Finnish Soldiers Readying to Go Old School If Enemy Shuts Down GPS

Finnish soldiers are training with basic navigation tools — paper maps and compasses — to make sure they can operate in environments where enemy activity means GPS isn’t available to them, a top military officer told Business Insider.

Col. Matti Honko, the commanding officer of Finland’s Guard Jaeger Regiment, said that an important lesson from Ukraine is that the satellite-navigation tool known as the Global Positioning System, or simply GPS, is vulnerable to interference.

The Ukraine conflict has seen heavy electronic warfare on both sides of the battlefield. Kyiv and Moscow rely on tactics like signal jamming, GPS spoofing, and other methods of remote interference to confuse and disable enemy weaponry. GPS interference has caused problems for a range of combat systems, from cheap drones to sophisticated guided munitions.

To ensure readiness for future conflicts where GPS isn’t an option, the Finnish Guard jaegers are using paper maps like the ones commonly found in glove compartments for road trips in the days before GPS became the norm in cars and personal phones.

“I think everyone has recognized the fact that GPS can be spoofed, and you might not be able to rely on it,” Honko said during an interview on the sidelines of last week’s Lively Sabre 25 exercise in southern Finland.

The colonel said that Finland is not abandoning the use of GPS. Rather, soldiers are being taught not to rely exclusively on it and are learning how to check things like making sure a grid reference actually matches a map, as spoofed GPS data could be wildly out of sync with real-world situations.

Honko said that this training is happening across the Finnish Army and likely within the country’s navy and air force, too. He said that Finland’s proximity to Russia forces it to train on GPS-denial scenarios because jamming is a frequent occurrence, possibly due to the air defenses in the nearby city of St. Petersburg.

“I would just call it a reminder that this is real, actually,” Honko said. “You can see for yourself that, yes, my GPS isn’t working.”

Electronic warfare challenges are not exclusive to the war in Ukraine. In the Middle East, for instance, GPS interference has been a feature of Israel’s conflicts with Iranian proxy groups. It has also been an issue in the turbulent Red Sea, where Western naval forces have spent over a year and a half defending shipping lanes from attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Militaries like Finland are closely watching the constantly developing electronic warfare practices and planning for scenarios where they may be tested in battle. And they’re not alone, either. Defense industry companies are similarly making sure that their products are more survivable.

One such example is Saildrone, an American company that makes uncrewed surface vessels in service with a handful of naval forces, including the US Navy.

Richard Jenkins, Saildrone’s founder and CEO, explained to BI in a recent interview that the company has integrated technology into its USVs, enabling them to work in environments where GPS and communications technology are compromised or unavailable. Some of the company’s drones that the US military operates in the Middle East have been sailing in spoofed areas for months, he said.

Jenkins said he believes this is the future of warfare.

“I think in a real conflict, satellites will be the first thing to go entirely.” He added that “everyone needs to work out how to survive without” satellites, GPS, and communications. And for militaries, that means not just new technologies but also making sure that basic skills are preserved.