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.

Re:Helpful

[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.

Re:Helpful

[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?

Re:Helpful

[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.

Re: Helpful

[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.

Re:Helpful

[Streetlight]

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

Re:Helpful

[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.

Re:Helpful

[Nutria]

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

Re:Helpful

[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.

Re:Helpful

[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.

Re:Helpful

[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?

Re:Helpful

[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.

Re:Helpful

[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 ...

Re:Helpful

[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.

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.

Re:Helpful

[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.

Re: Helpful

[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!

Re:Helpful

[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.

Re:Helpful

[kellymcdonald78]

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

Re:Helpful

[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...

Re:Helpful

[amicusNYCL]

Missiles should be able to navigate with a paper map.

Re:Helpful

[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.

Re:Helpful

[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.)

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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.)

Real war conditions

[Nukenbar]

Sounds like what will really happen in a conflict.

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.

"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.

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?

[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.

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: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...

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.

Since when has military been concerned with...

[3seas]

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

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.