Iran may be using a Chinese satellite navigation system to target Israel and United States military assets in the Middle East, intelligence experts say.
Former French foreign intelligence director Alain Juillet told France’s independent Tocsin podcast this week that it is likely that Iran has been provided access to China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system because its targeting has become much more accurate since the 12-day war with Israel in June.
“One of the surprises in this war is that Iranian missiles are more accurate compared to the war that took place eight months ago, raising many questions about the guidance systems of these missiles,” Juillet, who served as the director of intelligence for the General Directorate for External Security from 2002 to 2003, told Tocsin.
In response to the US-Israeli attacks that began on February 28 and the killing of top Iranian figures, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran has launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones towards Israel and US facilities in Gulf nations.
Although Israel and Gulf nations have intercepted many of these incoming missiles, several have breached the countries’ defences, causing significant damage and casualties.
While the US can jam or deny access to the US government-owned Global Positioning System (GPS), which Iran’s military previously relied on, it cannot do much to interfere with China’s BeiDou system if that is what Iran is using. Iran has not confirmed or commented on this.
Here is what we know about BeiDou and whether Iran’s potential use of it could mark the end of the US monopoly on real-time satellite intelligence in the battlefield.
What is the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS)?
China launched the latest version of its satellite navigation system, billed as rivalling GPS, in 2020. Chinese President Xi Jinping officially commissioned the system in a July 2020 ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
China began development of its own satellite navigation system after the 1996 Taiwan crisis because it feared Washington could restrict access to GPS in the future.
According to the Chinese government website for BeiDou, the aim of the system is to “serve the world and benefit mankind”.
Crucially, China’s system uses far more satellites than other navigational systems. According to data gathered by Al Jazeera’s AJ Labs data team, while the US GPS system has 24 satellites providing it with data, the Chinese system relies on 45. The two other main global navigation systems are Russia’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo system, each of which have 24 satellites.
The BeiDou website said the system is comprised of three segments – a space segment, a ground segment and a “user” segment.
“The BDS ground segment consists of various ground stations, including master control stations, time synchronisation/uplink stations, monitoring stations, as well as operation and management facilities of the inter-satellite link,” the website said.
“The BDS user segment consists of various kinds of BDS basic products, systems, and services as well as those compatible with other navigation systems, including basic products such as chips, modules and antennae, terminals, application systems and application services.”
Like other satellite navigation systems, BeiDou, which offers worldwide coverage, works by transmitting timing signals from satellites to receivers on the ground or in vehicles. By measuring the time it takes for signals from several satellites to reach the receiver, the system can calculate a precise geographic position.
“Accuracy varies depending on the level of service,” Brussels-based military and political analyst Elijah Magnier said. “The open civilian signal generally provides positioning accuracy of around five to 10 metres, while restricted services available to authorised users can offer much higher precision.”
Could Iran be using BeiDou?
Iran has not confirmed this. It is also unclear whether systematically switching military operations to a different satellite navigation system would even be possible in such a short space of time since the June war with Israel last year.
Following that conflict, Iran’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technology stated that Iran uses “all existing capacities in the world and does not rely on a single source of technology”.
However, Juillet told Tocsin that a switch to China’s BeiDou system is a realistic explanation for how Iran has improved its targeting accuracy so much since last year.
“There is talk about replacing the GPS system with a Chinese system, which explains the precision of Iranian missiles. … Significant targets have been hit.”
Some experts believe Iran has been working to incorporate China’s navigational systems for much longer than just the past eight months, however.
Theo Nencini, a specialist in China-Iran relations and a research fellow at the ChinaMed Project, a research platform, told Al Jazeera, “Back in 2015, Iran reportedly signed a memorandum of understanding to integrate BeiDou‑2 into its military infrastructure – particularly to improve missile guidance with signals far more accurate than those provided by the civilian GPS system previously used by its armed forces.”
Implementation was gradual, analysts believe, but appears to have accelerated after the Sino‑Iranian Comprehensive Strategic Partnership was signed in March 2021, when China is believed to have granted Iran access to BeiDou’s encrypted military signals.
“From then on, the Iranian military began incorporating BeiDou into the guidance of missiles and drones, and into certain secure communication networks,” Nencini said.
In practice, that shift meant that Iran started phasing out the US’s GPS around 2021.
“Some analysts had already suggested that BeiDou played a central role in the first wave of Iranian missile strikes against Israel in April 2024, noting the remarkable precision of those attacks.”
However, Iran is believed to have only completed its transition to BeiDou in June 2025, including for civilian uses such as transportation and logistics, just after the 12-day war, during which GPS disruptions affected the guidance of Iranian missiles and drones, as well as civilian aircraft and shipping.
“Iran’s move towards BeiDou thus reflects longstanding concerns, demonstrating Iran’s awareness of the technological challenges that would shape future battlefields,” Nencini said. “However, the experience of the 12‑day war was clearly a turning point, prompting Tehran to accelerate the full transition last year.”
How could using BeiDou improve accuracy in targeting?
The BeiDou system could be used to guide Iran’s ballistic missiles with much greater accuracy than before.
Magnier explained that until now, Iranian missiles and drones have been widely believed to rely primarily on inertial navigation systems. “These systems determine a weapon’s position by measuring acceleration and motion through onboard sensors such as gyroscopes and accelerometers. Inertial navigation offers the advantage of being self-contained and resistant to external interference,” he told Al Jazeera.
“However, it has a significant limitation: small measurement errors accumulate over time and distance, progressively reducing accuracy. Satellite navigation signals address this issue.”
Magnier added, “Typically, a missile uses inertial navigation to maintain its general trajectory while satellite signals refine the path and enhance targeting precision. This approach results in a substantial improvement in accuracy.”
He said it would make sense for Iran to use multiple navigation systems, rather than just relying on one.
“Simultaneous use of multiple satellite systems provides an additional advantage: resilience against jamming or signal disruption,” he explained. “In contested environments, navigation signals may be deliberately interfered with. If a weapon depends on a single satellite system, disruption of that signal can degrade accuracy. However, guidance systems capable of receiving signals from multiple constellations are more resistant to complete navigation denial. Furthermore, access to more satellites improves signal geometry, thereby enhancing positional accuracy.”
The Chinese navigation system is believed to have a “margin of error” of less than one metre (3.3ft), which means it is highly precise. It can also automatically correct target directions if they move, analysts said. “That is significantly better than what was possible under the civilian GPS signal, given that the US restricts access to its encrypted military signals to its adversaries,” Nencini told Al Jazeera.
Furthermore, it will likely help Iran to get around Western jamming systems used by Israel during the 12-day war last year. They successfully deflected Iranian drones and missiles – which were using GPS signals to navigate – in 2025. Jamming techniques include tricking incoming drones with false coordinates. The BeiDou system can filter out such interference.
Military analyst Patricia Marins told the news outlet bne IntelliNews this week: “Unlike the civilian-grade GPS signals that were paralysed in 2025, BDS-3’s military-tier B3A signal is essentially unjammable.”
The system uses “complex frequency hopping and Navigation Message Authentication (NMA), which prevents ‘spoofing’”, she added.
BeiDou also has a short message communication tool that allows operators to communicate with drones or missiles as far away as 2,000km (1,240 miles) while they are in flight. This means they can potentially be redirected after launch, Marins said.
How significant is Iran’s use of BeiDou?
If it has it, Iran’s access to BeiDou technology is a game-changer, analysts say.
“The evolution of satellite navigation has transformed the landscape of modern warfare,” Magnier said. “Precision strike capability, once the preserve of a handful of advanced military powers, is increasingly shaped by the availability of global navigation infrastructure. As long-range weapons become more accurate and more resilient to interference, systems such as BeiDou will continue to play a significant role in the technological foundations of contemporary conflict.”
If the reported effectiveness of BeiDou was to be confirmed, Nencini argued, it could prompt Iran’s neighbouring states, including those currently being targeted by Iranian missiles, to reconsider their own reliance on GPS. “Over time, this might lead to a transformation of the regional satellite navigation architecture towards a more diversified and less US-centric system.”
The ongoing war could also provide China – “which is certainly gathering military intelligence through its surveillance satellites,” Nencini said – with an opportunity to “field-test” its guidance capabilities in a large-scale operational theatre such as the present Middle Eastern conflict, which directly involves the US.
“This war, therefore, allows China to assess the effectiveness of its systems against American 5th generation fighter aircraft like the F-35, while collecting valuable data on the US ability to intercept Iranian missiles and drones guided by BeiDou.”
How many ballistic missiles does Iran have?
While the exact size of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal is not known, it is widely considered one of the largest and most advanced in the region. Ballistic missiles can travel distances ranging from a few hundred kilometres to more than 10,000km (6,200 miles) across continents.
Juillet told the Tocsin podcast that while the Israeli and US air forces claimed to have destroyed all identifiable targets in Iran, the exact number and distribution of Iranian missiles is unknown.
“Iran is three times the size of France, and the missiles are mounted on trucks dispersed across the country. How can one track these trucks in such a vast area?”
He added that it is likely that Iran is deploying its missiles more “judiciously” than it did in the 12-Day War in anticipation that the current war may be prolonged.
In the meantime, there are concerns on the US side that its store of expensive interceptor missiles could be depleted by taking down cheap Iranian Shahed drones before Iran even has to use many of its ballistic missiles.
For this reason, US President Donald Trump’s administration has asked Ukraine, where Russia is using Iranian-made Shahed drones, to share the interceptor technology it has developed and mass-produced.