March 2026: Al Jazeera reported rumors that Iran may be using the Chinese BeiDou Satellite (BDS) navigation system to target Middle Eastern Israeli and US military assets. The news outlet continued, presenting a claim by Military analyst Patricia Marins that “unlike the civilian-grade GPS signals that were paralyzed in 2025, BDS-3’s military-tier B3A signal is essentially unjammable.”
The Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation (RNTFND) consulted the RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys to dispel the claim of an “essentially unjammable” signal, who responds that “I doubt BeiDou has some magical remedy to ‘filter out’ spoofing. They’re subject to the same physics and asymmetrical information the rest of us are.” Further, Humphreys states that he “would not be surprised if Iran’s drones and missiles use BDS. [Rather,] it would be more surprising if they got access to the military codes of BDS.”
For more about the claims in the original article, as well as Dr. Humphreys’ rebuttals, follow along here.
