the film and prevent them from recovering it. The story was based on a real-life incident in 1959: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverer_2

  • someonebaggy · 14 hours ago

    If they're heavy enough, it doubles as a space fountain.

• pixl97 · 15 hours ago

  I mean isn't space X testing satellites with sat to sat lasers? In that case you don't need to ground lasers, you just beam the data where you have unjammed communications with the cost of higher latency.

  • LorenDB · 15 hours ago

    More than testing. That is their primary on-orbit link method for Starlink satellites as of 2.5 years ago: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming...

• exe34 · 15 hours ago

  Neutrinos

  • Kevcmk · 14 hours ago

    Gravitational waves

• notahacker · 14 hours ago

  Laser links for satellites work fine, but if you're up against a 10 year old spy satellite or you're selectively jamming their SAR (radar imaging) or GLONASS positioning rather than their comms...

In terms of international game theory, this is entirely expected. No action would be the anomaly.

> Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said daily lives depend on satellites that power everyday technologies like mobile phones and banking apps, adding the loss of GPS would cost the UK economy £1.4bn a day. Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"

• tene80i · 14 hours ago

  Why is it strange? Millions of people use banking apps daily to make transactions essential to their lives and businesses.

  • boredatoms · 14 hours ago

    Why does a banking app require GPS?

    • nickweb · 14 hours ago

      GPS relies on very very accurate timing. I would wager that the timing side of GPS is used more than the positioning side - but I have no way of confirming that. Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).

      • O3marchnative · 14 hours ago

        That makes the issue worse as the actual app/device likely just relies on querying some NTP pool for accurate time. Then that would mean the actual stratum 1 servers are not working right.

      • ChocolateGod · 14 hours ago

        I wouldn't be surprised if financial institutions use GPS for time keeping. It's more accurate than getting it from a NTP pool.

    • someonebaggy · 14 hours ago

      It doesn't. They're making shit up.

    • itsafarqueue · 14 hours ago

      To track you

    • autoexec · 14 hours ago

      Data collection and targeted advertising

    • vallerie · 14 hours ago

      - The UK is an island nation - In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK - Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.

      • autoexec · 13 hours ago

        Those cloud hosts like AWS have infrastructure in the UK and a UK bank's data should already be there for performance reasons (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/reg... ). I can't promise that amazon has taken into account the possibility of not being able to phone home to the US, but I would hope an undersea cable cut is something they'd have already given serious consideration to. Cuts do happen every so often. Scandinavia in particular has seen several disruptions because of cable cuts. Either way, it's a bit of leap to go from "We need to jam other countries satellites to protect your banking app" to "but what if the UK lost every satellite, and every undersea cable was cut, and all the local data centers and internet infrastructure in the UK stopped working!"

      • Melatonic · 13 hours ago

        Pretty sure there's no way current satellites can even get close to the bandwidth of satellite links. Also isn't GPS always wireless ?

    • fiftyacorn · 14 hours ago

      Security - checking your not accessing it in UK one minute and australia the next minute Some bank apps can block this access or request more validation

  • notahacker · 14 hours ago

    It's also a favourite stat of the UK space industry that a large percentage of UK GDP is vaguely linked to space in some way, and "some of your financial transactions touch a satellite uplink or require location data" is one of the more tangible non-obvious ones.

  • autoexec · 14 hours ago

    Those apps can all be replaced by a website, and most banks already have those websites, which means if all the banking apps on earth stopped working right now the solution wouldn't involve anything more complicated than stabbing your finger at different icon on your phone and typing the name of your bank into a search engine.

    • foldr · 14 hours ago

      That’s beyond about 90% of the population.

    • vallerie · 14 hours ago

      not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?

      • autoexec · 14 hours ago

        > not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better? The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?

        • vallerie · 14 hours ago

          The UK is an island nation that's reliant on undersea cables. If those cables are cut (which is something that Russia seems to threaten) your only fallback is satellite connectivity - so protecting that connectivity is pretty key to ensuring e.g people can access their money. I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).

          • QDwQ1 · 14 hours ago

            ideally British banks would have their infrastructure located in Britain and therefore would not rely on undersea cables

            • vallerie · 14 hours ago

              Monzo (a major UK bank) use AWS and GCP. Hopefully their DCs don't fail in some way when losing access to the outside world but I would hazard a guess something goes wrong. https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...

        • mylies43 · 14 hours ago

          Thats the point, the reasons the apps dont work would be the same reason the websites dont work. They are not work around, I think apps is just mentioned because 90% of people use them over the website

        • someonebaggy · 14 hours ago

          Banking apps don't depend on satellites, either.

    • mcintyre1994 · 13 hours ago

      There are very few things that would cause banking apps to stop working while their websites continue to function.

      • autoexec · 13 hours ago

        Presumably it'd be the loss of mobile service and/or GPS that would cause every banking app in the UK to fail, but I'm a bit skeptical that either one of those is a strict requirement.

    • thesmtsolver2 · 13 hours ago

      I think this comment is the tech equivalent of "if they can't eat bread, let them eat cake"

      • autoexec · 13 hours ago

        That would imply that somehow a bank's website was a less accessible option than the app is, when the app is dependent on a mobile device as opposed to the website which is avilable on virtually any device with a browser including the same mobile device the app is installed on.

  • 0x1ch · 14 hours ago

    It's not and it's also not uniquely a British thing either. Most of my friends and myself use our phones as wallets, in the US. The only time I use my physical cards is to pull cash from the ATM, ha.

    • asplake · 14 hours ago

      In my household, we refer to coins as “parking tokens”.

      • 0x1ch · 14 hours ago

        I should start calling my jar of quarters the "laundry tokens" haha.

      • ChrisRR · 43 minutes ago

        Trolley tokens for me. I just keep a couple of quid in my car for supermarkets that need a coin for the trolley

• jameshart · 14 hours ago

  In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.

  • bigyabai · 14 hours ago

    That's going to be a problem when the UK faces sustained service disruption attacks. Building fragile systems like this during peacetime is usually an ill-informed bet.

    • pmg101 · 14 hours ago

      Surely one of the great dividends of being at peace is not having to live like you're at war?

      • someonebaggy · 14 hours ago

        I didn't realise only people at war used cash

      • bigyabai · 14 hours ago

        Rather the opposite. Peacetime is the only good opportunity to promote robustness and refuse toleration of vulnerable systems. If you allow your banks and courts to be hacked freely by an adversary, then you can be manipulated into losing control of the escalation ladder.

      • JumpCrisscross · 13 hours ago

        We’re not at nor heading towards peace. Pax Americana is failing. There isn’t a hippies-and-unicorns exist from that structure, not in a disorderly way.

    • autoexec · 14 hours ago

      At the very least the idea of a population fearing for their future if an app doesn't work is frankly horrifying. In the case of banking apps there are already multiple, simple, well established, and widely supported alternatives to using the app available to them, but that should really be the case for anything actually critical an app provides.

  • autoexec · 14 hours ago

    All of that can be handed via your bank's website, ATMs, a credit card, or even (god forbid) writing a cheque.

    • jameshart · 14 hours ago

      All of which (except the cheque, which we can ignore - nobody in the UK has a chequebook any more) depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.

      • autoexec · 14 hours ago

        > All of which...depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does. That being the internet, which in the vast majority of cases doesn't depend on satellites either. Wifi, fiber, coax, and copper would continue to work just fine.

    • carlosjobim · 14 hours ago

      Do people write cheques in the UK?

      • baliex · 14 hours ago

        No

      • TedDoesntTalk · 14 hours ago

        Or checks?

        • jameshart · 13 hours ago

          Certainly not spelt (or spelled) like that.

      • autoexec · 14 hours ago

        There are several companies in the UK offering cheque cashing services so I presume somebody there is getting them.

      • mcintyre1994 · 13 hours ago

        I’m in my early 30s and I don’t think I’ve ever written one. When I had my first bank account when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now. I did recently receive a cheque for $12.99 or something like that from an Amazon settlement that I think is probably legitimate. Apparently Monzo can cash a cheque through their app so I’ll try that at some point. I’m guessing it won’t work with an international one though.

        • autoexec · 13 hours ago

          > when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now. I'm guessing you'd walk into your bank and ask for one. You can probably order one from their app somewhere.

        • rebolek · 13 hours ago

          I’m older (not in UK, in EU) and cheques are something weird from old movies. Never seen one in real life and concept is really strange.

        • dylan604 · 13 hours ago

          A couple of years ago during lockdown, I was working with someone definitely qualifying as a boomer, to start up an e-commerce site for him. He was proudly showing me his ledger book of checks that he had to shell out $200 to receive while declining a debit card. On a couple of occasions, I went with him to get cash by driving to a bank branch, writing a check, and having the teller cash it for him. It took months to convince him that he absolutely needed a debit card when people were constantly asking if they could use Venmo/CashApp/etc to pay for products. So we're still in a transitional stage where some people are still stuck on using checks.

          • autoexec · 13 hours ago

            At least I see them being used less often in stores. Also how on earth was he paying $200 for checks? You can get them for < $15. Here's a book with a fish on it, and a ledger, and a cover for under $25 https://www.checks.com/p/856/wonders-of-the-sea-checks

            • esseph · 12 hours ago

              Check processing I think, not writing them

              • dylan604 · 12 hours ago

                No, the ~$200 fee was for the book ledger and blank checks. I have no idea what kind of monthly fees the bank was charging for the account. He was also getting raked over the coals on his merchant account to process credit cards because it was deemed a high risk business so most reputable places would not accept the business.

            • dylan604 · 12 hours ago

              Man, don't get me started. However, business accounts are more expensive than regular accounts. Also, why are you surprised that a bank has found a way to charge more fees?

    • pixeljam · 14 hours ago

      A lot of banks in the UK have mobile-app-exclusive features / services. I imagine this is because of security, but it also makes little sense. If you don't have a smartphone it is about 5x harder to do anything online-banking related here. I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card. Also, cool username =)

      • autoexec · 13 hours ago

        > I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card. Not even over the phone? I'd be furious. Cell phones die, get lost, get stolen, get run over, etc. I'd personally hate to feel so entirely dependent on my phone being there 100% of the time. I don't even always carry mine with me.

    • dukeyukey · 10 hours ago

      I imagine that if all banking apps go down as a result of war then bank websites, credit cards, basically any other digital financial thing will also be down.

  • b112 · 13 hours ago

    If you're bored, have Claude pull apart your APK and do a privacy report. Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate. Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble. After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.

    • jameshart · 13 hours ago

      What does this have to do with the claim at hand which is ‘we need to keep our comms infrastructure secure because critical things like the primary way our population conducts economic transactions depend upon it’? That you find the population’s choice to use such mechanisms questionable, or that you think it is foolhardy to do so, does nothing to disobligate the government from trying to keep that infrastructure up and running.

      • staplers · 13 hours ago

        I think they are pointing out it's an oxymoron. There's nothing to secure if the service itself is insecure and leaking..

        • TallGuyShort · 13 hours ago

          It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.

          • b112 · 13 hours ago

            High potential for compromise? No, the point is that every single transaction you make is being sold on the open market, that's the problem. Using cash prevents this. Using debit cards, credit cards, banking apps ensures this. The banks provide the data anonymized , but then provide means to de-anonymize it.

            • TallGuyShort · 13 hours ago

              You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

      • b112 · 13 hours ago

        The point more is, this is one primary mechanism to spy on the populous. Primarily via 5-eyes, which means Americans are buying this data to spy on UK citizens.

    • TallGuyShort · 13 hours ago

      So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here? Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily. Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.

      • autoexec · 13 hours ago

        Digital banking might be unavoidable but what did your app do that you couldn't have possibly done via your banks website?

        • TallGuyShort · 13 hours ago

          You know, I didn't rush my laptop to the vet with me. If you're going to argue with the "mobile phones and banking app" line to this extent, I will freely admit: yes, if you want to be a Luddite, satellites are indeed unnecessary. You are absolutely right. But still not convincing me that's a weird thing for them call out here.

          • b112 · 13 hours ago

            Realistically, paying your mortgage isn't giving any data a credit pull wouldn't. It's not a secret you live where you do. And one off emergencies aren't the problem. It's foregoing cash for every single thing you do. That, combined with the telco selling data, Google linking that data to the number, and apps such as your banking app working in this same ecosystem, and companies such as Yodlee, your profile has a minute by minute location, plus what you spend and where. It lets intelligence agencies, buying this data, create links between people. Who you know. Who you talk to. Where you go. What your hobbies are. This gives the power of manipulation, for knowing who you are in the real world, combined with what you do online, means they know you better than you know yourself. And that's quite important, if you want to manipulate opinion. All this may not matter to you, and if so, that's fine. But this data is, quite frankly, what gives the Americans the power they have. The Americans aren't mighty due to guns, and weapons, and an army. They are mighty because of information . Information is how you send a mere 40 dudes to kidnap the President and his wife from Venezuela. Information is how drone strikes perform targetted attacks. Information is how you manipulate elections in foreign countries. It's the sort of power that means you don't even have to fire a shot, to overthrow a government. This information is what modern banking, and its apps, and companies such as Yodlee give to the Americans. And as a Canadian, with the Americans blathering on about 51st state this and that, I am perhaps over sensitive to this fact. Because the last thing we need, is to give Americans power over us. Any power. Even the tiniest bit. And information? Is more powerful than anything else they have.

            • TallGuyShort · 13 hours ago

              You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

              • b112 · 13 hours ago

                It's OK. You can talk about things tangential to the main thread. It happens all the time on HN. And I'm not blaming you for anything. My frustration is likely just showing, on this specific topic.

  • AngryData · 3 hours ago

    Which is why I think it is a stupid idea for a society to go cashless. They are just asking for a complete economic collapse if anything goes wrong with telecomms.

    • ChrisRR · 46 minutes ago

      If anything goes wrong with telecoms, no-one will be able to take money out of a cash machine anyway

• someonebaggy · 14 hours ago

  The UK's largest export is banking (i.e. money laundering).

  • AnimalMuppet · 12 hours ago

    Hate to break this to you, but not all banking is money laundering. Not even all banking in the UK. Not even all banking exported from the UK.

    • someonebaggy · 12 hours ago

      You don't need another country to export your ordinary banking.

• rolymath · 14 hours ago

  Not a strange thing at all. London sees itself as the competitor for the finance capital of the world. Why would you think it's strange?

• foldr · 14 hours ago

  https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cutting-edge-timing-techn...

  • autoexec · 12 hours ago

    The US has ROCkN https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/robust-optical-clock... but that seems to be just for military use

• brightball · 14 hours ago

  Just read the article and the conclusion was that they're using ground based systems to disrupt other countries satellites that are targeting the UK, not the one's that those countries depend on for their own internal services.

  • autoexec · 13 hours ago

    I guess the question is what does "targeting the UK" look like exactly? Flying over it? Flying over it with a camera? They call out "tracking the movement of the UK's nuclear armed submarines or other sensitive military operations, such as those involving special forces." but that could mean they jam military satellites that are doing that, or it could mean they're jamming satellites that might be capable of doing that. What would that mean for something like a weather satellite?

• lloydatkinson · 14 hours ago

  TIL my banking app goes via satellite internet /s I have no idea what that quote is trying to say...

• TallGuyShort · 13 hours ago

  Look, I'm a big believer in the importance of cash as an option in our society and the importance of keeping a supply on-hand for emergencies, but my mortgage company, employer, and a lot of other financial concerns are hours away from me, so yeah - my banking app is pretty fucking important to my daily life, and I don't even live in the UK where they have embraced digital banking even more. It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.

  • autoexec · 13 hours ago

    Is there something on your banking app that you couldn't do by browsing to your banks website?

    • TallGuyShort · 13 hours ago

      Asbolutely. Tap to pay options, and the better ones have stopped pushing SMS for 2FA and they will prefer their own apps over third-party ones. JPMC, Capital One and E-Trade (now Morgan Stanley) definitely all do this.

      • autoexec · 13 hours ago

        Tap to pay is also doable with a credit/debit card, but paying via phone is a legitimately useful feature although also not remotely critical or something that would be world ending if it were disrupted.

    • dukeyukey · 10 hours ago

      I work for a UK fintech that is bank-adjacent, the backend for the apps and the website are the same.

• dukeyukey · 10 hours ago

  If banking went down we'd have a hell of a time. It's not like I keep 6 months rent in cash on me.

• ChrisRR · 47 minutes ago

  How do you not think banking apps are useful?

I thought after 60,000 feet MSL a country's airspace ends. So, who's the UK actually attacking?

• nradov · 14 hours ago

  This is not an attack. The satellites aren't being damaged.

  • someonebaggy · 14 hours ago

    Someone tell that to DDOS

  • jareklupinski · 13 hours ago

    nothing to see here; orbit on

• 8note · 12 hours ago

  UK is under russian attack. same with canada, germany, sweden, etc.

one step closer to star wars

Given the “Hybrid” attacks in Europe originating with Russia, the Houthi’s and Iran taking shots at shipping and the likelihood that certain countries are feeding Iran some of the intel… this is pretty understandable. Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable. It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.

It should be standard practice to use radio jammers and dazzling lasers against every non-allied foreign satellite that passes over our territory, or any of our military bases or warships. Why give them a free look?

• gwbas1c · 14 hours ago

  Because that is one of the methods used to verify that everyone is complying with treaties, such as nuclear non-proliferation treaties.

  • nradov · 14 hours ago

    Unfortunately it's a little too late for that, those treaties are effectively dead anyway. Not a good situation but that is our reality.

• throwaway27448 · 12 hours ago

  It's a waste of money for no benefit to anyone but the military and its industrial parasites?

  • nradov · 9 hours ago

    If only that were true. The world would be a much better place if we only had to deal with waste caused by the military-industrial complex. But the unfortunate reality is that a desperate and expansionist Russia represents a serious threat. They need to be aggressively confronted and contained in every domain, including space.

    • throwaway27448 · 2 hours ago

      > But the unfortunate reality is that a desperate and expansionist Russia represents a serious threat. No, they do not. Attacking nato is suicidal behavior. Pretending like the war with ukraine is "expansionist" in intent instead of establishing a sphere of influence is just disingenuous. Was it stupid? Yes. Does it mean Russia is going to invade poland? Fuck no. Stop reading propaganda. You're smarter than your leaders. Act like it!

• dylan604 · 12 hours ago

  When I moved to the west coast, I was looking at the history and how cities like Burbank lived under a tarp cover that when viewed from the air looked nothing like the city/airport that they were covering. The fear of another Pearl Harbor like attack was that great. Plus, all of that cool shade while denying the enemy!!

Presumably when World War 3 kicks off the very first thing each adversary will do is knock out their opponents satellites? These are like flying lightbulbs that shine down usefulness from above, so step one is to cut the lights. Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup? Perhaps the answer is that every tank has a 10lb inertial navigation gyro or some other thingy in it as a backup, and the platoon around it uses the tank as a moving trig point? In that case I can see it being infeasible to deploy that for civilians. Perhaps-squared it’s just economics — GPS is cool and cheap now, so why burn profit margin on developing an alternative?

• para_parolu · 13 hours ago

  We may have enough satellite imagery to build visual place recognition system. Geoguesst but for tanks

  • toast0 · 13 hours ago

    There's a bunch of stuff for using terrain to figure out where you are [1], generally used for missiles and planes though, not sure if works well from a ground perspective. On the ground, you might be able to use the broadcast positioning system: more or less GPS but instead of satellites, the broadcast signal comes from existing TV towers... TV towers may well be targetted at some point in a war, but there's likely more valuable targets at the beginning of a war. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM [2] https://www.gps.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/CGSICMeeting...

    • JumpCrisscross · 13 hours ago

      I’d assume one of the things you’d do in anticipation of a war of space-denial scale it bomb your own landscapes a bit for this reason.

• vrganj · 13 hours ago

  That and cut undersea cables. Russia has been messing around with them for a while now.

  • chinathrow · 13 hours ago

    They are actively training for shit, it sure looks like. Same with other sabotage acts all over Europe in the last couple of years.

    • huurtehoog · 13 hours ago

      Doesn't make any sense to have merchants dragging anchor in active war. These actions are meeting their goals, not serving as preparation.

      • dchest · 13 hours ago

        https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/nato-allies-foil-russia...

        • huurtehoog · 12 hours ago

          Yeah I know I'm talking about it being training for war time anchor dragging. It's entirely clear that they cut cables and intend to cut more. It's not training, it's current aggression.

      • mschuster91 · 12 hours ago

        Plausible deniability, it's what Russia has done long before the little freen men invaded Ukraine in 2014.

        • FlowingRiver · 7 hours ago

          Its like directly addressing a compulsive liar. They know, that we know what they are doing but they will never admit it to us.

• louthy · 13 hours ago

  I’m sure we’ll go back to beacons [1] here in the UK ”Using fire to signify a message is thousands of years old. The earliest use of beacons in the UK dates back to the medieval period, primarily as a means of communication to warn of impending invasions or other dangers. Positioned on hilltops and along coastlines, these beacons were part of an early warning system signalling the presence of a threat, such as an approaching enemy fleet. One of the most famous early examples is the network of beacons used during the Spanish Armada in 1588. As around 150 Spanish battleships approached, beacons were lit along the southern coast of England, from Cornwall to London. As a result of this rudimentary but effective system Lord Francis Drake had the time to mobilise the country’s defences and defeat the Spanish fleet before they were able to reach the English shore.” [1] https://www.paintersforstal.co.uk/news/the-history-of-beacon...

  • dmoy · 12 hours ago

    150 battleships? Pretty sure the Spanish Armada was <150 total ships, of which only a small subset would be the big galleon things. (And then my knowledge hits a wall, idk what the difference between a galleon and ship-of-the-line/battleship is) I'm not sure how much to trust the rest of that website.

    • louthy · 12 hours ago

      I think it was around 130, but yeah, perhaps a better source was needed. The beacons were real though!

  • FridayoLeary · 12 hours ago

    I think you mean Sir Francis Drake.

    • louthy · 12 hours ago

      They’re not my words, but yes, you are correct.

• PJDK · 13 hours ago

  I think the general assumption is GPS is denied in most combat zones, it's constantly being jammed in and around Ukraine. For most things the fallback is going to be everything we used to use. Maps, stellar navigation, inertial navigation that sort of thing. Guided weapons wise, terrain mapping is pretty common for cruise missiles. Storm Shadow, for example uses GPS, terrain and inertial guidance systems. Trident uses inertia and stellar navigation. As for why it hasn't proliferated into civilian use? Mostly it has its just the old things. You can perfectly well drive your car with a road map and sign posts. Pilots still train to use dead reckoning and beacons. Etc.

  • xyzzy_plugh · 12 hours ago

    Actually it hasn't proliferated into civilian use because the military industrial complex has captured pretty much anything with real accuracy. I had an old colleague who in a previous life worked on an incredibly accurate positioning system that was effectively a brief case that knew where it was at all times. The story he told was the DoD made them an offer they couldn't refuse, and everything became secret. I'm pretty sure the company in question is still in business. I'm not trying to say it's not legal but it might not exactly be legal?

    • buran77 · 11 hours ago

      > the military industrial complex has captured pretty much anything with real accuracy Real accuracy is a matter of application. For mainstream civilian use the 20-30cm offered by Galileo/GPS is beyond real accuracy. It gets even better for specialized civilian use or with the aid of differential GNSS (low single digit cm). You'd have to think real hard for a reason to need better precision on a global scale especially if that involves any extra cost. Can't say how much of a priority accurate positioning would be for civilians during an armed conflict.

  • stult · 11 hours ago

    We also have visual navigation systems that can use satellite imagery to produce guidance packages. They will become increasingly less useful the longer the imagery goes without updates after a Kessler syndrome type event, though. Another strategy, which I believe the Ukrainians have been experimenting with, is scattering small radio beacons throughout the battlespace to provide a network of navigation aids. In a true Kessler scenario where LEO is denied for an extended period of time, I expect a variation of that strategy is how we would replace GPS for most civilian use cases. Likely by using cell towers to triangulate, possibly enhanced with additional transmitters to improve accuracy and coverage. Pure cell tower triangulation would have much worse coverage than GPS, obviously especially in rural areas where cell service is often already poor, but also anywhere that getting a signal from multiple towers isn't easy or possible. Cell towers are never distant enough to use the relativity-based timing tricks GPS relies on, so multiple signals would be required to triangulate. We'd likely end up with substantially less precise positioning, maybe something more on the order of the 10-20m of error we used to see with GPS before the US stopped limiting civilian access to the deaccuratized version. Cell tower triangulation also obviously doesn't work for aviation or oceanic shipping, where trident-like inertial+stellar nav would probably be the only workable option.

    • wildzzz · 5 hours ago

      Luckily, GNSS satellites sit in MEO with sufficient altitude between the various systems. GPS would survive a Kessler Syndrome.

  • 1e1a · 10 hours ago

    see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM for localization by matching altimeter measurements to a terrain map

  • SJC_Hacker · 8 hours ago

    GPS is generally jammed close to the target, to varying degrees. For intermediate guidance out of range of jammers it works fairly well

• huurtehoog · 13 hours ago

  Maps, compass, and celestial navigation.

• fragmede · 13 hours ago

  > Presumably when World War 3 kicks off That presumes we're not already in it. When historians 100 years from now look back on this period, what's going to be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? What's going to be the Reichstag fire of 2027?

  • nostrademons · 12 hours ago

    Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Iran/US are going to be looked at as the precursors to WW3, the same way that the Sino-Japanese War, Spanish Civil War, and Sudetenland Crisis were the precursors to WW2 and the Russo-Japanese War, Moroccan Crisis, and Balkan Wars were the precursors to WW1.

  • dofm · 8 hours ago

    Fiona Hill has said some time back that she believes we are already fighting World War 3 with Russia. https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/may/10/...

  • FlowingRiver · 7 hours ago

    We aren't there yet but one can definitely see the run up in action.

• nradov · 12 hours ago

  Right, in future conflicts between major countries the satellites will be first casualties. The US military is aware of this and still trains personnel on analog navigation techniques. Inertial navigation works well for some missions and research is underway on alternative technologies. Civil airliners can still navigate without GPS, although this may reduce safety and increase workload. https://interestingengineering.com/military/us-military-nail... We're also going to need a prompt launch capability to replace attrition losses. There should be warehouses full of spare navigation, reconnaissance, and communications satellites ready to mount on a reusable booster and launch within hours. Concerns have been raised over a "Kessler syndrome" due to orbital debris but in lower orbits with significant atmospheric drag this won't be a serious problem.

  • conorcleary · 12 hours ago

    The truth was the first casualty.

  • wahern · 11 hours ago

    IIRC, the Navy stopped teaching officers traditional ship navigation methods for awhile, until the series of incredibly stupid incidents drew attention to the lack of basic navigation and piloting skills, then curriculums were partly reverted. Not sure if things have improved much; probably too early to tell. I doubt officers or crew would ever have to resort to a sextant, but that's besides the point. It's the type of thing that's integral to learning navigation theory and building tacit knowledge that's fundamental to the job. EDIT: 2016 article discussing restoration of traditional navigation instruction: https://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-bac...

    • dylan604 · 6 hours ago

      Are they still using iPads to control the ship?

  • pchristensen · 11 hours ago

    Reminds me of in the Avengers - SHIELD couldn't navigate the helicarrier, and Nick Fury said "Is the sun setting? Then put it on our left!"

    • FlowingRiver · 8 hours ago

      This is the easiest trick technique for figuring out vaguely north/south direction. Take an analog watch. Say it is 9am, point the 12pm/midday point of the watch at the horizon directly below the sun, the half way distance between the hour hand and 12pm is the fairly close direction of the pole. So in that case, the 10:30am point would be the pole. In the northern hemisphere it points South, in Southern hemisphere it points North. EDIT : The Wikihow article shows it better. https://www.wikihow.com/Use-an-Analog-Watch-as-a-Compass It is an old Army/SAS trick for keeping baring without a compass.

      • jasomill · 4 hours ago

        This reminds me of this scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when they're trying to figure out whether Hamlet knows a hawk from a handsaw by the direction of the wind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf0erXl4pwQ

• pinkmuffinere · 12 hours ago

  > Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup? Once a stealth technology is integrated into civilian life, it's no longer stealth, and you lose the element of surprise if you have to use it in warfare. If somebody _does_ feel they have a clever secret work-around, the incentive is pretty high to keep it a secret.

  • FlowingRiver · 8 hours ago

    Exactly, a notable time military tech has been deployed in public in full would be the TOR network. That was done to provide enough noise on the network to hide its purpose/make difficult to track.

• mschuster91 · 12 hours ago

  GPS has relatively few satellites... but if in doubt, I think Starlink with its absurdly large fleet of satellites can be used as an alternative. Maybe not at a precision level good enough for precision farming, but good enough to roughly guide troops to where they need to go. Modern cruise missiles and stuff like Storm Shadow, Taurus etc. already rely on sensor fusion - GPS, inertial navigation, radar, optics and probably a ton more to always keep track of the position. Assuming Starlink is a no-show for whatever reason, airliners and ships will have to revert back to stationary navigation aids aka your good old light towers and radio beacons.

  • andylynch · 12 hours ago

    I works assume if/when something really kicks off the starlink and starshield networks would be high priority targets. (I’m mildly curious what their ground stations in Central Europe look like from this perspective).

    • mschuster91 · 10 hours ago

      That's the thing, to take down any of the megaconstellations you need thousands of antisat weapons and that's just one constellation. Not sure about the competitors but at least for Starlink their laser links should provide ample fallback for ground stations going out of service.

      • sm0rad · 5 hours ago

        Just a few destroyed satellites would likely produce enough debris to take out everything else in orbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...

• nostrademons · 12 hours ago

  There's technology now that matches local satellite/aerial images against the imagery that a drone or cruise missile sees to replace the GPS chip. For fairly obvious reasons, militaries that have it would rather it stay in their hands, for fear of creating a non-state peer competitor that can do cheap long-range strikes on strategic targets. It's fairly likely it'll fall into private hands anyway though, because anyone who can afford the prices for commercial satellite imagery could build such a thing.

  • FlowingRiver · 8 hours ago

    So long as the targeted area is limited, you only need imagery data for set routes/areas and can keep local data pools reasonable. Can already see the poor headlines of "Snapdragon chips used to bomb schools!"

• 8note · 12 hours ago

  you can see from russia's response to losing starlink, that the answer is sending people out to die bringing a radio repeater to put into a tree

• esseph · 12 hours ago

  > Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? ... Star navigation, INS, magnetic navigation... But nothing like we have today.

  • saltcured · 10 hours ago

    And conventional recon folks on the ground with target-illuminating lasers..?

• ryukoposting · 11 hours ago

  The US military has been funding plenty of projects related to what it calls Alt-PNT, or "alternative position, navigation, and timing" systems. I imagine other nations have invested in this as well. Which systems are actually getting deployed, and in what pieces of equipment? No idea, I imagine that's super duper classified.

• scottyah · 11 hours ago

  Knock out? no, best option is to have them all pre-hacked and send out spoofed data at the most desired times, especially if you knew what weapon systems were relying on them. Knocking out the satellites is like flipping the table in chess, you'd only do it if you were pretty sure you had no chance of winning because everyone else in the tournament won't like it. The duopoly-based cold war is over and those winner-take-all tactics were what drove USA policymakers to try so hard to get China to play on the world stage.

  • FlowingRiver · 8 hours ago

    You could have the GPS constantly changing in the same way as time sensitive rolling key authenticators work. Without the base private key, you wouldn't be able to decode it in time. So it remains functional for those that need it but becomes useless, actively works against those without it.

• ErroneousBosh · 10 hours ago

  > why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup? https://shop.osmaps.com/

• dotBen · 10 hours ago

  You may be right, but if that happens the resultant space debris will serve as an additional terrible outcome of any major conflict. We will have to kiss goodbye to any future space launches, existing satellites are likely to get knocked out and ultimately our frontier space era will grind to a hault. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

  • extraduder_ire · 9 hours ago

    You pretty much have to do this to knock out starlink (or similar constellations in future). There's so many currently deployed and they can be launched with such cadence that knocking them all out isn't feasible.

• eddyfromtheblok · 10 hours ago

  we don't use the word WAR anymore. it's uncouth. it's CONFLICT now. they'll call this the era of the Great International Technology Conflict or Technology Hostilities.

  • FlowingRiver · 7 hours ago

    We prefer the terms, spice diplomacy, proactive landscaping, aggressive cultural exchange or unplanned synergy meeting.

• bethekidyouwant · 9 hours ago

  I mean if you have a phone you can just use the cell towers..

• FlowingRiver · 8 hours ago

  A few months back Vertisium did a decent run down on how Russians are testing GPS blocking satellites over Europe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA

• PlunderBunny · 5 hours ago

  Didn’t Apple do something with triangulation of known WiFi hotspots in the days before the iPhone had GPS?

It’s probably trying to disrupt the Russian GPS jamming satellites. Veritasium did a video on it recently https://youtu.be/tz23G_UXCGA

has UK declared war on someone already?

does anyone know what exactly they are jamming? if a satellite spies on cellular and wifi activity, can you directionally jam it on that spectrum without causing collateral? if it's an active frequency hopping radar can you react in time to ruin its image? can a ground based laser track it well enough to dazzle its optical sensors?

• hylaride · 10 hours ago

  Most satellite signals are high frequency, but low power (it's amazing how little power you need for a LoS radio signal). So generally they're easy to overwhelm, especially as GPS receiving antennas tend to be multi-directional. GPS transmits on several fixed frequencies and is relatively bitrate, too. The military signals are apparently more robust, but full details are more scarce.

  • teravor · 7 hours ago

    the article mentions that satellites are being jammed as they move above Britain, what does GPS have to do with it? GPS jamming is for recievers.

I think military should offer solution that is reasonable instead of finding problem and jamming everything.

For the love of God, nobody wants to invade the United Kingdom. What is this for?

• cedws · 7 hours ago

  There’s been talk of Russia potentially attacking a NATO country within weeks. The way the media have coordinated in saying this leads me to believe this has come from intelligence and they’re trying to prepare us.

  • wildzzz · 5 hours ago

    And that country would probably be Poland. Russian hardliners want to reunite the USSR of which Poland was a member state. Plus Poland is the greatest threat to Kaliningrad.

    • Panzerschrek · 3 hours ago

      > reunite the USSR of which Poland was a member state It wasn't. Poland was formally independent country, but practically under control of Moscow.