For two decades, the governing anxiety in space security has been the destruction of satellites. The 2007 Chinese ASAT test, Russia’s 2021 Nudol strike, India’s 2019 Mission Shakti — each generated debris, condemnation, and a governance conversation organized around a single fear: that a future war would begin with the physical shooting-down of spacecraft, cascading into the Kessler syndrome that renders orbits unusable.
The entire architecture of counterspace governance, from the UN Group of Governmental Experts to the norms discussions at COPUOS, has been built around preventing kinetic attacks on satellites. The 2026 Iran war has demonstrated that this architecture was aimed at the wrong target. The decisive counterspace campaign of the conflict destroyed no satellites at all. It attacked the signal.
The Secure World Foundation’s 2026 Global Counterspace Capabilities Report records the pattern in a single understated line: across every active conflict, “only non-destructive counterspace capabilities are being used.” Iran did not fire a missile at a satellite. It did something far more effective and far less governed — it attacked the electromagnetic layer where space capability is actually delivered to users on the ground.
Beginning with the January 2026 domestic protests and intensifying through the war, Iranian forces jammed and spoofed GPS across the country, degrading the civilian positioning signal that everything from shipping to aviation to Starlink terminals depends on.
According to Windward, a shipping-intelligence firm cited by CNN, the electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani, and Iranian waters on February 28 alone. The signal, not the satellite, was the battlefield.
This distinction is not academic, and it is why the governance architecture missed it. Attacking a satellite is attributable, expensive, technically demanding, and internationally provocative — every incentive discourages it, which is precisely why the governance conversation could organize around banning it. Attacking the signal is the opposite on every axis.
As Space Force’s Major General Jason Galbreath acknowledged, brute-force jamming is relatively easy to field; the systems can be built domestically or procured from Russia and China, and they can be operated with plausible deniability because a jammed or spoofed signal does not carry a return address. Iran’s Iran Electronics Industries has a documented electronic-warfare capacity.
Read More: US Has Virtually Total Control of Hormuz, Trump Says
The Murmansk-BN system it reportedly deployed is Russian. None of this violates any treaty, because the entire body of space law and emerging space norms is written about objects in orbit, not about the radio-frequency spectrum through which those objects deliver their services.
The deeper point is that counterspace has been redefined from a capability that denies the satellite to a capability that denies the signal — and the signal is overwhelmingly civilian. The GPS constellation is a U.S. military system, but the civilian C/A code it broadcasts underpins the global economy: maritime navigation, aviation, financial-transaction timestamps, power-grid synchronization.
When Iran spoofed GPS across the Gulf, the military effect it sought — degrading drone and missile navigation — was inseparable from the civilian havoc it caused, because they rode the same signal. The U.S. military has M-code, the encrypted, jam-resistant GPS signal, and so its own precision capability was substantially protected.
The 1,100 civilian ships had no such protection. The structure of the attack meant that the party best insulated from it was the military it was ostensibly aimed at, and the parties least insulated were the commercial and neutral users who had no role in the war.
Read More: Khamenei Says Iran Will Push ‘Enemy Forces’ Out of Arabian Sea
This inverts the assumption beneath space-security governance, which has always treated the civilian and military space layers as separable — protect the commercial constellations, deter attacks on military assets, and the two problems can be managed on separate tracks. The signal war collapses that separation. You cannot jam military GPS in a theater without jamming civilian GPS in the same theater, because below the encryption they are the same broadcast.
You cannot degrade an adversary’s use of a commercial constellation like Starlink without degrading every civilian, aid worker, and journalist using it in the same footprint. The Iran war demonstrated that the electromagnetic layer of space is a commons in the most literal sense: an attack on any user’s signal is an attack on every user’s signal in range, and there is no governance instrument that recognizes this, let alone regulates it.
For states outside the great-power core — including Pakistan, whose maritime traffic, aviation, and agricultural timing all now depend on GNSS signals it does not own and cannot protect — the implication is stark. The counterspace threat that will actually affect them is not a debris-generating ASAT strike in a distant orbit.
It is the routine, deniable, ungoverned degradation of the civilian signal layer in any regional conflict within electromagnetic range. A war between two other states, fought partly through GPS spoofing, disrupts the shipping and aviation of every neighbor whose vessels and aircraft transit the affected airspace.
Read More: Iran Warns Conflict May Spread to Indian Ocean as US Signals Continued Pressure
The Gulf demonstrated this: the states most damaged by the signal war — through 1,100 disrupted ships and slowed Hormuz traffic — included several with no part in the conflict.
The governance conversation needs to move from the satellite to the signal, and it is a decade behind. Norms against kinetic ASAT testing, however valuable, address the threat that is least likely to materialize precisely because it is the most attributable and provocative.
The threat that has materialized, repeatedly, in Ukraine and now decisively in Iran, is non-destructive interference with the civilian signal layer — and there is no equivalent of the debris-based moral consensus to build a norm around, because signal jamming leaves no wreckage in orbit to photograph. Its damage is distributed, deniable, and terrestrial: a container ship reporting a false position, an airliner losing its approach guidance, a Starlink terminal in a besieged city going dark.
The war above the war, in 2026, was not fought in orbit. It was fought in the spectrum, against a civilian commons that space governance does not yet admit exists.
*The views presented in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Diplomatic Insight.*
Aleena Saif Ullah
Aleena Saif Ullahis an MPhil Scholar in International Relations at the University of Punjab, Lahore. She can be reached at[email protected]
