The recent US approval of an unprecedented $11 billion weapons package for Taiwan, including HIMARS, rockets, drones, and artillery systems, has sharply elevated tensions across the Taiwan Strait. Beijing has warned that the move risks driving the region toward “military confrontation and war,” while Washington views it as a necessary step to accelerate Taiwan’s defensive readiness. But amid the political signaling and hardware debates, a deeper and more dangerous vulnerability is receiving far too little attention.
The US remains overwhelmingly dependent on GPS for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). In a Taiwan contingency, that dependence could undermine US deterrence, complicate intervention decisions, and degrade operational effectiveness at precisely the moment clarity and speed matter most.
If Beijing chose to escalate toward armed conflict or sustained gray zone coercion, one of its most powerful asymmetric tools would not be naval or aerial alone. It would be the electromagnetic domain.
However, the situation isn’t hopeless. There are steps the US can take, right now, to prepare for a future conflict in China’s backyard — or risk falling behind at a crucial moment.
Space-Based GPS Is Easy To Disrupt
GPS is the invisible scaffolding of modern warfare. It synchronizes precision strike, logistics, communications, secure network timing, intelligence tasking, and joint fires across domains. It is equally embedded in civilian infrastructure, from ports to aviation, telecom networks, power grids, and emergency services. Yet despite its centrality, GPS signals are easy to disrupt, deceive, or deny. In a conflict over Taiwan, adversaries would not need to defeat US forces outright; they could instead attack the systems those forces depend on to operate coherently.
GPS satellites broadcast weak signals so they can be received by small, low-power antennas on ships, aircraft, vehicles, and handheld devices. This same design choice makes them easy to interfere with. Relatively inexpensive ground-based or ship-based jammers can overwhelm GPS receivers, while more advanced spoofing systems can feed false signals that cause platforms to miscalculate position or time without obvious warning.
These are not hypothetical threats: Jamming and spoofing have already been used extensively in recent conflicts and gray zone operations, affecting both civilian and military users. The technology is proliferating, improving, and becoming more accessible. In a dense, maritime theater like the Taiwan Strait, GPS interference would be difficult to isolate and harder to avoid.
The operational consequences would be immediate. Navigation errors would ripple through air and maritime operations; timing errors could disrupt communications, data links, and networked systems; and precision munitions, ISR tasking, and logistics synchronization would all degrade. And none of this requires attacks on GPS satellites — by targeting signals at the receiver level, adversaries can erode operational confidence without crossing clear escalation thresholds in space.
While the US has remained largely GPS-centric, China has pursued a more layered approach. It operates a mature BeiDou global navigation satellite system and has reportedly backed it with terrestrial timing and broadcast systems, fiber-based timing networks, and high-power long-wave terrestrial transmissions. Together, these elements form a PNT architecture that does not rely on space alone.
This layered approach matters most close to home. In the littoral regions surrounding Taiwan, Chinese forces can likely maintain more reliable positioning and timing even under heavy electronic warfare conditions. Public reporting suggests these terrestrial and fiber-based assets extend well offshore, allowing China to operate with greater PNT confidence while actively contesting GPS in the same battlespace.
If Chinese forces can retain accurate PNT while US and allied forces operate under degraded or deceptive GPS conditions, the result is an operational tempo advantage. Navigation, ISR cueing, precision fires, logistics, and secure communications all favor the side that can trust its timing and position data. This asymmetry matters in the opening phases of a crisis and in any prolonged standoff.
The Strategic Remedy: Building A System-of-Systems
The US needs a more resilient system-of-systems approach to PNT, one that assumes disruption and deception are baseline conditions in a Taiwan contingency.
Full disclosure: My company, Zephr.xyz, develops technologies aimed at improving GPS resilience. However, we are just one of the many potential solutions that will be needed in this scenario, and many companies will be needed, across a breadth of governments, to meet the threat where it is.
At the space layer, resilience starts with multi-constellation GNSS and hardened signals. Receivers that draw on GPS alongside other satellite systems, using modern authenticated and anti-spoofing techniques, raise the cost and complexity of effective jamming or spoofing.
But space alone is insufficient. A resilient architecture must include terrestrial PNT alternatives that continue to function when satellite signals are degraded or denied.
High-power terrestrial systems such as eLoran and fiber-based timing grids are difficult to disrupt from orbit and can provide a reliable baseline across coastal and island environments. In the Indo-Pacific, where undersea cables are already a pressure point, terrestrial timing resilience is inseparable from broader infrastructure security.
Forces must also be able to operate through outages, not simply wait for systems to recover. Inertial navigation combined with sensor fusion (which integrates vision, radar, terrain, or celestial cues) allows aircraft, ships, and ground forces to sustain operations when GNSS is unreliable or deceptive.
Another critical gap is awareness. Outside aviation and maritime safety, there is little persistent terrestrial mapping of PNT interference in many regions. Improving the ability to detect, geolocate, and share information on jamming and spoofing would enable faster mitigation and reduce the ambiguity adversaries exploit in gray-zone operations.
This effort cannot be unilateral. Allied cooperation must be central. Japan, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and other partners should be part of a coordinated Indo-Pacific PNT framework, with shared monitoring, interoperable systems, and targeted investment in partner infrastructure to build a regional resilience “umbrella.”
Finally, technology without people is not resilience. Forces operating in the Indo-Pacific must train routinely for PNT-degraded and PNT-denied environments. Doctrine, tactics, logistics, and command-and-control must be stress-tested under these conditions well before a crisis begins.
This is not about abandoning GPS. It is about ensuring no single point of failure — in space, on land, or undersea — can determine the outcome of a crisis. The time to invest in PNT resilience is now, not after the first missile flies.
Sean Gorman, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO of Zephr.xyz, has a more than 20-year background as a researcher, academic, and subject matter expert in the field of geospatial data science and its national security implications. Gorman served as a subject matter expert for the DHS Critical Infrastructure Task Force and Homeland Security Advisory Council, and holds eight patents.