Every day, thousands of flights cross the skies above the Baltic Sea. Pilots expect their GPS systems to guide them safely through busy air corridors, just as they have for decades. But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, something has changed. Navigation screens flicker with false readings. Aircraft suddenly lose their bearings. Pilots find themselves forced to rely on backup systems they haven’t used in years.

This isn’t an accident—it’s electronic warfare in action.

When the Sky Becomes a Battlefield

Russian military units operating from Kaliningrad and the Leningrad region have transformed GPS jamming into a regional crisis. Their electronic warfare systems don’t just block signals near the ground; they reach into space itself, interfering with satellites in low-Earth orbit. The numbers tell a striking story: Sweden reported 55 GPS interference incidents in 2023, but that figure exploded to over 700 by 2025. Across the broader region, tens of thousands of flights now navigate through electronic noise that didn’t exist just three years ago.

The human impact is immediate and tangible. Commercial flights divert unexpectedly. Ferry schedules become unreliable as maritime GPS systems falter. Emergency services struggle to coordinate responses when their location systems feed them false information. While Moscow denies responsibility, independent researchers and sensor data consistently trace these disruptions to Russian electronic warfare capabilities.

The Fundamental Flaw We’ve Ignored

The reason this electronic assault works so effectively reveals a troubling truth about our digital infrastructure: civilian GPS was never designed to be secure. Unlike military GPS signals, which employ encryption and anti-spoofing protections, civilian navigation signals broadcast openly across the globe. This openness was once seen as a strength—anyone, anywhere could access precise positioning for free. Today, that same openness has become a critical weakness.

The civilian GPS system operates on trust rather than verification. It assumes signals are genuine because, for most of its existence, the technical barriers to widespread jamming or spoofing were prohibitively high for most bad actors. That assumption no longer holds in an era where state-level electronic warfare capabilities have proliferated.

A Pattern of Vulnerable Design

GPS isn’t alone in this security-by-afterthought approach. Many technologies that now form the backbone of modern society were built during an era when security was a secondary concern. The early internet operated on protocols designed for collaboration among trusted researchers, not resistance to sophisticated attacks. Email systems still rely on protocols that assume good faith communication. Even HTTPS, which now protects most web traffic, only became standard after decades of insecure web browsing exposed countless vulnerabilities.

This pattern creates a patchwork of protection—layers of security measures added after vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited, rather than built into the system from the beginning. It’s like installing better locks after discovering your house has been burglarized, rather than building secure doors from the start.

The Modern Stakes Are Higher

As digital systems become more interconnected and autonomous, the vulnerabilities exposed by GPS jamming reveal a much larger problem. Today’s IT infrastructure operates on protocols and frameworks that were designed decades ago with little consideration for adversarial environments. Cloud computing platforms, Internet of Things devices, and artificial intelligence systems all depend on communication protocols that assume good faith actors.

Consider how modern systems compound these risks: automated trading algorithms that rely on precise timing synchronization, smart city infrastructure that coordinates through wireless networks, or AI systems that process data from multiple sensors and external APIs. When foundational components lack security, every system built on top of them inherits those weaknesses. A vulnerability in one layer can cascade through an entire technology stack, affecting services and applications far removed from the original point of failure.

The Secure-by-Design Imperative

The GPS jamming crisis demonstrates what happens when security becomes a retrofit rather than a foundation. But it also illuminates a path forward for how we should approach modern IT system design. Instead of building open systems and hoping to patch vulnerabilities later, we need architectures that assume hostile actors from day one.

This shift requires fundamental changes in how we think about system design. Authentication should be built into protocols at the lowest levels. Data integrity checks need to be embedded in every transaction. Network architectures should isolate critical functions and verify the identity of every component trying to access them. The goal isn’t to create perfectly secure systems—that’s impossible—but to create systems that degrade gracefully under attack and maintain their core functions even when individual components are compromised.

Building Tomorrow’s Defenses Today

The lesson from the skies above the Baltic Sea extends far beyond navigation systems. As we develop new technologies—from artificial intelligence to quantum computing to advanced communication networks—we have an opportunity to learn from GPS’s vulnerabilities rather than repeat them.

The challenge now is applying these lessons broadly, ensuring that the next generation of critical technologies is built to withstand the sophisticated attacks that are increasingly becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Security cannot be an afterthought in IT infrastructure. Openness served the world well for decades, but the threat environment has evolved faster than our defenses. Future systems must anticipate not just current threats, but the capabilities that adversaries might develop years or decades from now.