Russia has very advanced capabilities to disrupt GPS. Over 250,000 cell towers in Russia have been equipped with GPS jamming devices as a defense against attack by U.S. missiles. And there have been press reports of Russian GPS jammer in both Moscow and the Ukraine. In fact Russia has boasted that its capabilities “make aircraft carriers useless,” and the U.S. Director of National Intelligence recently issued a report that stated that Russia and others were focusing on improving their capability to jam U.S. satellite systems.
The fact that in both cases the GPS location showed up as an airport seems to point to something else – Russia has developed its cyber-warfare capacity to cause GPS satellite navigation systems to lie, perhaps to protect its airports from enemy drone and missile attacks.
For a local department to justify a drone gps jammer, I would think that they would need to prove that there is a legitimate threat from drones to the community. Now, many small departments own MRAPs or similar vehicles so I could be very wrong
A thorough cyber assessment of navigation bridges may show that GPS signal loss, jamming or spoofing could result in some or all of the other navigational units being affected including gyrocompasses, steering systems, radar/ARPAs, echo sounders, DSC VHF radios, etc. Mitigations might include having manufacturers provide signal strength alarms on new GPS receivers, employment of inertial navigation systems, RF jamming detectors and alternate positioning systems like enhanced Loran (eLoran). The eLoran positioning system is already well-proven, highly jam-resistant, accurate as GPS and fills GNSS voids in areas like urban canyons, inside dense structures and tunnels, underground and underwater. A robust terrestrial system like eLoran is not susceptible to extreme space weather (ESW) like satellite systems.
That’s why Russia’s jammers, and the new counter-drone “special forces” that operate them, don’t necessarily pose an existential risk to the US military’s UAVs. The Russian drone-hunters could struggle to pinpoint targets. “It would seem to be hard to do unless you knew where they were going to be and when,” one former US drone-developer explained on condition of anonymity.