A nation does not need to lose a battle to look weak. Sometimes it only needs to miss a paycheck.

Washington often treats budget shutdowns as partisan spectacle, but America’s adversaries see something far more useful: a live demonstration of self-inflicted fragility. When the federal government allows frontline security personnel to work unpaid it interrupts critical security and health functions and publicly advertises institutional dysfunction. It weakens more than morale, it weakens deterrence. That is the real national security cost of a prolonged budget lapse.

Deterrence rests on more than missiles, submarines, and strategic doctrine. It also depends on the visible reliability of state capacity. Allies and adversaries alike measure whether the U.S. can sustain operations under pressure, protect its population, and maintain continuity during disruption. A shutdown tells them the opposite. It signals that even absent enemy action; the U.S. is willing to degrade its own readiness through political dysfunction. Even short lapses in appropriations disrupt defense planning, contract execution, and the broader machinery that underwrites operational readiness.

The most immediate damage appears in aviation security. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is not simply a travel inconvenience buffer. It is part of the nation’s daily homeland defense posture. Every checkpoint, screening lane, and visible officer contributes to deterrence by signaling that attacks or probes are likely to be detected and disrupted. That visible consistency matters because deterrence at the tactical level often begins with routine friction imposed on hostile actors.

Friction weakens when the workforce begins to crack. More than 460 TSA officers have already quit during the current standoff, while absentee rates have climbed to 10 to 11 percent nationally. Repeated funding disruptions are damaging morale, retention, and long-term staffing stability across the Department of Homeland Security. That is not merely a workforce problem. It is a deterrence problem.

Fatigue measurably degrades visual search performance, which is directly relevant to screening-intensive environments such as aviation security. TSA screening is not just procedural. It is cognitive work performed under repetitive, high-stakes conditions. When officers are exhausted, financially strained, or distracted by uncertainty, the quality of that work can decline even if the checkpoint remains technically operational.

Equally important, deterrence at the checkpoint depends not only on actual performance but on what potential attackers believe about the system. Airport security screening is perceived as a stronger deterrent when it appears visible, universal, and credible. That matters because deterrence is partly psychological. A security system that appears chaotic, understaffed, and politically neglected may still function, but it no longer projects the same confidence.

This erosion has consequences beyond the checkpoint itself. Long lines spilling into terminal lobbies and pre-screening corridors create soft-target conditions that sophisticated attackers have historically exploited overseas. U.S. airports have warned Congress that the current operational strain is serious, worsening, and potentially long-lasting. In practical terms, a shutdown does not just reduce security throughput. It redistributes risk into large, dense, unsecured public spaces and creates opportunity.

More troubling still is that recurring shutdowns create patterns. Adversaries watch for patterns. If hostile actors can reliably anticipate periods when U.S. aviation security is underpaid, understaffed, and politically distracted, then Washington has unintentionally handed them a calendar of vulnerability. Strategic competitors, transnational terrorist networks, and opportunistic lone actors all benefit when a defender repeatedly broadcasts when its systems are under stress.

The same logic applies beyond airports. Health security is often treated separately from deterrence, but that is a categorical error. In an era defined by pandemics, synthetic biology, fragile supply chains, and the weaponization of disruption, public health capacity is national security capacity. A country that cannot sustain surveillance, biodefense coordination, and health system continuity under fiscal pressure is not demonstrating resilience. It demonstrates exploitable weaknesses.

That is precisely why the shutdown’s impact on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should concern strategists as much as its effect on TSA. HHS’s own FY 2026 contingency staffing plan states that 23,128 employees, roughly 31 percent of its workforce, would be furloughed during a lapse in appropriations. The plan further notes that numerous non-excepted functions would be paused or curtailed, including elements of grant oversight, data collection, validation, analysis, and portions of public communication. That may sound bureaucratic, but it is not.

Health system functions form the connective tissue of national preparedness. Surveillance, analytics, research oversight, and continuity of clinical and administrative operations are what allow the U.S. to detect biological threats early, understand cascading risks, and sustain resilience under stress. Public health emergency management is foundational to biodefense capacity, particularly in areas such as interagency coordination, situational awareness, testing, surveillance, and surge resilience. When those systems are interrupted, the country does not simply lose paperwork, it loses awareness, agility, and recovery capacity.

This point is reinforced by broader preparedness of scholarship. Public health emergency preparedness in the U.S. has long suffered from uneven and declining support, leaving critical state and local response systems more vulnerable to disruption. In deterrence terms, disruptions lower the cost for an adversary seeking to exploit a biological event, amplify public panic, or overload institutional response capacity.

System disruption and deterrence is where budget shutdowns become strategically self-defeating. The U.S. invests heavily in advanced military capability, but periodically undermining the civilian systems that make that capability credible is defeatist. No adversary needs to destroy American resilience if Washington is willing to suspend parts of it on its own. That contradiction sends a damaging signal to both allies and competitors.

For adversaries such as China and Russia, recurring shutdowns offer a useful strategic readout. They reveal domestic political brittleness, weak continuity discipline, and a governing system vulnerable to self-imposed paralysis. That does not automatically invite direct confrontation, but it does encourage gray-zone opportunism. Cyber probing, disinformation, infrastructure stress campaigns, and strategic influence operations all become more attractive when the target appears distracted and internally divided. Shutdowns are self-inflicted wounds. In a deterrence environment, self-inflicted wounds are still wounds.

For U.S. allies, the signal is quieter but equally corrosive. Extended deterrence relies not only on military capability but also in the confidence of American competence and continuity. Partners want to know that the U.S. can manage crises at home while sustaining commitments abroad. A federal government that struggles to keep airport screening and health preparedness stable during a budget fight risk is undermining that confidence at exactly the wrong moment.

For these reasons, shutdowns should no longer be treated as routine political leverage when they affect core homeland security and resilience institutions. Congress should establish automatic continuing resolution mechanisms for agencies and functions that are central to deterrence. This includes transportation security, emergency preparedness, biodefense, and public health surveillance. Political disagreement is unavoidable; however, institutional self-sabotage is not.

Deterrence is often discussed in the language of force posture, strategic messaging, and escalation dominance. This all matters. Yet, deterrence lives in the ordinary machinery of a functioning state: an airport screening lane that stays open, a health surveillance system that keeps collecting data, and a workforce that knows the government will not ask it to defend the nation for free. When that machinery stalls, deterrence does not collapse overnight. It thins. It flickers. It becomes easier to stress. That is the danger of a shutdown. It does not merely interrupt government. It advertises vulnerability.

Brandon Toliver is a Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies. The views of the author are his own.

Deterrence on Layaway: A Shutdown’s Quiet Assault on American Security was originally published on Global Security Review.

One example is instructive. The rate at which aircraft locations are electronically manipulated, “spoofed,” increased 500 percent in the first three quarters of 2024. An average of 1,500 flights a day were impacted by the beginning of September. In a recent survey of almost 2,000 flight crew members, 70 percent described their concerns about the impact on aviation safety as either “very high” or “extreme.”

The world depends upon signals from GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) to underpin virtually every technology. Yet the essential positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) service they provide is incredibly vulnerable.

Weak and Vulnerable Signals

These signals from space are, of necessity, very weak. The sun shining produces stronger radio signals than a GPS satellite. Yet, through a miracle of technology, receivers on earth can find coded signals in the radio noise floor, decipher them, and tell Americans where they are and the exact time.

Exceptionally weak signals mean that almost any interference on the right frequency can prevent them from getting through. For less than ten dollars, delivery drivers looking to electronically hide from their employers, people worried about being tracked by their spouse or the government, and bad actors wanting to disable receivers can buy a GPS “jammer” from any number of internet vendors. Such sales are illegal in most countries, as is the use of such devices. However, enforcement is almost always lax or nonexistent.

Keep in mind, signal specifications were made public as part of GPS becoming America’s “gift to the world,” with the US government encouraging GPS’s broad use. Other GNSS operators did the same.

While incredibly successful in promoting the wide adoption of signals, it has also facilitated spoofing. Compounding the problem, advances in digital technology brought inexpensive software-defined transmitters into the world. Now, for a few hundred dollars, a reasonably sophisticated hobbyist can easily imitate GPS and other satellite navigation signals.

The necessity of PNT services for everyday life and over-reliance on GPS/GNSS for PNT makes the vulnerability of signals to denial and imitation a primary weapon in conflicts around the globe.

This impacts millions of those not involved in these conflicts because any receiver within line-of-sight of the interfering transmitter can be affected. Thus, cell phone systems in Finland are degraded by drone defenses in St. Petersburg. First responders across the Middle East must use paper maps because of ongoing conflicts. Ships and aircraft, hundreds of miles from military actions, lose their navigation and collision avoidance systems. Given the number of conflicts around the planet, many regions of the world are adversely affected.

To date, appeals by international maritime and aviation professional organizations have failed to make an impact on the problem. The same is true for resolutions by the United Nation’s International Maritime Organization and International Civil Aviation Organization. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which seems to have the principal jurisdiction for this, is proving similarly ineffective.

At its World Radio Conference in December 2023, ITU delegates approved what, at first glance, appears to be a strong resolution enjoining member states to refrain from interfering with GNSS signals. The only way the resolution could pass was with an exception allowing interference “for security or defense purposes.” It is hard to imagine any other reason for which a state would disrupt signals.

Despite the failures of international diplomacy to mitigate this growing problem, there is likely a path for it to be much more successful. Attacks on GPS and other GNSS signals are useful only because most nations and systems over-depend on them with few alternatives.

Fortunately, many countries are actively considering establishing robust and resilient terrestrial PNT systems to complement signals from space. These can provide GPS-like information, but do not have common vulnerabilities and failure modes with GNSS.

The US Department of Transportation, the lead in America for civil PNT issues, said that intelligently using a combination of independent signals from space, terrestrial broadcast, and fiber cable can be the foundation of a resilient national PNT architecture.

Establishing such a system of systems will not make the services invulnerable. However, it will make them hard enough to disrupt so that antagonists will look elsewhere for opportunities to create mischief. Some nations are already taking significant steps toward achieving such resilience.

South Korea and Saudi Arabia field high-power terrestrial systems that provide PNT. The United Kingdom fields a partial system and seems poised to expand it, as well as a deployable capability. Much of Russia is also served by such a system.

China has the world’s most complete and advanced resilient PNT architecture. It includes three constellations of satellites in different orbital planes, an extensive terrestrial broadcast system, and a 20,000-kilometer fiber timing network with 295 “timing stations.”

Yet much of the world remains vulnerable to disruption. Those who interfere are therefore incentivized.

International diplomacy, in the form of the United Nations, can help improve the inevitable transition to resilient PNT by encouraging states to implement sovereign terrestrial systems. These systems will complement and cooperate with GNSS, while also operating independently.

As part of this effort, international standards can be developed to ensure aircraft, ships, and vehicles are able to seamlessly transit between nations. Technical assistance can be provided to nations with little local expertise in the field.

These efforts will greatly reduce the incentive to interfere with GNSS, thereby making it safer and more reliable. It will also reinforce the sovereignty and security of every involved nation.

The alternative is to continue down the path of increasing interference and increasing risk to life and property. Safety margins are already impacted. Ships are already colliding, and passenger aircraft are nearly straying, unannounced, into hostile airspace, all because of spoofing. It is only a matter of time before the world witnesses an avoidable tragedy.

The international community, perhaps in the form of a United Nations task force, must intervene to protect these fragile signals from space and disincentivize future disruptions.

Safer and more reliable signals from space and resilient sovereign terrestrial PNT are in the long-term interest of every nation. Diplomatic efforts must illuminate that shared interest bring parties together and nurture progress for everyone’s benefit.

Dana A. Goward is President of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, www.RNTFnd.org, an educational and scientific charity. He is a member of the president’s National Space-based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board and formerly served as the maritime navigation authority for the United States. Views expressed in this article are the author’s own. 

How Diplomacy Can Save GPS was originally published on Global Security Review.