The Silent Dependency: GNSS Vulnerabilities, Quantum PNT, and the Future of Small Wars
Introduction: The Crash That Should Have Changed the Conversation
On December 25, 2024, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 was reportedly shot down by a Russian air defense system after experiencing GPS jamming – likely also originating from Russia. Thirty-eight passengers and crew were killed. As documented in the peer-reviewed journal GPS Solutions in March 2026, this would be the first instance of civilian fatalities directly attributable to Global Positioning System (GPS) radio-frequency interference. The incident did not become a global watershed because the wider strategic community has yet to absorb a simple but consequential fact: the positioning, navigation, and timing services on which modern military and civilian operations depend have become one of the most exploitable vulnerabilities in the contemporary battlespace. Small wars and irregular warfare practitioners, whose operations depend entirely on these services, have not yet developed the doctrine, training, or technology choices that this reality demands.
The Silent Dependency
Positioning, navigation, and timing services delivered by Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have become the invisible substrate of modern operations. Drone navigation, artillery accuracy, convoy routing, communications synchronization, targeting, intelligence fusion, and command-and-control architectures all depend on GNSS signals originating from approximately 20,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface. What is true for state militaries is even more true for the small wars practitioner. The special operations team that infiltrates contested terrain, the counter-insurgent unit conducting patrols in remote provinces, and the intelligence officer fusing signals across multiple sensor types all rely on PNT services whose vulnerability most operators have never had to consider.
The dependency runs deeper than navigation. As the Center for a New American Security documented in its May 2025 “Atomic Advantage” report, PNT services underwrite submarine operations, drone targeting, munitions guidance, financial transaction systems, energy grid synchronization, and communications network timing. Approximately forty percent of European air traffic is currently affected by GNSS interference, with a five to tenfold increase in Russian jamming and spoofing operations recorded in the Nordic, Baltic, and Arctic regions between 2023 and 2025. The dependency exists. The exploitation has begun. The question is no longer whether PNT vulnerability will shape future operations, but whether doctrine, training, and force design will adapt before the next conflict demonstrates the consequences.
The Vulnerability Proven: Three Years of Operational Data
The Russo-Ukrainian war has provided the most extensive operational dataset on PNT denial available in the open record. Russia has heavily jammed GPS throughout the conflict, significantly degrading the accuracy of American-made guided munitions and forcing both sides to rapidly iterate on counter-PNT and counter-counter-PNT techniques. Investigations published by Defense News in July 2025 traced systematic Baltic GPS jamming to facilities near the Okunevo antenna site on the central Kaliningrad coast, with interference shifting from straightforward signal blocking to sophisticated “circular spoofing” that defeats legacy detection methods.
The technique has spread well beyond Ukraine. Israel began spoofing its own GPS signals in 2024 to defeat incoming drone attacks, causing receivers in Tel Aviv to incorrectly register Beirut airport as their location. According to the assessment of Thomas Withington at the Royal United Services Institute, spoofing technology may have helped deceive Iranian radar systems during Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025. In April 2024, 117 vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean were simultaneously spoofed to display Beirut airport as their position; subsequent incidents displaced 227 ships across the same region. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s establishment of Operation Baltic Sentry in early 2025 to address GNSS interference reflects the seriousness with which the alliance now treats the problem.
Most concerning, recent investigations have traced the GPS interference affecting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s aircraft in 2025 to space-based sources, suggesting that GNSS jamming has begun migrating from terrestrial to orbital platforms. The shift carries strategic significance: space-based interference offers vast geographic reach and represents what the Computing.co.uk analysis described as a qualitative escalation in the GNSS threat environment. The vulnerability has been comprehensively demonstrated across three years and multiple theatres. The doctrinal community has not yet caught up.
The Quantum Response: A Technology Maturing on Operational Timelines
Quantum positioning, navigation, and timing technologies offer the most credible path toward GNSS-independent operational capability. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has invested in quantum sensing for over two decades through programs including the Chip-Scale Atomic Clock effort from 2001 to 2009, the Quantum-Assisted Sensing and Readout program from 2010 to 2018, and the current Atomic Clock with Enhanced Stability program targeting clocks one thousand times more stable than existing chip-scale systems. The most operationally significant current program is Robust Quantum Sensors, launched in February 2025, with Phase 1 awards announced during the year to companies including Q-CTRL, which received approximately twenty-four million United States dollars with Lockheed Martin as a subcontractor.
The quantum PNT toolkit consists of three principal technologies. Chip-scale atomic clocks provide the precise timing reference that underlies all PNT functions. Cold-atom interferometric inertial measurement units can deliver navigation accuracy of approximately five meters per hour of drift without external signals – a capability currently being demonstrated through DARPA’s Precision Inertial Navigation Systems work. Quantum gravimeters and magnetometers enable navigation by detecting variations in Earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields, providing an entirely independent reference frame against which to fix position. The AUKUS Pillar 2 framework conducted maritime quantum PNT testing in May 2025 across all three partner navies, focused specifically on environmental sensitivity and platform integration for operational deployment.
The CNAS Atomic Advantage report concluded that quantum PNT capabilities for submarines, drones, and munitions are reachable within a small number of years, rather than decades, and recommended that the United States Department of Defense establish a Joint Quantum Office in the Pentagon to coordinate funding, prototyping, and acquisition of quantum technologies across the armed services. The strategic implication is that the PNT vulnerability window between demonstrated GNSS exploitability and operational quantum alternatives is approximately a decade. This window is the operational environment in which the small wars of the 2020s and early 2030s will be fought.
Why This Matters for Small Wars Practitioners
The small wars literature, from Callwell through Galula to contemporary counter-insurgency scholarship, has consistently emphasized that operational effectiveness depends on adaptation to the specific physical and political environment of the conflict. The PNT-degraded environment is now part of that physical reality – and it imposes specific operational consequences that doctrine has not yet systematically addressed. Drone operators trained on GPS-guided navigation find their platforms unable to execute pre-programmed routes. Indirect fire systems calibrated for satellite positioning lose accuracy. Intelligence fusion architectures that synchronize multi-source data through GPS timing degrade in ways that affect targeting decisions. Command and control systems that depend on synchronized time across distributed nodes lose coherence at exactly the moment commanders need clarity.
The doctrinal response cannot wait for the maturation of quantum PNT, because the next decade of conflict will unfold in the gap. Small wars practitioners must therefore prepare across two parallel tracks. The first is operational adaptation to PNT-degraded environments using existing technologies: terrestrial positioning systems, inertial navigation with regular updates, celestial navigation training, optical and visual reference methods, and the systematic incorporation of PNT denial into exercise and training programs. The second is institutional preparation for the quantum PNT transition, ensuring that when operationally deployable quantum sensors emerge in the late 2020s and early 2030s, the doctrinal, training, and acquisition infrastructure to integrate them already exists.
Middle Powers and the Pakistan Air Force: A Strategic Choice
Middle powers operating in contested PNT environments face a structurally distinct challenge as opposed to major powers. They cannot match the research and development budgets of the United States or China, nor the multilateral coordination of AUKUS or the European Defense Fund. Yet they operate in environments, the Baltic-to-Black Sea corridor, the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea margins, and increasingly the India-Pakistan border, where PNT denial is already an operational reality. The strategic choice is whether to remain dependent on services they cannot guarantee or to invest now in the technologies, doctrines, and partnerships that will provide GNSS-independent capability over the coming decade.
The Pakistan Air Force offers an instructive case. Pakistan operates in one of the most electronically contested airspaces in the world, alongside India’s deepening integration of NavIC, the indigenous Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System, and against the backdrop of Chinese BeiDou access through the strategic partnership. The PAF’s May 2025 operational performance depended on resilient PNT services that will be contested in any future conflict from the opening minutes – including the cooperative kill chain that fused ground radar, airborne early warning, and space-based assets through a common data link architecture. The doctrinal task for the PAF and similarly positioned middle-power air forces is to ensure that future operational architectures incorporate PNT resilience as a foundational requirement rather than as a graceful degradation mode.
Three concrete actions follow. First, middle powers should invest in multi-constellation receiver architectures that draw on GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, and, where geographically relevant, NavIC combined with high-quality inertial backup, and in indigenous quantum PNT research. Second, they should embed PNT denial into routine training and exercise programs at every operational echelon, ensuring that no commander or operator encounters PNT degradation first in combat. Third, they should pursue partnerships with the more advanced quantum PNT programs in Western, Chinese, and Turkish ecosystems, recognizing that capability transfer in this domain will follow the political logic of broader strategic alignment. For the Pakistan Air Force specifically, building on the institutional culture that produced the May 2025 operational results, integrating these three tracks under a coherent doctrinal framework offers exactly the kind of strategic foresight that middle-power air forces will increasingly need to demonstrate.
Four Doctrinal Imperatives
Four imperatives emerge from the empirical record and bear directly on the strategic choices facing small wars practitioners and the institutions that train them. First, PNT denial must become an explicit assumption in operational planning rather than an exceptional condition. Second, the institutional architecture for evaluating, acquiring, and integrating quantum PNT technologies must be built now, during the decade in which these systems will transition from laboratory to deployment. Third, training programs must incorporate degraded PNT environments as a standard feature, with operators across every specialty required to demonstrate competence in GNSS-independent operations. Fourth, the doctrinal community must engage seriously with the implications of space-based GNSS interference, which represents the next qualitative escalation of the PNT threat and will require defensive and offensive responses that current frameworks do not provide.
Conclusion: The Decade That Must Be Used
The crash of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 on Christmas Day 2024 should have reframed the strategic conversation about positioning, navigation, and timing. It did not, in part because the costs of the silent dependency on GNSS services have been distributed across so many systems and so many operational environments that no single incident has made the underlying vulnerability fully visible. The doctrinal community cannot afford to wait for the next mass-casualty PNT incident to take the problem seriously. The decade between now and the operational maturation of quantum PNT technologies is the window in which small wars practitioners must build the doctrine, training, and institutional architecture that will allow their forces to operate effectively when the GPS signal fails or, worse, when it lies. Middle powers face this challenge most acutely because they have the fewest resources to address it. But the experiences of Ukraine, the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and the South Asian theatre in May 2025 all converge on the same conclusion: the silent dependency has become a strategic vulnerability. The technologies that will resolve it are arriving. The institutional preparation must begin now.
