Navigating the Future

What is PNT and why it matters for warfare

On October 5th, 2027, computer terminals at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) and the Pentagon receive a stream of warning messages. Until that morning, the PRC had been in the middle of another Joint Sword training exercise. Suddenly, there are reports from vessels and aircrafts that the PLA is redirecting all sea and air traffic away from Taiwan. This time, it seems, the blockade is real. In the early morning, the People’s Liberation Navy detained three Japanese flagged vessels crossing the Taiwan Strait while the People’s Liberation Air Force established a no‐fly zone above the island. The commanders in Hawaii are rushing to join the Joint Chiefs in a briefing to the President as units across the force begin to muster and receive orders. Staff officers in U.S. Army, Japan notice navigation and location devices are not reporting. INDOPACOM’s Operations Center is receiving the same error messages. The devices are not tracking locations. More worrisome, in INDOPACOM, a staff officer prepares to tell the commander that the Joint Fires Network, the system connecting weapons systems across the theater, is reporting multiple errors. The fires network, critical to accurately employing America’s arsenal, is essentially blind. The young staff officer sweats as he briefs the admiral, who, on hearing this, flushes and suppresses the urge to fling his coffee cup at the wall. Panic grips the Pentagon, as a Colonel rushes to tell the Joint Chiefs, “We lost GPS!”

“Where?” The Generals bark back in response.

“Everywhere.” The colonel meekly replies.

American firepower, predicated on accurately bringing to bear the arsenal of democracy against its enemies, is frozen in place.

This hypothetical crisis sounds like the start of a (very bad) Tom Clancy paperback. However, it is a possible scenario. Almost every aspect of the modern military relies on exact position, navigation, and timing (PNT) data from the constellation of global positioning satellites. This reliance extends to the entire economy. Every day, Americans depend on high-quality and precise PNT data to perform the most basic functions of the modern economy. ATMs, traffic lights, industrial supervisory control and data acquisition systems, personal GPS devices, air traffic control, and ground logistics all rely on PNT data to function. Its ubiquity belies its vulnerability.

Increasingly, the U.S. faces threats from hostile actors abroad and closer to home. Reporters and national security thought leaders have written about the danger of cyber and physical attacks against American critical infrastructure. However, cyber and physical attacks require long lead times. Adversaries must plan, resource, and execute these attacks. They are high risk, with multiple failure points, and the U.S. or its allies can discover one or all these attacks, blunting or preventing their success. These are not the only threats. Both the U.S. military and economy are reliant on GPS technology that is decades old and easily disrupted. Navigation Warfare (NAVWAR) has the potential to impact and destabilize U.S. military and economic power.

On September 1st, 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, claiming the pilots had crossed into Soviet-controlled airspace. In the aftermath of this tragedy, President Ronald Reagan marked specific bands of GPS for civilian use internationally and provided much of the world’s economy with a secure means of timing and location that served then, and still serves, as scaffolding for the modern world.

Accurate timing allowed faster economic transitions, reliable communications, increased safety in the sky and on the ground, and helped propel the world toward autonomous vehicles. It reduced the friction of communication and travel to the point that our world became more connected and more prosperous than at any point in history. Over the ensuing decades, the U.S. military, whose strength underpinned the global economic system, developed and fielded weapons that use GPS to accurately deliver munitions anywhere in the world, and networks to send information and data across the force. The U.S. military stood as a paradigm of speed and power. Now, as our weapons and soldiers’ reliance on GPS has increased, the frictionless system is collapsing under sustained threats.

A core principle of warfare is the ability to concentrate forces at the critical point of a battle. Generally, the military that arrives first and in the greatest numbers wins the day. Inherent in this principle is the ability to find the battlefield. This is a task that is no longer simple or guaranteed. Modern warfare, with the proliferation of drones and the resurgence of heavy artillery barrages, is challenging decades-old U.S. military tactics and technological development. Accurate location data is at the bleeding edge of combat. The U.S. demonstrated the lethality of a highly precise military during the Gulf War and in Afghanistan. America’s adversaries learned valuable lessons from those conflicts and built systems specifically designed to blunt America’s technological advantage. Today, the U.S. and its allies need to rapidly adopt technology that enable precise operations in a contested environment.

The Russian military’s employment of sophisticated, layered electronic warfare (EW) has challenged conventional thinking on air and spectrum supremacy. Russia has increasingly deployed EW systems down to the platoon level. In 2017, the Estonian Ministry of Defense released a report on Russian EW stating, “Russia’s growing technological advances in EW will allow its forces to jam, disrupt and interfere with NATO communications, radar and other sensor systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other assets, thus negating advantages conferred on the Alliance by its technological edge.” We are seeing this bear out in Ukraine.

Russia’s ability to target Western weapon systems has created confusion, reduced the effectiveness of U.S. and Allied support to Ukraine, and prompted a reconsideration of America’s economy-of-force model. Some researchers and military analysts believe that Russia’s EW use in Ukraine is only a part of its capabilities. They note that “Russian forces regularly jam GPS signals in northern Norway from locations far across the border. In some cases, this jamming has been so precise that signals in a nearby frequency band from Russia’s GLONASS satellite navigation system have been unaffected.” They also correctly point out that Ukraine’s military is less technologically advanced than NATO militaries, making Ukraine less susceptible to EW. While this may be true, Ukraine has still proven capable of technological feats. In particular, the destruction of Russian strategic bombers in Operation Spiderweb. Despite these tactical and strategic wins, the effect of Russia’s EW has been to limit connectivity to higher commands and has force Ukraine’s reliance on lower tech means of communication and movement that do not support the scale of data necessary to control the modern battlefield.

The character of warfare is changing in Ukraine. Ukraine’s army is learning crucial lessons:

“Without the proper drone and electronic warfare support, an infantry unit will survive only a few hours on the battlefield,” says Major Dmytro Tolstoluzhsky, an officer in a specialized technology unit of Ukraine’s defence ministry. The task of EW turned to neutralizing the drones, loitering munitions and glide bombs that now dominate the skies.”

Ukraine is a testing ground for Russian EW against NATO weapon systems. We must recognize that Russia is learning—and sharing—those lessons. Just as the Ukraine War has served as a clarion call to invest in defense production, it should also lead us to prioritize national assured PNT.

China has made extensive efforts to inculcate EW in its military strategy, particularly in the South China Sea. According to a 2021 article by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), China is in the process of expanding electronic surveillance and communications installations at its Mumian facility on the island of Hainan. This facility is a crucial part of China’s EW capabilities, as it hosts satellite tracking and communication (SATCOM) platforms. CSIS’s analysis notes, “Many assets in the vicinity appear dedicated to gathering communications intelligence (COMINT), a subset of SIGINT that includes the collection of communications between individuals and organizations.” According to satellite imagery, the facility underwent a large expansion from 2018 to 2020, which appeared to include new radars, SIGINT systems, and SATCOM platforms.

Aside from Russia and China’s emerging EW capabilities, smaller state adversaries like Iran and North Korea are expanding their EW abilities. On August 25, 2023, Iran launched a major EW exercise, Separ-e Hafezan-e Velayat (Shield of the Guardians of Islamic Jurisprudence), aimed at targeting “mock enemy drones, fighter jets and helicopters” in its central region. In testing and expanding its EW capabilities, Iran seeks to counter U.S. and Israeli technological advantages that have left them in a chronically weakened position across the Middle East. However, as we see from the last several days, Israel’s capabilities far outstrip Iran’s currently. Iran’s investment in EW, coupled with advances in unmanned systems, proves U.S. military operations around the globe will face enemy EW specifically aimed at undermining the U.S.’s technological advantage.

North Korea’s EW capabilities recently came into the spotlight when incidents of jamming and spoofing of GPS systems in South Korea increased from 39 cases in 2023 to 578 cases between January and August 2024. According to South Korean sources, the incidents targeted civilian aviation and shipping, with 90 percent of these cases traced back to North Korea. Additionally, a Newsweek article reported that “the majority of the incidents were reported across five consecutive days between May 29 and June 2, when hundreds of civilian aircraft and ships reported suspected GPS jamming around the de facto inter-Korean sea border in the west, known as the Northern Limit Line.” Such incidents highlight the evolving sophistication of the North Korean military’s EW capabilities and their threat to military and economic assets. As these technologies spread from state actors to terrorist and criminal organizations the U.S. defense and critical infrastructure must adapt.

PNT is vulnerable to spoofing and jamming. Spoofing involves deceiving a device into reporting an inaccurate location. Spoofing and jamming are challenges that modern militaries will face as adversaries continue to develop and employ sophisticated electronic warfare capabilities. The U.S. needs a multi-layered approach to PNT. There is no such thing as a civilian PNT network. The network that underpins the U.S. military is the same as the network that ensure the modern economy runs. The same satellites providing global positioning to U.S. and allied forces also serves telecommunication infrastructure, transportation systems, power grids, and international banking. The U.S. PNT system is dual-use technology and a potential target in a conflict. During the Global War on Terror the foreign battlefields seemed remote to Americans, but future conflict, as it spills into information, economic, and cyber realms, will show how deeply they are intertwined. Military commanders are concerned with achieving mass on the battlefield, they need a solution to the reliance on GPS. Without a robust solution, the vulnerabilities of our PNT system mean adversaries willing to strike first could prevent our military from reaching the battlefield and bring our economy to a halt.

Iran and the Ukrainian success in Operation Spiderweb also point to the need for increased deployment of EW capabilities at home. How could these drones operate near sensitive sites? The easy answer is, Russia and Iran allowed adversaries to slam drones into some of their most sensitive and important military sites because most nations look at their home like it is base in a game of tag. This thinking must change, which means nations must increase the use of EW countermeasures and counter-drone technologies at home. This means building more robust systems that are resilient to both enemy and friendly EW across military and economic infrastructure.

The Space-Based Position Navigation and Timing National Advisory Board noted in its 2023 whitepaper, “GPS is falling behind other Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) such as Europe’s Galileo and China’s Beidou.” It further said, “Also, the data message modulated on the GPS signals is fragile. Environmental effects or malicious actions can prevent a receiver from reading the information or manipulate what is read, limiting the robustness of the GPS signals.” This insight into the frailty of the system, combined with the increasing threats the U.S. faces, shows the need for investment in this space.

The U.S. military must field assured PNT devices across its formations while also deploying more resilient systems across critical portions of the nation’s infrastructure. These need to be both space and ground based to overcome the inherent weakness of a signal traveling from space to hit a ground station. The U.S. military’s systems span everything from individual soldiers navigating across unknown terrain to theater fire networks directing the most expensive and impressive armaments in the world. Without these integrated systems the U.S. risks being unable to respond to a conflict. The lack of PNT resilience across the U.S. economic and physical infrastructure incentivizes adversaries to strike this critical vulnerability early. Fixing this is not easy. In no small part because there is no economic incentive to fix it now. The current system works, and a large number of people think “it can’t happen to me” when considering insurance against a catastrophe. Interestingly, by investing in a capable alternative the U.S. would protect its current system against attack. Why would an adversary risk attacking the U.S. PNT system if the only accomplishment would be to make the U.S. angry.