Russia Jammed GPS During Major NATO Military Exercise With US Troops (cnn.com)

The Russian military jammed GPS signals during a major NATO military exercise in Norway that involved thousands of US and NATO troops, the alliance said Wednesday, citing the Norwegian government. From a report: The NATO exercise, Trident Juncture, concluded Sunday and involved some 50,000 personnel. It was labeled the alliance's largest exercise since the Cold War. Non-NATO members Finland and Sweden also participated in the exercise. A spokesperson for the Norwegian ministry of defense acknowledged the jamming to CNN, which it said took place between October 16 and November 7, and said it would defer to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on further questions to Russian authorities.

"Norway has determined that Russia was responsible for jamming GPS signals in the Kola Peninsula during Exercise Trident Juncture. Finland has expressed concern over possible jamming in Lapland," NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu told CNN Wednesday. "In view of the civilian usage of GPS, jamming of this sort is dangerous, disruptive and irresponsible," she added. Asked about the report of Russian jamming, NATO's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance was aware of the reports but did not offer additional information. "We have seen there have been similar reports from Norway, and I cannot share more precise information with you," Stoltenberg said Sunday at a news conference marking the end of Trident Juncture.

Comments

Helpful

[Aero77]

It was nice of Russia to make the exercises more realistic.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, soldiers must be able to navigate with paper maps too.

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[Pascal Sartoretti]

It was nice of Russia to make the exercises more realistic.

It makes no sense. If Russia has the ability to do this, of course they wouldn't show it during a NATO exercise.

Or maybe they can do 1'000 times more damages and want to hide it from NATO.

Or maybe they want NATO to believe this, and they showed all they could.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahahha.... LOL...!

My exact same thinking.

They want to practice for war...Right? Why not do it with the real foe jamming your signals? Even more successful if the Russian interference did not break their exercise.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It was nice of Russia to make the exercises more realistic.

It makes no sense. If Russia has the ability to do this, of course they wouldn't show it during a NATO exercise.

Or maybe they can do 1'000 times more damages and want to hide it from NATO.

Or maybe they want NATO to believe this, and they showed all they could.

Or maybe you don't know what you're talking about.

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[dunkelfalke]

Come on, what ability are you talking about?
Even petty criminals can jam GPS. The signal is so weak you can build a jammer yourself or even order one on ebay if you are too lazy.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps we, or a friendly, successfully tested a way to jam GPS in a way that looks like Russia did it.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Kudos to them for added realism.
It was also a test of jamming capabilities.

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[registrations_suck]

Sure. But plenty of equipment and armament is designed to be deployed with a GPS requirement. Does not matter if you know where you are if your missile cannot figure it out.

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[myth24601]

In a real conflict, wouldn't it be fairly easy to pinpoint the location of the jamming source and direct a strike on it?

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[Anonymous Coward]

If Russia has the ability to do this,

Everyone has the ability to do this. There is no "if" involved. Signal jamming is easy, especially if you only want to jam a single known band.
All those FCC regulations on your wifi router that Slashdotters find an offensive infringement on their right to overload the airwaves? Those exist to reduce accidental "jamming" of nearby signal bands.

All you need is an antenna and a bigger power supply than the signal you want to overload. With GPS, the signal strength is pretty low by the time it reaches human activities, so you could jam a large area with a car battery, a bit of frequency conversion, and a metal post.

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[Type44Q]

Indeed, that was suspiciously generous of them to reveal their capabilities like that...

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[Micah NC]

Ha. Actually I'm a little surprised they divulged they had that capability.

Unless it was like, "C'mon guys, war is never going to actually break out so we're just going to show off."

Despite all the US spends on military craft ... not feeling real safe.

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[Type44Q]

It makes no sense. If Russia has the ability to do this, of course they wouldn't show it during a NATO exercise.

Holy shit, as I live and breathe... an actual non-idiot.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It's no secret that GPS can be jammed. I agree that if anything they improved the exercises for NATO.

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[Streetlight]

Use many multiple jamming devices. And when your defensive response (GPS guided weaponry) require GPS and there is no GPS signal...

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[Nutria]

Emitting white noise at high power from directional antennae on a fixed set of frequencies isn't anything new or remarkable.

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[Anonymous Coward]

The F'in point is that if this were real war, do you think they would not be jamming GPS? This just shows the Govts involved in the exercise that they had better not rely solely on GPS during a time of war.

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[Anonymous Coward]

so we should ask Russia not to do that if there's an actual conflict so our missiles can still hit them?

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[Nutria]

We've had home-on-jam HARM missiles for a long time. And we have a lot of them.

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[registrations_suck]

The F'in point is that if this were real war,....

That wasn't the point I was responding to, which was that soldiers should be able to navigate with a map.

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[magarity]

Come on, what ability are you talking about?
Even petty criminals can jam GPS. The signal is so weak you can build a jammer yourself or even order one on ebay if you are too lazy.

Maybe you mean "nearby vehicles" or "in a theater" but WTF order a jammer on eBay to jam gps for Norway??

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[Archtech]

In a real conflict, wouldn't it be fairly easy to pinpoint the location of the jamming source and direct a strike on it?

In the first place no, it wouldn't be fairly easy to pinpoint the location of the jamming source,

In the second place, "directing strikes" is what Western armed forces do when they have invaded some poor country without proper defences or weapons. "Directing strikes" against sites that may well be inside Russia itself would be an act of war; and Russian military doctrine is that direct attacks on Russia itself will be met with a nuclear response.

So if you want to be hit with an unstoppable nuclear missile, go ahead.

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[pgmrdlm]

The artillery rounds are designed to operate in GPS-denied environments. The U.S. Army's artillery is set to receive a new round of upgrades that will allow artillerymen to conduct precision fire missions without the use of GPS. ... The U.S. military's reliance on the GPS network makes that network an attractive target.

Do missiles use GPS? Today guided weapons can use a combination of INS, GPS and radar terrain mapping to achieve extremely high levels of accuracy such as that found in modern cruise missiles.

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[Immerman]

If soldiers can't navigate with a map, it doesn't much matter what else doesn't work - they'll be useless in any war against an even vaguely symmetric opponent.

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[Archtech]

From TFA:

"Norway has determined that Russia was responsible for jamming GPS signals in the Kola Peninsula..."

Er, has anyone realised that the Kola Peninsula lies wholly inside Russia?

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[hey!]

This reminds me of a friend of mine in high school who was... well interesting. Tony was into cryptozoology, pyramid power, orgone energy and all that sort of thing. One day he informed me he'd built a working UFO detection alarm, following directions he'd got from one of the ufologist magazines he subscribed to (this was before the Internet).

"How do you know it actually works?" I asked.

"Because it goes off all the time," Tony said.

The moral of the story is that it's easy to convince yourself that something you built works. But to have rational confidence in something, you've got to have some kind of independent empirical confirmation. The Russians built a system to disrupt NATO military use of GPS, but the only way they can know that it would work is to actually disrupt a NATO military exercise.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I don't see the problem. Surely the US and NATO all know that they can jam GPS signals. Like someone else said here, it's actually nice of them to add more realism to the exercise.

The only downside I can possibly see, is if it caused mass confusion, and Russia was all "Yes! FOOLS! We OWN you!", but in that case I'd still want someone to deal with that scenario.

FAST!

Thanks Russia? Why is this news everyone else?!

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[Anonymous Coward]

No. Not even close. You and the gp are simply Russian trolls

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[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. But plenty of equipment and armament is designed to be deployed with a GPS requirement. Does not matter if you know where you are if your missile cannot figure it out.

Perhaps reliance on GPS should be revisited as a potential problem. It's fine for the kind of wars the US prefers to fight: asymmetric warfare against a much less technologically advanced opponent. But on the odd chance the US would have to fight an advanced nation, that might prove more problematic.

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[dunkelfalke]

My point is, there is nothing difficult about jamming GPS. The signal is so weak, especially in these latitudes, that a 100W jammer probably would be enough to jam GPS in the whole country.
In fact, the power output of the actual GPS satellites is just a few hundred watts and they sit way up high with the resulting power loss.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe you have a too much tinfoil in your hat.
Russia is an ally of the American people. Macron is an ally of the corrupt status quo.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Despite all the US spends on military craft ... not feeling real safe.

We better hope they don't have rainmaking technology as well, or the trillion dollar military contractor welfare scam F-35's won't be able to fly...

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[Anonymous Coward]

Jammers are cheaper than HARM missiles.

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[cascadingstylesheet]

It was nice of Russia to make the exercises more realistic.

Well, yeah. Seriously, I'd think they need to be ready for this?

"We'd like to announce that what the enemy did was really unhelpful, and even dangerous"

Oh, well, OK then, that should take care of it ...

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[Opportunist]

Yes.

That way you know the missile is useless in a real scenario. And missiles that only fire in exercises are kinda pointless.

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[Opportunist]

This.

How long do you think high-tech equipment relying on easily destroyed or disabled infrastructure will work in a symmetric war?

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[Anonymous Coward]

A large Norwegian warship worth hundreds of millions actually collided with a cargo ship and sank during the exercise but the Russians were not the cause.

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[Opportunist]

Why? The NATO maneuver served as a show of force. What better thing to do than to answer with one, for a much cheaper price, I might add.

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[magarity]

Indeed, soldiers must be able to navigate with paper maps too.

The exercises were in Norway. Soldiers must navigate with sunstones.

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[Anonymous Coward]

lol why are you freaking out?
GPS is trivial to jam.
GPS is already below the noise threshold, which is why it is so power-hungry when turned on in phones since it requires a signal boost to be useful.
A vehicle battery could jam it in a confined space.
A vehicle motor could jam it in a much larger space.

Enough of them in a region could make GPS-targeted missiles essentially useless, meaning you couldn't even realistically figure out where the jamming is coming from either since you can't really send the drones in to find them. Actually, you probably could if you just make it path-find to the strongest signal it can find until it "hits", in which case it exploded. But that can easily be foiled with redundancy and remote antennae.
This is why so much money is being thrown at image recognition so they can make missiles work based on terrain + motion sensor data, with an initial GPS coordinate to start it off.
We can already do rough calculations of where a person, vehicle or even missile is going when GPS signals are lost, but it starts to lose accuracy pretty sharply after a certain threshold. (I forgot the exact distance)
With image recognition that is actually decent, we could bring the error correction rate well in to GPS levels. (military GPS precision, that is, not consumer level)
But I don't see that happening any time soon.
Current image recognition is stupidly brute-force and hilariously shit. And we're supposedly getting self-driving cars "totally in 2019 guys we promise!!".
Remember those flying cars "totally in 10 years" every 10 years for the past 50~ years? Yeeeeaaaaah. I love my personal flying automobile! (admittedly flying cars is not reeeeally a tech issue, more a regulations issue, they are entirely doable, but still!)
I'll not go behind a self-driving vehicles wheels any time soon, that's for fucking sure!
When it takes a piece of tape to turn a stop sign in to 80mph zone, you know it's not happening any time soon!
The very ideas being used by most of these companies are horribly flawed. They don't work. They are not proper intelligent recognition. They can't reason or reconsider. And if you have something that is self-modifying, OH BOY you better make sure it doesn't break ITSELF. We're not even close to that yet. That facet of machine learning created a whole job role itself.
These companies test ideals and just barely real-world scenarios. The problem with that is you can't realistically do real-world tests without potentially causing actual crashes. You need to either rent a road at the graveyard hours where only delivery and the occasional cars are out and about, use "dead" roads, or you build very costly test roads. But said test roads are exactly that, artificial. Unless you can easily replicate the actual scenes experienced on proper roads, it isn't going to be real-world! Constantly having to change the roads to test out new ideas becomes tiresome very quickly. So it ends up falling back to using real roads.
So you have patrols with drivers around it just so nobody potentially gets past and causes issues. That way you can test out real-world scenarios in a pseudo-closed space between the cars. (which might still end in a collision, so it is still bad anyway!)
BUT, doing it at night means it isn't getting a good idea of day-light activity either. AHH
It's the drug testing problem all over again. You can't just play dice with lives unless it is the absolute last thing they can do to potentially survive, and they give consent.
A semi alternative is you can just drive a car around manually, have the algo watching and give you suggestions for actions, and you can either say it was good or bad and make it learn from that.
Downside to that is it takes a metric fuckton longer to learn it.
Google, if they don't do it already, could put said software in with their Google Streetview vehicles and have a person control that system while another drives around.

Re:Helpful

[Opportunist]

A HARM missile? Depending on the model that thing costs between 250k and 800k. Building a jammer costs a tiny fraction of that price.

If you are stupid enough to do that, I sink you with the cost to wage that war.

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[Zero__Kelvin]

You seem to be under the impression that they have some capability that nobody knew about until now. Slashdot really has become a bad charicature of its former self.

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[Opportunist]

Excuse me, what did they reveal? That they can jam a weak signal? Sorry, I didn't know this was a state secret.

What they revealed was that quite a bit of the NATO equipment relies far too much on working GPS. For that PR blunder in what was the biggest military exercise since the end of the cold war, you can reveal the secret that you can do what anyone could since WW2.

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[Lab Rat Jason]

My money is on the fact that Russia thought they could embarrass NATO by foiling their exercise with a simple GPS jammer... they then sheepishly shrugged their shoulders when it didn't work.

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[NormalVisual]

I'd have thought for an exercise like that, NATO would have been jamming it themselves for realism.

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[DamnOregonian]

Said the idiot.

Yes, if the Great Russia Federation had the advanced capabilities required to block a -130 dBm radio signal, they certainly wouldn't show it off during a NATO exercise. Such high power transmitting must remain secret until the opportune moment, when you can spring it upon the Capitalist pig dogs, who never ever saw the eventuality of a nation on this earth being able to summon the terrifying raw power required to drown out watts of power transmitted at over 12,000 miles away. As I live and fucking breathe! Praise the motherland!

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[Anonymous Coward]

You got modded as funny but this is actually true. Pretty stupid of them to help us out like this, realtime conditions like this are more realistic and only help NATO improve.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Boris isn't going to be in a rowboat with a GPS jammer. It will be attached to a military platform of some type.

It's also risky to transmit anything as it tends to give away your position.

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[Opportunist]

It's more likely to be some sort of Russian technology (read: Cheap Chinese crap attached to a car battery). In true Russian fashion built by the millions and liberally distributed throughout the countryside.

Good hunting!

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[nitehawk214]

I think that proves that even with GPS, modern navies can't navigate.

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[cheesybagel]

In case of a real war against Russia they would shoot down GPS satellites, not just jam them.

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[fustakrakich]

in a way that looks like Russia did it.

*cough*

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[schweini]

I don't get how jamming GPS is so easy?
If I\d encase the receiver's antenna with a type of metal bowl that opens to the top, so that only signals coming from the sky can be received - how could anything earth-based interfere or jam the signal coming from GPS satellites?

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[Freischutz]

If Russia has the ability to do this,

Everyone has the ability to do this. There is no "if" involved. Signal jamming is easy, especially if you only want to jam a single known band. All those FCC regulations on your wifi router that Slashdotters find an offensive infringement on their right to overload the airwaves? Those exist to reduce accidental "jamming" of nearby signal bands.

All you need is an antenna and a bigger power supply than the signal you want to overload. With GPS, the signal strength is pretty low by the time it reaches human activities, so you could jam a large area with a car battery, a bit of frequency conversion, and a metal post.

I have to say that it was awful nice of the Russians to give us this demonstration of how easily everything form simple navigation to weapons targeting can be disastrously disrupted due to our over-reliance on GPS instead of springing it on us in the opening phases of a shooting war. Without Russias kind assistance it might have been a lot harder to obtain funds from the politicians for preemptive improvements and the procurement of less vulnerable systems. This, and their hacking efforts along with disruptions of drone guidance signals, along with their downright dangerous jamming of civilian air traffic systems comms and air traffic radars will result ins some very swift and comprehensive upgrades to these systems.

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[nehumanuscrede]

" In the first place no, it wouldn't be fairly easy to pinpoint the location of the jamming source "

Easier than you may realize.

Between ships and aircraft outfitted with the right antenna arrays to satellite based systems, if you fire up a transmitter we can build an AOU small enough to send several cruise missiles your way to say hello.

The spooky people use to send us targeting data based on this stuff so we could incorporate it into the bigger picture of whatever region we were operating in at the time.

These systems have been in use for a long time and, over the years, have likely become far more accurate than the original hardware.

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[smooth wombat]

It was nice of Russia to make the exercises more realistic.

The same thing is happening in Ukraine. With all the Russian jamming devices sent in to help the terrorists, NATO and others are taking their own equipment to the battlefield to see how things work as well as sucking up all the information they can on how to minimize or counter the jamming.

It's almost as if Putin didn't think things through when he invaded another country, what with over 3,000 Russian soldiers dead so far, and has to support a peninsula which has no water source or ability to supply its own power.

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[fustakrakich]

If I\d encase the receiver's antenna with a type of metal bowl that opens to the top...

I don't know. Do those things really work?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Saw a documentary talking about INS and how current public knowledge is that a hyper-sonic missile can have single digit meter final target accuracy, zig-zagging through a mountain range with a bee-line range of several hundreds of KM. Not sure anything other than INS is actually needed except for redundancy and initial positioning.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, soldiers must be able to navigate with paper maps too.

Uh, much like civilian communications, we rely on GPS for a HELL of a lot more than getting a human from point A to point B, which every military member who's ever been through Pathfinder school can attest we still train troops using plenty of "old-school" methods (compass, printed maps, sun, etc.)

The real problem with jamming GPS is high-speed communications links that rely on a very accurate timing source, and a local time source may not be good enough to maintain a solid connection.

And let's hold off on pointing fingers at the military as to why they haven't fixed this problem yet. We civilians have PLENTY of similar issues (e.g. BGP and DNS security) that have been going on for literally decades. Some things are not easy to fix.

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[Anonymous Coward]

All those FCC regulations on your wifi router that Slashdotters find an offensive infringement on their right to overload the airwaves?

Correction: The problem is that ham-handed FCC regs combined with lazy manufacturers means that FOSS alternative firmwares get blocked. That is what I find offensive. I have no beef with the FCC saying that you shouldn't overload airwaves.

Those exist to reduce accidental "jamming" of nearby signal bands.

Hmno, if it was only "accidental jamming" they could've done it a tad differently. Requiring lock-down goes a little farther than a fence to avoid an accidental mis-step.

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[DamnOregonian]

You can buy a fucking GPS jammer off of alibaba.
If you're bored, you can build one for $20.
If you're determined, you can go ahead and build one with a wide area of effect for a reasonable price as well. But warning- they *will* find you.
WTF are you going on about, anyway? Blocking GPS isn't hard, and is expected in any military encounter with any even reasonably advanced adversary.

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[hjf]

No antenna is perfect, and the GPS satellites are 35,000Km away from earth. It's very easy to interfere from a couple km away with relatively low power.

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[k6mfw]

Reminds me talking with a former Marine describing when his squad were "lost" while on a exercise at night, they had maps and compass but were not sure where they were and where to go. One of their team was one guy, not that smart but he can look up at the sky and intuitively figure out the proper direction of travel. He couldn't explain how it did it, in fact couldn't explain anything but had that knowledge of navigation.

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[Strider-]

That would be extremely difficult. The GPS birds are in medium orbit, well above the theoretical range of any known or suspected asat weapon. Furthermore it would put their own network at risk, as it's in similar orbits.

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[k6mfw]

The real problem with jamming GPS is high-speed communications links that rely on a very accurate timing source,

I heard Wall Street uses GPS to coordinate transfers, does this mean jamming GPS can send the US back to Oct 1929?

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[kellymcdonald78]

GPS Sats are not in GEO but a slightly lower orbit ~20,000km

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[DamnOregonian]

Statistical wave propagation and distance squared are working against you. You could block a lot of the jamming, but it's very easy for the jamming to still be far more powerful, on account of it not being 12,000 miles away. GPS already operates with a negative SNR at ground level. It's simply very easy to drown out. Always has been.

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[Anonymous Coward]

In case of a real war against Russia they would shoot down GPS satellites, not just jam them.

Easier to said than done.

Those sat's have orbittal speed about 14,000 km/hour (3888 meters/s) at an altitude of approximately 20,200 km (12,550 miles). That's pretty hard target to hit with any projectile or guidable missile even when the orbit is well known. Not that it could't be done, but it's not easy and cheap feat to pull.

Also as the GPS is being used so much by civilian uses that kind of action would also would not let them escape blaming and PR hit what would follow if they did or even tried that -- regardless if they would try to justify it as an act of war.

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[Anonymous Coward]

What stops someone from giving them new targets to home to that you might not want?

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[loonycyborg]

Wouldn't it be easy for weather, solar flares and other geo effects to interfere with it then?

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[bobbied]

Ha. Actually I'm a little surprised they divulged they had that capability.

I'm not in the least bit surprised that they have this ability, or that they are not trying to hide it. Everybody knows GPS is very easy to disrupt.

I am a little surprised that they decided to up the realism of our exercise and actually do it. But they are obviously turning up the heat and poking at the USA a bit harder of late. I suppose they may be trying to figure out what effect their jamming activities have on our operational responses, what works, what doesn't, but their primary motive likely is just to annoy NATO.

Don't be worried, I'm very sure we are able to operate in such electronic warfare environments. GPS is a convince, but it is hardly the only way to get around or locate friends and foes on the battlefield. We are prepared to work without GPS, as well as deny others the use of GPS signals by skewing location accuracy to suit our purposes.

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[MattskEE]

It's all about ratios. Using a high gain antenna pointing directly at the satellites will improve the signal to jammer ratio. It could improve things by 10x, 100x, even 1000x. Then the jammer just needs to increase its power or focus its signal on the target more narrowly to increase the effective jammer power, and we're back to square one. The jammer has an easier job here because the GPS satellites are further and broadcasting over a wide area and through more atmosphere, the jammer can be closer and more focused, and on a ground or air platform the jammer will have access to higher transmitter power levels per dollar invested.

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[rogoshen1]

Not even remotely a fan of Russia or its president; but .. NATO running wargames that close to Russian territory -- how are the rooskies supposed to interpret that exactly? It's sort of like during the 1960's, we place missiles in Italy and Turkey, and Russia responds by placing their own in Cuba.

If China had a real navy, and started running drills off the coast of Japan, what would the reaction be?

Re: Helpful

[locketine]

Yes

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/impa...

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[bobbied]

You got modded as funny but this is actually true. Pretty stupid of them to help us out like this, realtime conditions like this are more realistic and only help NATO improve.

Maybe their point was to asses NATO's abilities in a GPS denied environment? What still worked? What didn't? Who lost their way? Where there communications disruptions (GPS is used as a time source you know)? Disrupting GPS in the area might generate some interesting information for war planners.

Or, maybe it was just to be annoying...

My vote is on the latter. Ivan has been kind of aggressive and harassing of late with dangerous intercepts of our aircraft and ships operating in or above international waters. I think it was just another way to annoy NATO for geopolitical reasons.

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[amicusNYCL]

Missiles should be able to navigate with a paper map.

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[racermd]

It's not the soldiers with or without maps that are the issue, it's the other equipment that relies on GPS to know where *IT* is so it goes where it's supposed to go or report to the chain-of-command where it is.

That said, for the life of me, I cannot fathom why this would be an issue today. We, as civilians, have known that GPS can be jammed and hacked for quite a while. And the military would have been able to know about this from Red/Blue exercises for a lot longer than that. The question becomes - what have they done to mitigate that attack vector?

If they were smart, they'd use GPS as only one source of location input and use a pool of additional sources to get a consensus. If any one of the sources wildly disagrees with the rest, pitch that data out. This way, if GPS is jammed altogether or, worse, hacked to give an incorrect location, it could be detected and mitigated.

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[link-error]

      Instead of jamming, they would probably inject some errors, i.e. Selective Availability, so systems would still 'think' they have a good signal.

Re:Helpful

[cstacy]

Missiles should be able to navigate with a paper map.

They can! How do you think precision cruise missiles worked prior to the invention of GPS? They have a map, and they use AI ("computer vision") to look at the terrain they are flying over. I remember when this was deployed around 1980.

They also have inertial guidance in the navigation array, of course.

And to cross /. threads here: Some of the folks at the lab where I was working at the time, who invented those vision systems as part of pure basic science research, were concerned about what the technology would be used for. (Of course the funding was from DARPA.)

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[d0rp]

It makes no sense. If Russia has the ability to do this, of course they wouldn't show it during a NATO exercise.

It makes perfect sense that Russia would run their own exercise to test their jamming equipment and gauge NATO's ability to deal with it.

Re:Helpful

[BringsApples]

...the only way they can know that it would work is to actually disrupt a NATO military exercise.M/quote> Nah, they could test this on their own GPS equipment due to the way the jamming works. There's a really good bit of information about it here.

Re:Helpful

[d0rp]

I have to say that it was awful nice of the Russians to give us this demonstration of how easily everything form simple navigation to weapons targeting can be disastrously disrupted due to our over-reliance on GPS

My guess is that they wanted to test the equipment to gauge NATO's ability to deal with the disruption. No point in using jamming equipment if it's not going to be effective (i.e. if they already have redundant systems to prevent this kind of jamming), and you'd want to go back to the drawing board and come up with something more effective.

Re:Helpful

[cstacy]

The Russians built a system to disrupt NATO military use of GPS, but the only way they can know that it would work is to actually disrupt a NATO military exercise.

There is this thing called "Science" and the big feature is that it can make correct predictions. In the case of how electromagnetic energy works, it can predict -- perfectly correctly -- and we know this -- that a trivial device can disrupt GPS. So, NO, testing it is "not the only way to know", except in some existential sense. I mean, it could be that if you turn on a radio transmitter, it doesn't broadcast a signal, but instead opens a quantum vortex from which the interdimensional aliens pop out and annihilate all of humankind.

Russians were just being assholes trying to annoy us.

Meanwhile, the military is not as dependent on GPS as you imagine; the military, which invented GPS, is not that stupid.

Re:Helpful

[s_p_oneil]

TBH, when 1 air force coffee cup costs $1200, they really don't have to do much of anything to sink us with the cost to wage war.

Re:Helpful

[hey!]

I'm assuming they probably tested it on their own equipment first, but that's not a very convincing test. As a civilian you can buy anti-GPS jamming equipment, although some of it requires a security clearance. Presumably the Russians aren't supposed to have the classified stuff, and even if they did it wouldn't necessarily be the same as what the US or NATO military has.

Russians were just being assholes trying to annoy us.

That's quite possibly a contributing motivation, but it doesn't preclude a more pragmatic motivation.

Re:Helpful

[tlhIngan]

My point is, there is nothing difficult about jamming GPS. The signal is so weak, especially in these latitudes, that a 100W jammer probably would be enough to jam GPS in the whole country.
In fact, the power output of the actual GPS satellites is just a few hundred watts and they sit way up high with the resulting power loss.

There are different levels to jamming.

The cheapest of the cheap simply aim to spew crap over the band - these are trivially easy to find and identify and they don't do as good a job as you might think. They work when they desensitize nearby receivers, but you have to to be close. It's basically like having someone shout in your ear. Once you start getting farther away, all you did is raise the noise floor a tiny amount.

Basically, satellite signals are inherently weak. What we do is design coding schemes that actually let us recover a signal that's below the noise floor (which is basically what GPS uses). Through the magic of a correlation receiver you can recover signals buried deep within noise.

The other kind of GPS jammer actually transmits incorrect GPS signals. These are much nastier and can lead things astray unless you compare your received GPS signals against each other.

Re:Helpful

[William Baric]

If missiles require GPS, then they are useless against Russia. The first thing Russians will do if the US attack them is to shoot down all GPS satellites.

Re:Helpful

[ShanghaiBill]

In a real war, they would have their jammers HARMed.

HARM = High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile

But I agree that Russia did NATO a big favor by flipping over their hole cards. We likely learned a lot about where their jammers are located, and how they work. We also got some practice working around the jamming.

Thanks Russia!

Re: Helpful

[Agent0013]

Right, because you can't just drop it off at a gas station bathroom or somewhere. Or tie it to a helium balloon and let it fly away.

Re:Helpful

[Nutria]

I never said it was cheap or cost-efficient. Just that we've had home-on-jammer HARMs for a long time.

Re:Helpful

[Agent0013]

It isn't only the devices that need to know where they are that can be broken by GPS jamming. I remember an article on here a year or a few ago that showed other problems. Even if you revert back to paper maps for navigation, there were systems that would not boot up because they could not get accurate time from the GPS satellites. So, even if they have nothing to do with navigation or location, they can still be built with a dependency on the GPS satellites for correct and accurate time.

Re:Helpful

[Immerman]

I agree. Which made the stories of GPS "hacked" drones in the Middle East a few years ago all the more troubling as it suggests gross incompetence amongst the military leadership. The widespread use of GPS-dependent technology promises to severely undermine the usefulness of our military against real threats, no matter how useful it is for stomping on grossly outmatched combatants. Get everyone accustomed to using a tool that's trivial to disable, and it's going to severely undermine their effectiveness when it's inevitably taken away by a credible opponent - just at the moment where their peak performance is needed most.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

This is part of why it is obvious the Russians are responsible.

Do you think no one else would have noticed if a couple of trailers of Russian military equipment rolled into Poland and started broadcasting?

Re:Helpful

[Freischutz]

I have to say that it was awful nice of the Russians to give us this demonstration of how easily everything form simple navigation to weapons targeting can be disastrously disrupted due to our over-reliance on GPS

My guess is that they wanted to test the equipment to gauge NATO's ability to deal with the disruption. No point in using jamming equipment if it's not going to be effective (i.e. if they already have redundant systems to prevent this kind of jamming), and you'd want to go back to the drawing board and come up with something more effective.

I don't think so because testing this live against opposing forces unnecessarily warns them of your capability. The Russians could have done secret tests deep in the Siberian forests in some military exclusion zone against a simulated opposing force using either civilian equipment or western military grade equipment obtained through third countries like, say, India? who in turn got it from some western country like Israel, for example, that sells hight tech military equipment and weapons to anybody willing to pay. That might have been picked up by western intelligence services but is unlikely to have influenced a western political, military and defence industry hierarchy that is too deeply invested in their existing systems to believe profit reducing intelligence reports about the vulnerabilities of their systems. Just witness the way these people were willing to completely ignore the potential issues with unencrypted command links to US drones in central Asia until the Iranians used that oversight to hack-n-jack the beast of Kandahar. Instead the Russians chose to showcase their capability, in a way that neither the western politicians, their military hierarchy nor the armaments industry can ignore however much they might want to. Western forces have been over-reliant on GPS, especially for weapons guidance for way too long. Jammers like this would be pretty effective against the JDAM for example which reverts to inertial guidance when the GPS is out, come to think of it, if the Russians can 'skew' the GPS signal the JDAM might not even notice and slam down next to the target. A bomb does not have to miss the target most of the time by more than a hundred yards for a $25.000 JDAM kit to be wasted. The whole thing is a bit like that time some Bush White House bozo bragged about the US ability to bug and track Al Quaeda satellite phones, within 24 hours every single Al Quaeda bigwig had dropped of the CIA's radar and vanished into Pakistani tribal country. The lesson here is that if you have an advantage like this, or tracking Al Quaeda satellite phones or decrypting Nazi army, air force and navy communications you don't tell anybody and never do anything to make your capability obvious to the enemy until it is absolutely necessary. Like Napoleon said, Never interrupt the enemy while he is making a mistake.

Re: Helpful

[William Baric]

Considering that since 2009 the US has chosen to have a warmongering attitude toward Russia, it's quite possible Russia did indeed troll NATO.

Re:Helpful

[Shotgun]

Where there jammers are? Just how much energy do you think is require to jam a GPS receiver? They could have small, 10 Watt transmitters strapped to a few drones flying around transmitting randomly at 10k ft. It would totally disrupt a whole nation.

Re:Helpful

[William Baric]

Are you sure it's "Ivan" who is aggressive? I mean NATO (so the US) just made a military exercise right at the border of Russia. Imagine if Russia did the same thing to the US...

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, GPS satellites are over 12,500 miles away and there are about 30 of them. Reaching them with requires a launch from one of very few places on Earth, making the rockets easy to target.

Second, actually destroying one could send out so much debris that it would damage Russia's own GLONASS global positioning constellation.

dom

Re:Helpful

[thegarbz]

They work when they desensitize nearby receivers, but you have to to be close.

You definitely do NOT have to be close.

It's basically like having someone shout in your ear.

Exactly. It's like having someone shout in your ear ... while you're sitting with the otolaryngologist attempting to characterise your age related hearing loss. GPS signals when they reach the surface are in the order of -130dBm The fact that they work at all is a borderline miracle and they drop out constantly by the most trivial and innocent of interference to say nothing of someone actively attempting to block the L1 band.

Once you start getting farther away, all you did is raise the noise floor a tiny amount.

Define further away. Any half way knowledgeable person can produce 500W of noise to interfere with these signals. Now IF these people were at line of sight 21000km away then they already generate just as much noise as as the signal itself. It's unlikely that they would be working from this distance for obvious reasons.

What we do is design coding schemes that actually let us recover a signal that's below the noise floor (which is basically what GPS uses). Through the magic of a correlation receiver you can recover signals buried deep within noise.

There's nothing magic about it. But here's the kicker, that thing you call magic is required just to make the base case work. There most definitely is no assumption that you'll be battling with another transmitter in the L1 band accidental or nefarious. It's why the band is so heavily protected in the first place.

The other kind of GPS jammer actually transmits incorrect GPS signals.

While everything you've said up until this point is wrong, this here is actually the most likely scenario. Transmitting incorrect signals. Incidentally that doesn't make the GP's comment any less relevant. Transmitting incorrect GPS signals is comically trivial. Like download some open source code, run a command and feed the resulting signal from your cheap $40 SDR through an easily built (or bought) amplifier kind of trivial. Heck there were people doing just this during the rise of Pokemon Go just so they don't have to leave the house while they play.

Re:Helpful

[thegarbz]

Where is the sky? If you point a high gain antenna straight up your odds of hitting a satellite are greatly reduced. There's a reason that the best GPS antennas have a 180degree radiation pattern and a gain of 2.

But even if you did point it straight up and even if you did have an incredibly high gain (no antenna is perfect), you're still battling a 500W signal from 21000km away vs a nefarious actor who is likely standing much closer to you.

Before you understand how easy it is to jam a GPS signal you need to appreciate how amazing it is that it works at all given the absolute tiny signals that we are dealing with.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

While that looks impressive on paper, and is a great catchphrase to toss about, it isn't reality. Much of what gets put down on paper is not really a "500 dollar hammer". In many cases they have to mark things down that are classified, in a budget that has to be public. They go with things that are similar. A classified piece of artillery that they use to "hammer" the enemy with might very well be written somewhat tongue in cheek as a hammer in the budget. The military is not really dumb enough to buy a 500 dollar hammer.
 
In other times, something like a flashlight might very well be 500 bucks. Your 20 dollar flashlight is not waterproof to 50 feet, shock tested for mounting on a rifle, or shielded from who knows what with a warranty from the manufacturer for full replacement.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia didn't show us anything, any HAM or electronics tinkerer knows how to jam a GPS signal and those who are non technical can buy one from some site like alibaba for $50

If NATO and their allies have not already prepared for such tactics to be used, then shame on them

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Except this capability is not a secret. The observed response might have been more valuable.

Re: Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus you can set each one to come on for N seconds and then sleep for M minutes, where N and M are random numbers.

Re:Helpful

[benjfowler]

The Russians know that NATO are a defensive alliance only.

The whole "NATO aggression" thing is pure propaganda horse shit; they know it, we know it, everyone knows it, but they still need some fake ass bullshit to justify their unjustifiable rage and entitlement. They're bitter and angry at us for being broad-spectrum better them, so they're literally inventing excuses to feel assaulted and discriminated-against.

Fuck the "feelings" of these shitty, backwards, worthless people.

If they attack us, we'll be ready -- and they'll be sorry. Beyond that, I literally couldn't give a shit WHAT those stupid angry little barbarians think.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Missiles should be able to navigate with a paper map.

They can!

Obligatory The Missile Knows Where It Is

Transcript (shamelessly copy/pasted from elsewhere):

The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.

In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was.

The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice-versa, and by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be, and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.

Re:Helpful

[gurps_npc]

I agree and I do not understand why people think this is 'funny'. I would have called it insightful.

Furthermore, I think we should include this in future training. It is clear that is what we should expect if a real war with a tech power were to occur.

Re:Helpful

[benjfowler]

That won't always be the case.

Re:Helpful

[benjfowler]

Just waiting for somebody to use that Russian slur "pindostanis"...

So far, there's a lot of people rolling out all the shopworn, slightly-racist Russian stereotypes of the West and how it fights its wars.

Stereotypes, which incidentally, lulls them into a false sense of security, and occasionally gets them (literally) blasted off the battlefield.

Re:Helpful

[benjfowler]

Russia has been constantly assaulting the West with constant acts of war for a couple of years now.

In fact, they just admitted their 2016 hack attacks on American and British democracy, as acts of war, as a defence against being sued by the DLC.

So if the West committed an "act of war" now, they'd merely just be evening the score.

Re: Helpful

[benjfowler]

The Russians are stupid backwards-ass hooligans. They're like urban idiots who smash things up and beat people for the sheer fun of it. Because they're stupid, spiteful peasant trash, who just get off on that sort of thing.

Russia does it, simply because they're scum, and simply because they can. It's note more sophisticated than that.

Re:Helpful

[DamnOregonian]

They do it at the borders of NATO all the time.
The fact that they don't have the capability/friends over on this side of the globe (anymore) is hardly relevant.
NATO members in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia are scared shitless of the Russians. Yes, we're all very sure that Ivan is aggressive. NATO was founded because of it.
The alternate pole of NATO was the Warsaw Pact, which collapsed because its members managed to throw the yoke of their masters in Moscow. Your relativism here is fucking nauseating.

Re:Helpful

[DamnOregonian]

They simulate GPS-dark operations on a regular basis. This story is less about how it affected them, and more about the fact that it was done to a sovereign nation with "collateral damage" in time of peace.

Re: Helpful

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

How useful the information is would likely depend on how clever the jamming was. Spewing enough noise to drown out some satellites broadcasting over a fairly wide area from 20,000km away(and not that loudly, I think the power budget for the block III satellites is ~4kw, for everything they do, not just broadcast power) isn't necessarily of much interest; though it might be slightly alarming how many people need a reminder that it isn't exactly difficult.

Exploiting the details of the implementation to allow jamming at power levels and/or duty cycles well below those of naive noisemaking is more interesting. Subtle injection of skew into the time or position results without being caught by any sanity checks is more interesting still.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you only want to let them know, that they better now mess with you, cause you're scared? With NATO bases all around them, isn't that a valid concert from russian side of view? Let them know it will be too costly to fight.

I mean, If your goal is to prevent war, showing your capacity is just another deterrent.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck there were people doing just this during the rise of Pokemon Go just so they don't have to leave the house while they play.

Really? Game cheaters are incredibly inefficient then.
Why bother transmitting a fake gps signal so a receiver sees an engineered position? (Not that easy. Disturbing/disrupting is easy. Simulating 4 satellites with the correct signal delays to a gps device that already known the orbital data for those satellites - that is not trivial.)

It is so much easier to just feed a fake gps data into your apps - without having to transmit and then receive the coordinates. On a pc, you use a fake driver. On a android phone, there are already apps for feeding fake coordinates to other apps. No need to risk punishment for illegal radio transmissions.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're using frickin' laser beams, you can't completely block interfering signals. The concept you describe is a gross oversimplification of a CRPA antenna.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm assuming they probably tested it on their own equipment first, but that's not a very convincing test. As a civilian you can buy anti-GPS jamming equipment, although some of it requires a security clearance.

All you need is willingness to own & operate an illegal device. $50 or so from China. Use a gps near a major road, and see gps blackouts whenever some trucker is fooling his employer's tracking system in order to make interesting detours.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

In a conflict with Russia, they may jam/misdirect from their own satellites. Hitting those is expensive.

For ground-based transmitters, you allocate a missile. Which is why Russia do this in peacetime, when they merely will get a diplomatic protest.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

The military use encrypted GPS signals that theoretically makes it impossible to spoof. Jamming is still a challenge though.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

They can jam civilian GPS which isn't hardened against jamming, Military GPS on the other hand is (supposed to be) hardened against jamming via higher power, frequency hopping, directional antennas, etc. I do have a hard time believing that the Russians would demonstrate their jamming capabilities during an exercise, that would be a little like calling the bank you're about to rob and letting them know that their security guard is sleeping on the job. More likely someones mis-calabrated/faulty equipment was throwing off a bunch of static. It wouldn't be the first time that an expensive piece of military hardware jammed itself/other friendlies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M247_Sergeant_York

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

. Transmitting incorrect GPS signals is comically trivial.

Only for civilian GPS. The military use encrypted GPS to verify it comes from a trusted source.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

But I agree that Russia did NATO a big favor by flipping over their hole cards.

What makes you think that? For all you know they flipped a switch on some cold war tech rotting in some basement just to troll everyone a bit and see the reaction.

Re:Helpful

[Aighearach]

Not only is the signal really weak, but you generally need to talk to a bunch of different satellites at the same time. You'd need a giant apparatus with hundreds of shielded antennas pointing different directions, just to avoid having to make each shield move to track a satellite.

Military systems instead use a bunch of other fancy techniques with encrypted signals and backup navigation methods. GPS is useful, but not so useful that you want every navigation system to weigh 2 tons.

Re:Helpful

[Aighearach]

You could probably do it cheaper if you had an old car stereo and a microwave oven to use for parts.

Re:Helpful

[Aighearach]

What if the jammers cost $1 each (made in China) and an unguided mortar shell costs $400?

Now, add in the differences in mass and volume, and you might get a picture of what it would take.

Oh, and a guided mortar costs $60k.

Re:Helpful

[Aighearach]

Ha. Actually I'm a little surprised they divulged they had that capability.

All of the capabilities that would in danger of being revealed would be how NATO responds to it. That's the part that isn't easy to just calculate based on signal propagation. Stuff that is easily calculated isn't the stuff you keep secret. Operational responses cannot be calculated without gathering intelligence. For example, by turning the jammers on at a time when NATO units would be trying hard to communicate and are in fact practicing their operational responses...

Re:Helpful

[Aighearach]

From TFA:

"Norway has determined that Russia was responsible for jamming GPS signals in the Kola Peninsula..."

Er, has anyone realised that the Kola Peninsula lies wholly inside Russia?

It is called "Continental English," you can't parse the grammar or syntax that precisely. You don't uncover subtleties that way, you only lose the thread.

Re: Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Flamebait

A perfect example of people who hate real evidence. If people believe their bullshit, we are doomed. And this is something we can pin on the democrat faction at this point in time.

Re:Helpful

[Kuruk]

Indeed. Everyone needs to play games to test there military might :)

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

How precise does your nuclear missile really need to be? And precision munitions are nice to have but are certainly not mandatory. We fought plenty of wars before the advent of GPS. And Russia deserves a thank you for providing a realistic scenario. However in recent years the military has created scenarios that included the loss of GPS and other communication channels during the war game. The military is well aware of the threat to the weapons and communications electronic infrastructure and create training scenarios for such situations. In a real war if Russia was to shutdown NATO (the US) GPS signals NATO (the US) would return the favor and the playing field would e equal again.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

you could jam a large area with a car battery, a bit of frequency conversion, and a metal post

I, for one, find it pretty cool that MacGyver posts on Slashdot!

Re:Helpful

[SharpFang]

...and hit a $20 worth of antenna and cable equipment with a several $mln missile. Getting the jammer (1 out of 80) offline for 30 seconds it takes Misha to plug the cable leading to the antenna 300 meters north (then an hour to fix the first one.)

Re:Helpful

[SharpFang]

"How precise does your nuclear missile really need to be?" - Depends. If you want to destroy a city of civilians, not very. If you want to destroy an underground command bunker or nuclear silo, it must have a goddamn pinpoint accuracy.

Re:Helpful

[SharpFang]

Nah, Wall Street is not one entity, it's a plrthora of firms each with own solutions (jealously guarded against the competitor). Some may use GPS. But jamming it you'd only make the others happier.

Re:Helpful

[SharpFang]

Or maybe you just don't understand Russians.

They have a very special sense of humor.

Re: Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was a real war those jamming transmitters would be targetted by anti-radiation missles like HARM.

This was nothing more than childish games.

Re: Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

The block 1 gps satellites weren't finished launching until 1985, The tomahawk cruise missile was in service in 1983 using TERCOM for "precision" (The definition has changed over the years, they were relatively precise for the time) strike based on technology developed in the 60s. They later used DSMAC for better precision. It wasn't until 1993 that they added GPS to the block 3.

Which means all those tomahawks used in the gulf war, probably the most widely known use, didn't have GPS.

Re: Helpful

[Opportunist]

Even better, adjust their broadcasting times to each other so it looks like a military vehicle driving, which could prompt the use of the aforementioned HARM.

Re: Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Happens a lot

Re: Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think there arent alternatives? Gos guided bombs can still be used as âoedumbâ bombs

Re:Helpful

[sabbede]

"Dear Vlad,

Thanks. We were going to have them turn off their GPS to simulate jamming, but as you know a simulation is no substitute for real experience. Besides, we weren't really sure how your jammers worked or what effect they would have, so giving us a chance to see them in action was most helpful.

Sincerely, NATO

P.S., Suck it."

Re: Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, Professor Reasonable, for your scholarly and even-handed insights.

Re: Helpful

[anegg]

Bingo. An adversary is holding war games. You increase a threat or compromise a capability, and observe the effect on your adversaryâ(TM)s behavior. Now you have learned something about your adversary (and they about you), but who gave away more? These are the games militaries play.

Re: Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember reading years ago that the Navy was suspending the requirement that ship captains know spherical trig and other skills to perform manual celestial navigation. Why bother, with satellite guidance? Then, more recently, I heard the Navy was reinstating the requirement. Several infamous collisions of Navy shops with large, firm objects might have something to do with it.

Re: Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG - I bet high-frequency trading depends on satellite clocks to function ... in a real shooting war, this might negatively affect Goldman Sachs revenues. Ergo, we are all safe.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only is the signal really weak, but you generally need to talk to a bunch of different satellites at the same time. You'd need a giant apparatus with hundreds of shielded antennas pointing different directions, just to avoid having to make each shield move to track a satellite.

And yet, this is effectively what they've been doing since the '90s.

Re:Helpful

[Thelasko]

It was nice of Russia to make the exercises more realistic.

It wasn't nice. Most NATO conflicts have been against adversaries with limited capabilities. e.g. no GPS jamming. The Russians haven't been able to gather intelligence on how NATO operates against more advanced adversaries. Jamming the GPS signal allowed the Russians to gather intel on tactics used by NATO in the absence of GPS.

Re:Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

In a real conflict, wouldn't it be fairly easy to pinpoint the location of the jamming source and direct a strike on it?

Sure. We'll just use a smart guided weapon that used GPS...oh, crap.

Re:Helpful

[Agripa]

Instead of jamming, they would probably inject some errors, i.e. Selective Availability, so systems would still 'think' they have a good signal.

Spoofing is much more difficult than jamming military receivers. One reason for the military encryption is authentication to prevent spoofing.

Real war conditions

[Nukenbar]

Sounds like what will really happen in a conflict.

Re:Real war conditions

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia is our friend now. We need not worry about their tactics, my dear comrade. China hasn't stolen this technology yet.

Re:Real war conditions

[MightyYar]

Sounds like what will really happen in a conflict.

Exactly right. In a conflict, all hell would break loose and there would be collateral damage.

When there is no conflict, civilian users of GPS can be forgiven for getting a little steamed if they become "collateral damage".

If NATO wants to simulate a loss of GPS, they can certainly do that without "help".

Re:Real war conditions

[rickb928]

Exactly.

"In view of the civilian usage of GPS, jamming of this sort is dangerous, disruptive and irresponsible,"

War is "dangerous, disruptive and irresponsible (to many)". Losing GPS isn't the worst thing that would happen to the civilian population in actual war.

Re:Real war conditions

[Anonymous Coward]

Comrade, do you need GPS tracker and/or Jammer? We have you covered!

Re:Real war conditions

[MightyYar]

It's mild compared to getting shot down (e.g. Russia shooting down MH17) . But in peacetime losing position can be pretty damn dangerous.

Re:Real war conditions

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia is our friend now. We need not worry about their tactics, my dear comrade.

I thought we just had an election! Get over it, Republicans. You lost.

Welcome to the jam

[Anonymous Coward]

What'd they expect?

Good Practice

[techdolphin]

I hope our military can operate without GPS, and it is something they should practice with or without Russia's help.

Re:Good Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

They can, but Russia wants to observe the procedure so that they can interfere with that too.

If other nations would do to Russia half of the bullshit Russia does to others then the Russian generals would have a fscking meltdown.

Re:Good Practice

[Micah NC]

Iran's capture of our drone four years or so ago ... indicates our military can't operate without GPS.

On the other side ... human pilots (with all the design/support/payload/safety) bring up aircraft cost astronomically.

Re:Good Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

Good chance most of them couldn't operate without their smartphones...

Re:Good Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like funding a separatist movement in Chechnya? Or multiple revolutions in Ukraine?

Re:Good Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

> If other nations would do to Russia half of the bullshit Russia does to others then the Russian generals would have a fscking meltdown.

You think they don't? CNN probably is just not interested in investigating and covering what the "west" does to Russia.

Re:Good Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

I've flown around the world in a plane
I've started revolutions in Ukraine
Chechnya I have parted
But I can't get started with you

Re:Good Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

The drone wasn't downed due to faulty/jammed GPS contrary to what propaganda would like you to think. It was the most obvious, dead engine. Things don't stay up very long if their engine doesn't work.

Re:Good Practice

[getuid()]

You mean, like, putting US military bases all over the world including ther fscking foregarden?

Or sustaining something north of 50.000 NGOs in their country?

I'm no fan of russinas, but their generals sure seem pretty relaxed to me, given the circumstances. More so than the US generals anyway.

Hahaahahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

And Putin just sat back and chuckled at the stupid Americans.

Re:Hahaahahaha

[Archtech]

And Putin just sat back and chuckled at the stupid Americans.

Well, at least you got that right. Although, being a diplomat and a statesman, he doesn't let it show.

Re:Hahaahahaha

[cyberchondriac]

I have to wonder if you have posters of him riding horseback, shirtless, or posing with a bear, all over your bedroom wall.

Re:Hahaahahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

I told you to stay out of my room.

Re:Hahaahahaha

[William Baric]

Putin is one of the best statesmen I can think of. I mean in the West we have Bozo the Trump, I make great duck face Trudeau, momma's boy Macron, let the invaders in Merkel, I'm everyone's puppet May... So it's not like the competition is tough.

Re:Hahaahahaha

[DamnOregonian]

You really are a vile little shitstain, aren't you?

Re:Hahaahahaha

[benjfowler]

They're welcome to keep thinking that ;-)

The Russians NEVER learn. It'll cost them.

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

The Russian military exercise was a resounding success!

"international contracts"

[gDLL]

F you very much for these international "contracts" ... how about other "contracts" such as british sovereignty in north america, slavery, Yalta, communism, the belgian Congo .... how about the "peace in our time"-accord with the 3rd reich ?

God help the americans.

Exercises for everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

So NATO military exercises also are Russia counter-measures military exercises. 2 for the price of one.

Nothing

[webinstinct]

... is what will be done about it. Russia scored some cheap points with their population by doing something almost juvenile and all the "adults" in NATO can do is call this irresponsible and unprofessional. Same thing happens when Russian planes buzz US/NATO planes in international airspace. Whatcha gonna do?

Re:Nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone loves the underdog and in this case his name is Laika.

YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP!

[Thud457]

but it's expecting a bit much of civilian oil tanker captains to navigate without GPS

Re:YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn frigate made out of paper?! What's up with that?

Re:YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP!

[Talderas]

That tanker is 250m long and 44m wide and has a displacement of 112k tons. That frigate is 134m long, 17m wide, and has a displacement of 5.3k tons. That frigate stands no chance of stopping that tanker in a collision. The tanker may have been where it shouldn't have been but the frigate should have been able to get out of the way unless it was crowded or low visibility conditions.

Re:YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the tanker is most likely douple or triple hulled.

Re:YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP!

[ceoyoyo]

It is not. In fact, they're required by law to be able to do so.

Re:YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP!

[amicusNYCL]

From what I heard, according to the communications, the frigate was at fault. It didn't want to turn because it was "only" 900m from shore.

I mean, turning isn't really a requirement, unless you don't want to lose one of your five largest ships which costs as much as your entire defense budget for a year.

Re:YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP!

[Aighearach]

You don't really need the communications for that; as the smaller vessel, it is expected to get out of the way.

Re:YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about 'stopping the tanker'. The damn thing should have been able to take the hit and just be pushed along/aside with nothing more than a small dent. It's a fucking military ship, for chrissake! Imagine if our old B-17 bombers were so fragile (for comparison)! All we need in our navy is a bunch of big old tankers, I guess... Ram the enemy, and victory is ours!

Map reading is still part of basic training

[pgmrdlm]

https://www.armystudyguide.com...>br>https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2016/02/11/commandant-to-marines-get-out-your-map-and-your-compass/

Jam GLONASS next time?

[Octorian]

So when Russia does their next big exercise, should we deploy the GLONASS jammers in return?

I really do hope we're able to deal with a lack of GPS. Everything has become so dependent on it, and this general assumption that we have unchallenged space superiority. Probably because we've gotten way to accustomed to fighting Iraqis and Afghans who really cannot even pretend to challenge us technologically.

Re:Jam GLONASS next time?

[Anonymous Coward]

When we went to war with Iraq the first time they were the world 4th largest military. Most of our fights are actually against Russian equipped nations. Almost a real military simulation. The only difference is both Russia and the US typically don't deploy their fanciest toys in these proxy wars because they don't want the other side to develop effective counter measures.

Re:Jam GLONASS next time?

[guruevi]

GLONASS is (slightly) better defended against jamming. It's not impossible but the signal frequency for each GLONASS satellite is not fixed like GPS. So you have to jam a broader band and since the satellites are built for this, they can switch frequencies at a dime.

Even GPS jamming isn't that effective for military installations unless you do it from space. Various anti-jamming techniques for military purposes involve having multiple receivers, some that would shield signals that come laterally (from the ground). Although that may prevent you from acquiring satellites nearer the horizon, it's a tradeoff.

Re:Jam GLONASS next time?

[MiniMike]

We should probably be prepared to use GPS or GLONASS (as well as neither).

This affected civilian GPS

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon slashdot. Everyone knows that GPS can be jammed, and the NATO military can deal with it. The reason that this is an issue is that civilian GPS was jammed. Aircraft, boats, etc. that were not part of the military exercises were possibly affected. That is a reckless and possibly dangerous thing to do.

Re:This affected civilian GPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure,

But Russians just don't care and they know it.

BTW, I wrote an another comment, just a moment ago.

Re: This affected civilian GPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck em. Fair targets

Re:This affected civilian GPS

[k6mfw]

does this mean people will no longer be eager to dump all those VOR stations scattered about the country?

Jam Schroeder's cat next time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the Quantum Compass will help us?

https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/11/quantum-compass/

Did this effect US Mainland?

[Anonymous Coward]

I experienced GPS problems over a few days during the time period of this exercise in the Boston area.

Re:Did this effect US Mainland?

[Anonymous Coward]

I very much doubt it. Boston is about 4000 miles away.

Broad Spectrum jamming

[Anonymous Coward]

If all it takes to break this state-of-the-art equipment is a simple broad spectrum jamming equipment, then NATO needs to go back to the drawing board. Thank you Russia for showing several NATO generals that they are idiots in promoting these connected soldiers and networked military equipment.

Good Omega Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

They could always use Omega as a navigation aid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_frequency

If this were a surprise...

[QuietLagoon]

... shame on NATO. I would expect this to be one of the first things that is done during any military conflict. So I'd say we owe a thank-you to Russia for adding a level of realism to the exercises.

Re:If this were a surprise...

[jeff4747]

Considering a few countries filed NOTAMs about GPS being blocked before Russia jammed anything, I really doubt it was a surprise.

Also, GPS jamming is somewhat common in military exercises. It turns out the military is not staffed entirely by idiots.

Re:If this were a surprise...

[DamnOregonian]

I would expect this to be one of the first things that is done during any military conflict.

They do.
What led you to believe otherwise?
This is news because a country we have a near Cold War with did it across their border and impacted civilian population as well as military exercises.
Not quite an act of war, but it's hostile. Whether or not it's expected in case of a real conflict is entirely inconsequential to the report.

Re:If this were a surprise...

[QuietLagoon]

...It turns out the military is not staffed entirely by idiots....

Never said it was. That's your straw-man.

Most severe consequece reported this far

[Anonymous Coward]

Was that reindeer (carbou) herders had difficulties locating whereabouts of their herd as the gps coordinates transmitted by tracking collars few reindeers wear were reporting locations somewhere else than the herd was. This was reported by local newspapers here day after the exercise was already over and incident was first reported and told that Finnish Communications Authority had heard about jamming while it was happening but did not bother reacting as nobody yet had complained about disturbances.

Now few days after when the incident was reported politicians are expressing that they need to do something about the matter. Like it would really matter to Russians, they will repeat it at their own will.

It's like those airspace violations at Baltic sea. They just don't care and thus those happen every now and then no matter how they each time promise to be more cautious in the future. Someone needs to be real gullible to trust any Russian promises if the promise doesn't primarily serve their own interests all times.

Re:Major troop movements near Russian borders...

[Opportunist]

This Warsaw Pact?

Didn't know the US was a signature power. You learn something new every day...

unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

For all their drunken bravado, the Russians are a bunch of whiny pussies who wouldn't dare respond to a limited conventional assault with nukes.

Re:unlikely

[cheesybagel]

You would be wrong. Not a lot of people remember, but back when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa one of the things the Soviets did was they bombed Berlin on August 7 1941 with DB-3 long distance bombers. If they know there is a large force behind the attacks threatening their nation they could strike.

Re:unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

77 years ago and well before their economic collapse... For reference, Russia's GDP is less now (2017 est. nominal) than the Soviet Union's was in 1989.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a cover story for that frigate that basically head-on collided with an oil tanker, isn't it?

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it have been better to wait until an actual conflict to disrupt GPS?

Since when has military been concerned with...

[3seas]

Civilians... other than considering them acceptable collateral damage?

In practice, the reverse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently the frigate had AIS off. Also, it was in a fjord. Maybe the tanker crew just didn't notice them; whether they should have is another thing. But tankers aren't really great at maneuverability, so the smaller ships get to go around instead.

Not long ago here on slashdot: Turns out the US navy has reduced its ship handling 101 for officers to a set of teach-it-yourself DVDs. Civilian captains OTOH get a little more grounding in classic navigation for their unlimited master's certificate. So I wouldn't be surprised if civilian captains do better than US navy captains when no GPS is available. Though there are exceptions, like that idiot Italian that capsized and sank a cruise ship with no GPS jamming at all. Was just about the first off the ship to boot. Apropos: The Norwegian frigate is Italian-built.

them rooshans

[Anonymous Coward]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DXUU4m6V4AAQrNO.jpg

Spread Spectrum GPS

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not sure but I believe that GPS signals are broadcast using a technique called Spread Spectrum.

Spread Spectrum signals are supposed to resist jamming.

I hope that someone more knowledgeable about this can comment.

If true, it's quite nice of them...

[bradley13]

If it's actually true that Russia jammed GPS, one should thank them profusely. Any military planner who expects GPS to last past the first minutes of a serious military confrontation, is living in fantasy land. It is easily jammed, and numerous countries undoubtedly have anti-satellite capability. Hence, practicing maneuvers without GPS had better be standard practice.

Of course, it's also possible that one NATO unit was tasked with the jamming, without informing the other units. And this was later blamed on Russia, because right now every damned thing is blamed on Russia.

The US is bound via the NATO.

[Anonymous Coward]

The NATO and EU countries are bound by it, and hence the USA too.

Not that any US American would learn anything about history. Let alone something true.

Re:The US is bound via the NATO.

[Opportunist]

By the very definition of what the Warsaw Pact was no NATO member has EVER signed it. It's pretty much impossible.

Re:The US is bound via the NATO.

[DamnOregonian]

Holy fuck, you are terminally stupid.

Zach Patterson/ZIP "Greatest Hits" (lol, not)

[Anonymous Coward]

See how STUPID "ZIP" (Zach I. Patterson) CHIMP is (taking credit for what I solved before him) https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... (he needs to LEARN TO READ)!

I even SHOW ways to do it YOURSELF https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... (he couldn't).

Delphi/FreePascal/ObjectPascal HAS no issue w/ null-term'd string bufferoverflows - C does, C++ can UNLESS you do what I said 1st loser.

Tell us about CODE SIGNING (which has been STOLEN & ABUSED) https://www.helpnetsecurity.co... MY METHOD CAN'T BE (upmodded +2 INTERESTING in CODING FOR DEFCON no less) https://it.slashdot.org/commen...

"I'm a much better programmer than APK" - by Anonymous Coward ZIP on Monday October 08, 2018 @11:27PM (#57449082) FROM https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... yet nothing to show in programs. I can from registered /.ers liking/using/praising my work (& 100k users worldwide too). He can't.

LIAR ZIP says he has no account "I don't have an account, so I don't have mod points" https://news.slashdot.org/comm...

Yet LIAR ZIP says he downmods my posts (IMPOSSIBLE MINUS AN ACCOUNT on /.): "I down-modded a few of your post on other threads" - by Anonymous Coward "ZIP" on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:31AM (#57461058) FROM https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...

APK

P.S.=> KEEP PLAYING PUSSY GAMES IMPERSONATING ME YOU CHIMP - this comes out every time, lol!... apk

NATO military can deal with it

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, no, a frigate hit a cargo ship and sunk.

All's fair in love and war

[bigtreeman]

All's fair in love and war.
I hope they are still able to operate with map and compass and aim their guns with slide rule calculations.
The next world war could quickly devolve into a good old fashioned hand to hand blood bath.

Look Its Putin's Cum-Bucket!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whore.

Re:Major troop movements near Russian borders...

[DamnOregonian]

Wrong again, Ivan.

You aren't modded troll for calling out some kind of inconvenient truth, you're being modded a Troll for gaslighting and dressing it up as such.
What I consider a defining aspect of our times, is I'm not even sure you're aware of how full of shit you are. I think you might actually believe that shit.

Fake news

[Anonymous Coward]

Fake news, why would Russia ever use a weapon prematurely for absolutely no gain, if they exposed an ability to jam GPS the US will just build a counter which makes the jamming obsolete and useless.

Only US troops count ?

[Anonymous Coward]

SO only US troops count ? Nobody cares about the others ?

It was not the Russians

[aberglas]

NATO knows that that it is easy to accidentally build dependencies on GPS into their systems, given that GPS is used everywhere. So to perform a serious exercise, they want to jam GPS to find out what stops working.

But it is difficult to just jam a specific area. There will be leakage. And that will annoy civilians that rely on GPS nearby.

So blame the jamming on the Russians.

Your Driverless Car - Dead in a War

[BrendaEM]

Not only would GPS be the low-hanging fruit, ripe for disabling. If everyone has driver-less vehicles, America's productivity stops.

A military execise

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't jamming signal be a normal part of a military exercise? Otherwise how would the military practice for such an event? Military GPS is generally not the same as civilian GPS.