FOM 9 Logbook, Entry #001

THE FOM 9 JOURNAL

Navigation · Heritage · The Sea

Why Navigators Still Look Up

When GPS goes dark, the stars don't.

March 2026

 

On March 1, 2026, more than 1,100 vessels in the Persian Gulf lost their GPS signal within a single 24-hour period. Ships appeared on tracking systems to be sailing inland, over airports, and in one reported case, directly through a nuclear power plant. Navigation screens showed vessels sprinting at supersonic speeds across open water. None of it was real. All of it was dangerous. 

This is what GPS denial looks like in practice. Not a clean outage you can plan around — a hall of mirrors, feeding false positions into the systems that officers and crews depend on to keep their ships and their people alive. 

The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil supply passes, has become the most active electronic warfare environment in commercial maritime history. And the ships transiting it — tankers, LNG carriers, bulk carriers — were suddenly navigating blind. 

The Vulnerability Nobody Wanted to Talk About

GPS was not designed to be the sole navigation system for the world's shipping fleet. It was designed as a military positioning tool that, over decades, became so reliable and so convenient that the maritime industry quietly stopped asking what would happen without it.

The answer arrived incrementally. GPS jamming in the Persian Gulf was first widely reported in 2019, when U.S. officials identified Iranian jammers operating from Abu Musa Island near the Strait of Hormuz. The goal, a U.S. defense official told CNN at the time, was to cause ships to wander into Iranian waters — creating a legal pretext for seizure. At least two commercial vessels reported interference. One had its AIS transponder switched off before being detained.

That was a warning. The maritime industry mostly treated it as a regional anomaly.

By June 2025, during the Israel-Iran conflict, over 900 ships in the Strait of Hormuz were having their navigation signals jammed simultaneously. By March 2026, that number had crossed 1,100 vessels in a single day. Insurance underwriters — Gard, Skuld, NorthStandard, the American Club — began cancelling war-risk coverage for the entire region. Major tanker operators halted deployments. The world's most critical maritime chokepoint had become digitally contested territory. 

By March 2026, over 1,100 vessels had their GPS signals jammed or spoofed in a single 24-hour period in the Persian Gulf. Ships appeared on screens to be sailing over airports and through nuclear facilities. 

What the Professionals Reached For

When the screens went wrong, bridge teams in the Strait of Hormuz did what professional mariners have always done: they went back to first principles. Radar. Compass. Chart. Visual fixes off known landmarks. Dead reckoning — calculating position by tracking course, speed, and time from a known point, accounting for current and drift. The methods that existed before the first GPS satellite ever launched. 

Port Technology International reported in June 2025 that crews were increasingly relying on these fundamentals as GPS became untrustworthy. The UK Maritime Trade Operations noted the interference was hampering vessels' ability to even report their own positions. In the fog of electronic warfare, the navigators who had kept those traditional skills sharp were the ones their crews were grateful for.

This is not a romantic notion. It is an operational reality. A navigator who only knows how to read a screen is only as capable as the technology beneath their hands. A navigator who understands the underlying principles of position-finding — who can take a bearing, plot a fix, read a chart without an overlay — carries that capability regardless of what the satellites are doing. 

The Navy Already Knew

The United States Navy had seen this coming. In 2015, the Naval Academy quietly reinstated celestial navigation training — nearly two decades after dropping it from the curriculum when GPS made it seem obsolete. The reasoning was blunt. As Commander Ryan Rogers, deputy chairman of the Academy's Department of Seamanship and Navigation, put it: "We went away from celestial navigation because computers are great. The problem is, there's no backup." 

By 2016, celestial navigation was formally back across the fleet. The Chief of Naval Operations told the Senate Armed Services Committee that it was "back in the curriculum at the Naval Academy and other places" precisely to reduce the Navy's dependence on systems that could be jammed, spoofed, or destroyed. The admission was significant: the world's most powerful navy had recognised that it had handed too much authority to a constellation of satellites it could not always protect. 

The USS Lake Erie tested this directly. In 2019, the guided-missile cruiser transited from San Diego to Pearl Harbor using only celestial navigation and dead reckoning — no GPS fix from departure until radar acquisition of the Hawaiian coast. The navigation team arrived within acceptable margins. The point had been proven. 

"We went away from celestial navigation because computers are great. The problem is, there's no backup." — Cmdr. Ryan Rogers, U.S. Naval Academy

The Sextant's Irreducible Advantage

Celestial navigation has one property that no electronic system can replicate: it cannot be jammed. The stars emit their own light. The horizon is real. The mathematics have not changed in centuries. A navigator with a sextant, a watch, and a nautical almanac is working with a system that operates entirely outside the reach of electronic warfare.

Nathaniel Bowditch understood this in a different way. When he published the American Practical Navigator in 1802 — still issued by the U.S. government today — his central argument was that navigation was a science, not a mystery. That any intelligent person who learned its principles could find their position on the open ocean. He democratised the knowledge precisely so that mariners would not be dependent on any single authority or system.

Two centuries later, the principle holds. The navigator who understands why their instruments work — not just how to operate them — is the navigator who functions when the systems fail. That understanding is what separates a mariner from someone who manages a very sophisticated screen.

Navigation as Identity

FOM 9 exists because navigation is not just a job function. It is a way of thinking — precise, deliberate, grounded in the discipline of knowing where you actually are rather than where a system tells you that you are. The events in the Strait of Hormuz are not a distant crisis for someone else's profession. They are a demonstration, playing out in real time, of exactly what is at stake when that discipline is neglected. 

When you wear FOM 9, you are not wearing a nautical aesthetic borrowed from a lifestyle catalogue. You are wearing a statement about craft, about the value of hard-won knowledge, and about the navigators who kept their skills sharp when the technology around them insisted they didn't need to.

Sextants over satellites. Not because the technology is bad — but because the navigator behind it must always be better. 

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Veteran-owned. San Diego, CA.