Taiwan's military plans NT$60 million system to feed false satellite signals to enemy drones

Taiwan's armed forces plan to spend NT$60 million next year on a system that would broadcast imitation satellite navigation signals to throw hostile drones off course. The project belongs to the electronic warfare division of the Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command, the service that runs the military's cyber and electronic warfare units, and is described in the defence ministry's budget book for 2027, according to a Liberty Times report published on Tuesday 10 November.

In the budget book, the military argues that its current satellite navigation jammers can only overpower signals by brute force. That approach is losing its value against newer drones that carry several ways of finding their position, so the armed forces want a spoofing capability that misleads a drone about where it is instead of simply drowning out its receiver.

The defence ministry explains that modern drones often combine satellite navigation with inertial navigation, visual odometry and terrain matching. Even under heavy electronic interference, such a drone can fall back on one of those methods and keep flying its mission. A spoofed signal is meant to look normal to the drone, which lowers the chance that it notices a problem and switches to a backup mode.

The project is listed under the ministry's innovation and development programme. The ministry approved it on 20 August this year, and the plan is to finish development, testing and acceptance during 2027. The money would buy portable signal simulators, a vehicle to carry the system and a vehicle that generates threat signals, and would also pay for integration and verification of the whole system.

On the technical side, the budget book describes a software-defined electronic warfare platform that links several transmitters with high-precision time synchronisation and works across multiple frequency bands alongside cooperative jamming. The aim is to build a local protective net of positioning signals. The ministry also wants to draw on the mass-production strength of Taiwan's hardware suppliers, so that cheap equipment can be used against large numbers of cheap drones.

The system would not let operators seize control of a drone. It would only distort the drone's sense of its own position. The work is still at the research stage, while comparable products are already on the market abroad, including the RING counter-drone system from Israel's Regulus Cyber and the Skydel NAVWAR simulator from France's Safran, which generates spoofing signals in software and can be fitted to different military platforms.

The plan follows criticism of Taiwan's existing drone defences. In July, the National Audit Office's annual review of government accounts found that a remote drone defence system the air force had commissioned from the National Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology could not detect or disrupt drones on the 5.1GHz band, missed some Beidou 3 satellite frequencies, and had no answer to fibre-optic guided or AI-navigated drones. The audit office warned that defences relying mainly on disruption and jamming might not be enough against those newer types, and recorded that the air force had detected 1,238 drones, 276 of which were targeted for jamming.

Responding at the time, ministry spokesperson Sun Li-fang said the institute built that system in 2021 to cover commercial drones on the 1.2, 1.4, 2.4 and 5.8GHz bands, before Chinese drones using 5.1GHz appeared in 2023, and that a software update would add the newer band. Sun said the omitted Beidou frequencies were S-band channels that drones rarely use, and that the ministry would keep reviewing how to counter fibre-optic and autonomously navigating drones.

The Executive Yuan said in February that government drone countermeasure systems should give priority to locally produced equipment, a policy that matches the ministry's stated plan to lean on domestic suppliers for the new spoofing project.