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In 2019, Brandon Davenport and Rich Ganske wrote “‘Recalculating Route’: A Realistic Risk Assessment for GPS” for War on the Rocks, in which they argued that threats to GPS are regularly over-exaggerated and that the GPS remains highly resilient. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s recent spate of jamming military and civilian aircraft in Europe, we asked them to look back on the article.Read more below.Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Lt. Col. Erin GuldenIn your article “‘Recalculating Route’: A Realistic Risk Assessment for GPS” written in 2019, you demonstrated that threats to GPS are over-exaggerated, often by ill-informed skeptics. You argued that GPS remains highly capable and resilient, particularly through appropriate use of tactics, encryption, and redundancy. Over the past five years, has that changed?From our point of view, the article still rings true. While interference and spoofing have increased, the use of GPS, the resilience of its users, and the system’s relevance have increased rather than what contemporary naysayers suggested. Most importantly, as we noted in the article, there are differences in civil use of GPS versus military-encrypted receivers. As we made clear then, important caveats exist for the military use of commercial GPS receivers. We recommended against that, but the improvisations of both the Ukrainians and Russians relying on GPS add more evidence to our argument of the system’s continued importance. For example, commercial off-the-shelf first-person-view quadcopters were not nearly as prolific and operationally significant at the time of writing.The tone we sought to set was one of moderated concern that also galvanized purposeful action. We did not argue then and still do not claim GPS to be infallible or free from risk of jamming or spoofing — especially for civilians. Instead, especially for combatants, GPS degradation or denial will add a layer of fog and friction