FILE – In this July 20, 2016 file photo, six fitness tracking devices measuring step counts and other fitness features are worn in New York. A new Pentagon order says military troops and other defense personnel on certain sensitive bases and warzone areas won’t be allowed to use fitness tracker or cellphone applications that can reveal their location. The memo stops short of banning the fitness trackers or other electronic devices, which are often linked to cell phone applications and can provide the users’ GPS details to social media. It says GPS technologies present significant risk to personnel. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews) Somewhere in the Middle East, an American soldier finishes his shift, heads back to quarters, and calls his family to say he’ll be home soon. Elsewhere, an adversary’s intelligence analyst has been watching that soldier move all day — and not only him. He’s been watching everyone on the base. Now he sees them converge on the barracks for the night.
A missile is aimed and fired. The soldiers will never see home again.
The analyst had no drone overhead. He didn’t need one. He tracked our forces in real time through the smartphones in their own pockets, and he didn’t hack anything to do it. He simply bought the data from the same digital-marketing companies that try to sell you breakfast cereal as you drive past the supermarket.
Nothing in this scenario is hypothetical. It is a real vulnerability that has left American troops exposed in active conflict.
In April 2026, U.S. Central Command confirmed that commercial smartphone data was being used to target American forces stationed abroad. At the time, Iranian missile and drone strikes had left swathes of U.S. installations across the Gulf damaged or unusable, forcing commanders to disperse thousands of troops into hotels and offices with none of a base’s perimeter security. Every one of those service members still carried the same phone in their pocket, broadcasting location data that’s for sale to anyone with a credit card.
It led Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), joined by a bipartisan group including Reps. Elijah Crane (R-Ariz.) and Scott Perry (R-Pa.), to send a formal letter to the Defense Department’s chief information officer, demanding answers and immediate action.
This isn’t a new threat. The Pentagon was warned about this exact scenario more than a decade ago and has done remarkably little about it.
In 2016, an intelligence contractor named Mike Yeagley sat before the leadership of Joint Special Operations Command and reconstructed the training routines, deployments, and home lives of operators in one of America’s most secretive units — down to showing commanders images of their own homes. The room assumed he had hacked the data. He hadn’t — he had simply bought it, cheaply, from his home office in Maryland.
That was a decade ago, and the warnings didn’t stop there. In 2018, the fitness app Strava’s public heatmap inadvertently exposed the layouts of forward operating bases worldwide. In 2024, journalists bought commercial ad data and tracked U.S. troops at bases across Germany, including to their homes.
The response to date has been shockingly inadequate. While one end of our multitrillion-dollar military industrial complex develops F-35s and futurist space weapons, another segment tries to stop our soldiers from being tracked by telling them to tap “Ask App Not to Track” and use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. This misunderstands the threat entirely.
The problem is not that our troops have their GPS enabled. Modern apps reconstruct a unique device fingerprint from hundreds of signals and combine them into a profile that is as precise as any GPS coordinate, regardless of what any permission toggle says. There are no standard criteria for what a safe digital signature looks like, and therefore no protocol to enforce one – something our adversaries have been exploiting for years.
There is an embarrassing asymmetry here. China bars foreign cars like Teslas from government complexes and requires that all data collected on Chinese soil stay there. The U.S., in contrast, allows location data generated by its own servicemembers’ phones to be collected and sold on the open market. An adversary that protects its data while exploiting ours could hold a clearer picture of our forces’ digital footprint than we do.
Fixing this will take more than just tinkering at the margins of online privacy settings. What we need are technologies that reduce the signals our forces’ devices broadcast. And crucially, commanders in the field need to have full visibility of the data their own units are releasing into the open market.
The good news is that this is solvable. This week, as amendments are introduced to the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress has the opportunity to direct the Defense Department to meet this standard. The threat is confirmed, the remedy is within reach, and the bill is on the floor this year. Congress must act on it before the next conflict forces us to learn the hard way.
Erik Prince is a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer and a longtime entrepreneur in the defense and security industries.
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