Hundreds and hundreds of vessels. Yet they are all in the wrong place. This is the case with the senior maritime intelligence analyst Michelle Wiese Bockmann of Windward, a maritime AI firm, as she looks at the live positions of the commercial ships navigating the waters outside Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

She says, glancing at a map of the Strait of Hormuz and says, “there are 35 different clusters.”

The groups she speaks of are bizarre groups of markers superimposed on the map, each marker depicting a genuine ship.

Ships do not form unnaturally perfect rings. Nor do they fly in the air either,–where some of the clumps can be found. No, their GPS positions are tampered with, making them lose sight of their actual position.

The battles are not fought with the help of bullets and bombs. Fighting electromagnetic waves also. GPS jamming can be very disruptive and can lead to impaired communications, which are invisible to the naked eye, and even fatal accidents.

GPS jamming has been experienced in recent times, and aeroplanes in Europe have been hit, including a plane by the President of the European Commission. And it is a day-in, day-out constituent of the war in Ukraine. Electronic warfare is overflowing even more due to the conflict that has occurred in the Middle East.

The GPS jamming that is currently being witnessed in and around the Strait of Hormuz is hardly the first occasion that Bockmann has heard the jamming of GPS being experienced on the Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) of ships.

This occurred in this area last year in the 12-day war between Iran and Israel, and electronic interference has also been an issue for the vessel navigators in the Baltic Sea. However, she says, “this is a whole new level.”

“When we talk about the enormous risk this entails to maritime navigation and safety,” said Bockmann. There is also the National Hydrographic Office of Pakistan, which has warned of interference in shipping in the area.

Avoidance is one of the purposes of ships that use AIS. It can also take a long time before a 300m-long tanker with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of oil on board can rotate or halt, and it can take ships, conceivably, many kilometres before they properly change their path.

When you are not certain of the locations of other marine vessels, the danger of a collision increases, particularly during the night or in low visibility.

“This is the issue,” according to Alan Woodward at the University of Surrey. “Not knowing where you are going– it is not knowing where all other people are going.”

No official assurance can be made on who is behind the jamming, but the military analysts are of firm belief that Iran is behind the disruption of the vessels. Iran has also threatened to strike any vessel that tries to transit via the Strait of Hormuz.

Thomas Withington, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank, says that Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) or GPS jamming tools produced by Iran are probably homemade or made using equipment that was imported into the country either by Russia or China.

He also insinuates that US troops in the area are jamming their bases, on board, and officers in order to defend themselves against drones and GNSS-fired missiles.

The US Department of War responded to the BBC when questioned about the situation, saying: “We will not comment on the situation of certain capabilities in the region as a result of operational security.”

Sean Gorman is the co-founder of technology company Zephr.xyz, which has studied the levels of jamming in such countries as Ukraine. Aircraft information can demonstrate the occurrence of GPS jamming, but with the airspace over Iran currently shut down, Gorman has been forced to seek other avenues.

Recently, he detected jamming in Iran with radar data from a satellite. Although the BBC did not confirm this information on its own, Gorman states that jamming equipment leaves behind a record of the disruption they create to the radar signals and thus, he is able to disclose instances of GPS-jamming nationwide.

In 2024, he and colleagues were able to research GPS jamming in Ukraine using smartphones attached to the drones. The drones would fly them around, and the smartphones would capture the GPS data, pick up the interference and then that would be plotted on a map. He says that they were “checking the [GNSS] readings of all those phones. Triangulate to the location of the jammer.”

Gorman says that he was simply “astonished by the amount of jamming and its strength.”

GPS jamming has different technologies that promise to protect it. Solutions to the problem may involve automatically identifying jamming or interference and switching to frequencies not affected, such as.

One such device is the Landshield made by defence giant Raytheon UK, which is no bigger than an ice hockey puck in its smallest size. The company claims that this “anti-jam system of the antenna” can be fitted to various forms of vehicles, including cars and aircraft, and it incorporates a variety of channels to defeat jamming. Alex Rose-Parfitt, engineering director of Raytheon UK, says that their “anti-jamming products are experiencing quite an increase in demand and capacity at the moment.”

Other corporations have come up with navigation tools that operate in the area of the weaknesses of GPS. An Australian company has invented a device that is able to determine the position of a vehicle, which is done by the readings of the gyroscopes and accelerometers, which are the same gadgets that your smartphone relies on to tell you when you have turned the phone on its side, etc.

Regarding calculating geographic location, however, Chris Shaw, the co-founder and chief executive of Advanced Navigation, says that his company can utilise the solution as GPS is not available or reliable.

This involves the reconciliation of optical images of the position of people with satellite images, or even by computer-based interpretation of the relative positions of stars in the sky.

“The image processing is highly developed,” and as Shaw says, “it is very advanced. It is very cheap to do something, such as a star map. It is just not very accurate,” he added. This is why there may be a need for various kinds of location and position analysis.

GPS is probably not going to be secure in its present state without more secure solutions. More importantly, signals employed by the GPS-based systems are extremely weak and thus can be readily jammed. It is noted that the military can use M-Code or GPS, a highly authenticated and encrypted version of the technology that is far more resistant to jamming.

According to Ramsey Faragher, a director of the Royal Institute of Navigation, GPS jamming in the Iranian waters increases the possibility of a maritime accident. He states that the increasing popularity of jamming is likely to create more secure substitutes. Like the slow transition of the wi-fi networks, which were once fully open and publicly accessible, the current password-secured networks.

“In the next few years, he says, we will look back over our shoulder and realise that we were utilising open GNSS signals, and we are going to think, God, we were insane, that was not a smart thing to do.”