Did Iran launch the missile strike against SA? Dunno. But let me tell you a story.
Not too long ago, I was flying over the remote desert Southwest on a nice day. The A320 I was flying was at 34000 feet, our GPS navigation was primary and the airplane was happy with it. The accuracy, calculated by the constant comparison of all of our nav systems, was 10 meters.
As we approached one of our nav fixes, I noticed something odd. The airplane began drifting right of the course. A check of all the systems showed nothing but green. The calculated accuracy remained at 10 meters. It soon became obvious that we were going to miss the fix by several miles. Everything was still all green.
I called ATC to give them a heads up. They said it was no problem and they knew about a “scheduled temporary GPS system anomaly” in the area and that we could switch to manual navigation if we wanted to. So we switched to the old fashioned way of navigating using VOR signals. It’s not nearly as accurate as GPS, but perfectly fine for enroute navigation.
Notably, ATC did NOT want to talk about the “anomaly”. In retrospect, it was obviously a military test. The A320 has multiple redundant checks to prevent a degradation of GPS from going undetected by the airplane. It didn’t detect this; it just started flying off in a direction that someone else wanted us to go—until I intervened.
So here is the point: The photos of the missile/drone strikes show that they were extremely accurate. Certainly well within 10 meters. That tells me they were probably using GPS. The US military owns and operates the GPS system and they have demonstrated that they can actually spoof the signal in certain areas if they choose to.
So, if these strikes were guided using GPS, which I think is likely, why didn’t they spoof the signal? I have questions.
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And they may be able to spoof other GPS systems as well. At the very least they have the capability to jam GPS and other SATNAV systems in a certain area.
Iranian cruise missiles can of course rely on onboard INS systems, and they are pretty accurate when limited to that. But in my experience, INS by itself is not this accurate:
Aside from GPS, the only system I know of that could produce that kind of pinpoint precision is a laser designator, which would require a team on the ground, in line of sight to the targets.
I’m not claiming we set this up or that we “let it happen”, but I do have questions. These impact points seem way too precise.