Especially since USN are making these mistakes with increasing regularity: Port Royal, Porter, Antietam, Fitzgerald, McCain, etc. International shipping predates GPS by centuries. It's entirely possible to navigate and avoid collision without using GPS at all. The Navy (or more probably, a particular subset thereof) are just increasingly bad at driving their boats.

I agree, that makes little sense of giving away such a capacity outside of an armed conflict. Anyway, there were 4 collisions in this area this year (we mostly talked about the 2 with loss of life) so there may still be a more fundamental problem to solve than individual negligence.

Just to play devil's advocate, here are a few hypothesis that could make malice have more sense in that case:

- The enemy has the capacity to spoof this but knows that it will soon be removed. May as well use it.

- The enemy knows that this vulnerability will not work on ships that are in conflict mode and is interested in removing two ships from the existing fleet in preparation of a conflict.

Pretty weak hypothesis if you ask me. Anyway, I can't say I am sad at seeing media and the general public talk a bit more seriously about cyber security.

Could they instead spoof the GPS that the other civilian ship was using and guide it into the US ship? That seems like it would be infinitely easier to do.

Isn't is also possible to just hack into the computers of the civilian ship as they are likely incredibly insecure and basically do what you want with it? I understand most industry computer control systems incredibly dated and insecure.

Just speculation of course.

Navy attack ships are much, much faster and more maneuverable than cargo ships or takers. They could have outmaneuvered one easily if they wanted to.

The US military uses encrypted GPS, not the civilian one.

Maybe, but why do it? I see no possible motive here.