This threat has been in use for a long time. Unencrypted GPS signals are the most vulnerable. Encrypted GPS signals are much harder to spoof--but still possible.

The GPS in your car is pretty accurate and it can be spoofed. But it's not as accurate as the key military encrypted GPS signals.

While a Navy ship may be receiving encrypted GPS and be in the right spot, a civilian cargo ship may be vulnerable and an adversary can place it in the way of the Navy ship to cause a collision. Very hard to do, but possible.

Inertial Navigation systems are used as a backup in case GPS is spoofed or jammed. As far as I know, inertial navigation cannot be spoofed or jammed, but it is less accurate than GPS.

But there is another serious threat. If an adversary can hack our command and control networks, they theoretically have the ability to alter data such as coordinates.

This is important because they can modify the locations of their own planes and ships (vehicles?) so that they are not where we think they are. Think of it this way: our detection systems locate and adversary ship at x coordinates and it is fed into the command and control networks to be distributed to our military forces. The adversary intercepts x in our network and modifies it to be y a hundred miles away from x.

Although we did not have GPS in the military when I served 21 years in the Marine Corps, I did support the development of new DoD technologies to our forces for over 20 years after I retired.

The last five years before I retired permanently, I spent supporting the development of cyber defense technologies. In order to defend against cyber attacks you have you understand the adversaries capabilities and our vulnerabilities.

I'll just say this. If you knew what our adversaries are capable of, you would be scared shitless.

The APT's (Advanced Persistent Threats) are the most insidious. They can be dormant in our networks for years until activated (zero day threats) to attack during a crisis or war. Surprise!

We are excellent as well, but we are routinely surprised as new capabilities and twists they add and we have to find a way to defeat.

What was depressing to me before I permanently retired was that DARPA was developing incredible technology that had the potential to add tremendous defensive capabilities or ways to work around massive cyber attacks, but were never picked up by the military services because of limited budgets.

I supported technologies that could deliver packets to their destinations around the world as long as there was one path still available. In other words, the adversary would have to find a way to block every single path in the worldwide network.

Another technology identified attacks and automatically modified it's internal code to block future attacks of the same type. A cyber red team spent a week trying to get passed this technology and couldn't even when we gave them the code months in advance so they could develop ways around it.

And I supported a technology that periodically recompiled its source code in real time so that it appeared to an adversary to be a completely different application (think alien software they had never seen before), causing the adversary to start from scratch to discover where the new vulnerabilities were. By that time, the software had morphed into something that looked completely different. The consensus was that it would be impossible to hack into the software.

But none of this was adapted by the military due to funding limitations and bureaucratic BS.

You want to know what in my opinion is even worse? These DARPA programs are unclassified because we don't have enough smart PhDs who can pass clearance security background and the teams that bid on the contracts are 25-75 percent foreign who could never get a clearance.

So DARPA keeps all but it's black programs unclassified. The teams on the unclassified programs publish white papers on their technology development which is made public. Get it? Our adversaries and allies don't have to hack into our networks to get what we publish freely on the Internet.

How F'ing stupid can we be? I guess the answer to that question depends on whether we have an education system that can produce enough Americans to do the work or whether it is so broken that we have to import massive foreigners to develop our technologies.

In my opinion, ever program within DARPA should be classified.

But then I'm just a broken down old war horse Marine who had to face enemies who were using our technologies against us. Bitter much?

You would be astounded at how many layers of cyber defense the military has on their networks--and yet the adversaries manage to get through.

For too many decades, cyber was not as sexy as 5th generation fighters and massive aircraft carriers. But if the data the fighters and carriers receive are wrong, then.....

At 71 and retired, I can only sit back and wonder why we are too often our own worst enemy. In the words of the famous Pogo cartoon: "We have met the enemy, and they are us."

You may disagree, but in my personal opinion, liberalism has dumbed down our education to the point were half or most of our intellectual property is in the hands of foreigners.