Ships on land and cars in the sea: How Middle East war is messing with GPS in the UAE

Accurate GPS is a mainstay of modern life, but because of the Iran war, people in the UAE are finding that their phones think they are out at sea or in cities hundreds of kilometres away.

Jamming and spoofing, used as a defensive tactic against missiles and drones, are to blame, experts say, but it’s not just enemy projectiles finding themselves lost in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

“I was using the maps while driving until it started taking me through weird roads,” said Hind, a French resident of Dubai who gave only her first name.

Instead, she was forced to head back to a main road and “relied on the road signs to figure out where I was”.

Despite the occasional inconvenience, the bizarre information given by GPS services, such as delivery drivers floating somewhere in the middle of the Gulf, has become the subject of jokes on social media.

Andrew, a delivery driver in Dubai originally from Uganda, said it had become a frequent problem.

“For example, a delivery that should have taken 10 to 15 minutes ended up taking 30. The GPS would show me the direction, then suddenly freeze. I tried to move, it kept rerouting me repeatedly until I finally arrived.”

The wealthy Gulf monarchies have been hammered by Iranian drones and missiles since the start of the Middle East war late last month, begun by the US and Israel.

The UAE alone says it has been targeted by more than 260 missiles and 1,500 drones, more than any of its neighbours.

‘Defensive measures’

Clayton Swope, an aerospace security expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said the disruption was “probably a response to defeat Iranian drones and missiles”, which may be relying on GPS to find their targets.

Two options are used, he said. Jamming, which “makes it hard to receive a GPS signal”, and spoofing, in which “someone is sending out a false signal broadcasting the wrong location”.

Doing this can disrupt GPS-guided munitions.

GPS and other satellite navigation systems are passive, meaning they function by receiving timing signals from multiple satellites orbiting the Earth and using them to calculate their locations.

These signals are weak, however, making it relatively simple to block them with more powerful, locally broadcast signals.

Lisa Dyer, director of the Global Positioning System Innovation Alliance (GPSIA), said that so-called electronic warfare, or EW, had a history going back to the Second World War.

There are reasons for using EW range beyond protecting against incoming attacks, and it can provide both “strategic and tactical advantages”, she said.

But it also comes with problems.

“The risks to aviation, shipping, and other infrastructure in the region are significant.”

Nevertheless, with the potential costs of a successful drone or missile strike so high, Gulf states clearly see the risks as worth taking.

Meanwhile, Iran has its own EW efforts, with several open-source intelligence websites identifying “Iranian EW sources and their locations”, Dyer said.

‘Half of ships affected’

The Middle East is no stranger to the effects, with GPS signals as far away as Cyprus affected by spoofing and jamming during the Gaza war and various other recent conflicts involving Israel.

Since the start of the current Middle East war, as many as a thousand ships in the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman have found themselves blinded by the jamming of satellite navigation, according to Dmitris Ampatzidis, an analyst at Kpler, which monitors maritime movements.

That means half of the ships present in the area have been affected, he said, with the vast majority of those impacted off the coast of the UAE and Oman.

Experts have told AFP that shipping is particularly vulnerable because, unlike modern mobile phones, it relies on a single, older and weaker GPS band.

Some ships in the area also appear to have been hit by spoofing, making huge oil tankers appear like they are on dry land deep inside the UAE or Iran.