GPS jamming and spoofing are driving the search for alternative navigation technologies that could keep aircraft, ships, and critical infrastructure operating when satellite signals are disrupted.
A report by the Center for New American Security (CNAS) warns that GPS’s reliance on weak satellite signals leaves it vulnerable to jamming, spoofing, and attacks on the satellites themselves.
“GPS interference already undermines military operations and disrupts up to thousands of commercial flights daily,” noted the report written by CNAS Fellow Constanza M. Vidal Bustamante.
The problem has become particularly acute at sea. According to maritime intelligence company Windward, GPS jamming affected more than 18,300 vessels globally during the second half of 2025.
In the first quarter of 2026, Windward recorded approximately 978,000 GPS jamming events worldwide, with 98% concentrated in the Middle East Gulf. More than 1,100 vessels were affected in the region.
Windward described the first-quarter total as the largest single-quarter concentration of maritime GPS jamming events it had ever recorded.
Ubiquitous but Vulnerable
Shaun Moore, CEO and co-founder of Tern, a developer of non-GPS navigation systems in Austin, Texas, pointed out that GPS has become an invisible infrastructure for the modern world.
“Transportation, emergency response, agriculture, logistics, communications, critical infrastructure and military operations all depend on it, and a NIST-sponsored study estimated that a widespread GPS outage could cost the U.S. economy roughly $1 billion per day,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“At the same time,” he continued, “autonomy, robotics and physical AI are demanding positioning that is more continuous, precise and trusted than ever before.”
“GPS is not going away,” he conceded, “but something this critical cannot be a single point of dependency. We need independent ways to determine and maintain position.”
“GPS is ubiquitous but vulnerable,” added Michael Biercuk, CEO and founder of Q-CTRL, a global developer of quantum-sensing systems.
“While the technology delivers extraordinary capabilities by relying on tiny signals received from satellites,” he told TechNewsWorld, “the simple reality is that it’s exceptionally easy for these signals to become corrupted — either because of the environment in which you’re working, such as underwater, or because of deliberate action.”
Navigating With Gravity
Biercuk explained that deliberate GPS interference has become a weapon of strategic and economic sabotage. “From war zones like the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe, GPS disruption is now rampant,” he said.
“More than 1,000 flights are affected by GPS interference each day, causing operational disruptions, increased costs, and even concerns over flight safety,” he added. “New solutions that provide a resilient backup are desperately needed.”
Biercuk’s company recently demonstrated its Ironstone Opal quantum-assured navigation system in the Coral Sea off Australia’s east coast. Q-CTRL reported that the system achieved positioning accuracy of one nautical mile without relying on GPS during the maritime trial.
Ironstone Opal uses a quantum navigation technique known as GravNav to measure subtle variations in Earth’s gravitational field, effectively detecting invisible hills and valleys in the planet’s gravity. By comparing those measurements with gravity maps, the system can determine its position without relying on GPS signals.
Q-CTRL says the technology is designed for use on land, at sea, and in the air, providing a backup when GPS is unavailable or impaired. It can operate day or night, in all visibility conditions, without relying on external radio signals for positioning.
Quantum Navigation’s Promise and Limitations
Quantum sensors could provide a more resilient alternative to GPS-based positioning, navigation, and timing services, according to the CNAS report.
By exploiting the properties of atoms, these devices can deliver highly precise measurements that could supplement or, in some applications, outperform existing GPS-based services.
The report projects that quantum sensors could support navigation for submarines, drones, and munitions, as well as timing services for telecommunications networks, power grids, and financial systems. However, realizing that potential will require continued development and deployment of the technology.
Although early quantum sensors are moving from the laboratory into field testing, many prototypes remain too fragile and bulky for widespread deployment, according to CNAS.
Developers must make the devices durable enough to operate in harsh environments and on moving platforms while reducing their size and integrating their atomic, optical, and control components into compact systems.
Gravity Versus Magnetism
A major challenge for gravity-based navigation systems is separating measurements of Earth’s gravitational field from vibrations and acceleration caused by a moving vehicle.
Sanket Deshpande, co-founder and CEO of Madison, Wis.-based quantum-sensing navigation developer Dirac Labs, said vibration isolation remains a significant technical obstacle.
“Because gravity measurement is essentially measurement of the platform’s acceleration, it becomes very challenging to separate the vibrations due to the movement of the platform from the gravity ‘picture’ of the Earth,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Gravity-measuring quantum sensors also face size and complexity challenges. Deshpande noted that some devices are as large as a small refrigerator and require advanced lasers and vacuum components to operate.
“Magnetic PNT systems fare better in terms of real-world deployment compared to gravity,” he said.
“The magnetic field has features very similar to that of gravity, but the quantum sensors for magnetic field measurements are already very compact — about the size of a golf ball — and don’t face the same hurdles as gravity-based systems,” he explained.
High Costs Could Limit Commercial Adoption
Cost could present another obstacle to commercial adoption, particularly in industries where conventional GPS receivers are inexpensive and widely available.
Akshay Hanumegowda, CTO of Loadguard in Los Angeles, an operator of a freight-broker software platform for vetting motor carriers and preventing fraud, said the sensors could initially cost $10,000 to $20,000 each. “I can get my GPS for less than $10,” he told TechNewsWorld.
If production is scaled up to a commercial level, the price might reach $500 to $600 per sensor, he continued. “Even at that price, I would still prefer something that is less than $10,” he said.
“The sensors may not make sense for commercial purposes,” he maintained, “but if you’re the military, where your budget has no limits, and you don’t have to make a profit, it works.”
Nation-states have shown interest in quantum sensors because, with the level of geopolitical instability in the world, nations worry about jamming and spoofing disabling critical services, added Allison Kealy, director of the Innovative Planet Institute at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.
She conceded that quantum sensors for measuring gravity can be quite big right now. “But work is going on to get them into smaller form factors,” she told TechNewsWorld.
“Progress over the last even five years in terms of getting them out of the lab has been escalating,” she added.
Funding Disparities
The CNAS report noted that the United States attracts the largest share of private capital in quantum technology, although about 80% flows to the more nascent field of quantum computing, while only 9% goes to quantum sensing.
“This disparity reinforces the vital role of robust government support in advancing quantum PNT, both through direct federal spending — especially in critical defense programs — and by sending market signals to the private sector,” it stated.
The report noted that recent defense spending bills also favor quantum computing over sensing, reinforcing the funding imbalance despite quantum sensors’ potential to address GPS vulnerabilities affecting military operations today.
Meanwhile, it continued, the People’s Republic of China — the United States’ closest quantum competitor — is not wasting any time. China’s quantum sensing research is expanding quickly in both volume and impact, backed by a state-led strategy and tight civil-military fusion, consistent funding, and a formidable manufacturing capacity that could allow it to surpass U.S. technology development and adoption, it warned.
Building a More Resilient Navigation Future
“GPS alternatives have become a mainstream topic of discussion now, and their importance to our warfighters and economy will continue to increase,” Dirac Labs’ Deshpande predicted.
“PNT is a fundamental need for our economy and for exploration, which is a core human trait,” he said. “I’d expect a significant amount of resources to be deployed by governments and private capital into developing technologies such as magnetic navigation, which open up access to domains such as underground and underwater.”
“These domains are getting increasingly important, and currently, there is no GPS-like alternative in those domains,” he said.
GPS remains the gold standard in navigation, according to Q-CTRL’s Biercuk.
“Going forward, we’ll rely on a combination of ‘alt nav’ technologies to make navigation more resilient, rather than relying on a single source of truth,” he said. “Quantum navigation can be an important part of that resilient navigation architecture, and these technologies are increasingly being validated in real-world use cases.”
Read the full article here
