The Silent Dependency: GNSS Vulnerabilities, Quantum PNT, and the Future of Small Wars

Introduction: The Crash That Should Have Changed the Conversation

On 25 December 2024, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 was reportedly shot down by a Russian air-defence system after experiencing GPS jamming—jamming that in all likelihood originated from the same source. Thirty-eight passengers and crew were killed. According to the peer-reviewed journal GPS Solutions, documented in March 2026, this constitutes the first civilian fatalities directly attributable to GPS radio-frequency interference.

The incident failed to become a global watershed because the broader strategic community has yet to absorb a simple but consequential fact: the positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services on which modern military and civilian operations depend have become one of the most exploitable vulnerabilities on the contemporary battlefield. Among small-wars practitioners—whose operations depend entirely on these services—the doctrine, training, and technical options required to address this reality have not yet been developed.

The Silent Dependency

PNT services provided by Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have become the invisible infrastructure of modern operations. Drone navigation, artillery accuracy, vehicle routing, communications synchronisation, target cueing, intelligence fusion, and command-and-control architectures all depend on GNSS signals transmitted from approximately 20,000 kilometres above the Earth's surface. This dependency applies to state militaries and small-wars practitioners alike. Special operations teams operating deep in denied terrain, counterinsurgency forces patrolling remote provinces, and intelligence officers fusing multi-sensor feeds all rely on PNT services—and most operators have never seriously considered the underlying vulnerabilities.

The dependency extends well beyond navigation. According to the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) report Atomic Advantage, published in May 2025, PNT services underpin submarine operations, drone target cueing, precision munitions guidance, financial transaction systems, power-grid synchronisation, and communications-network timing. Approximately 40 percent of European air traffic is currently affected by GNSS interference, and Russian jamming and spoofing operations across Northern Europe, the Baltic, and the Arctic increased five- to tenfold between 2023 and 2025. The dependency already exists; the exploitation has already begun. The question is no longer whether PNT vulnerabilities will affect future operations, but whether doctrine, training, and force design can adapt before the next conflict reveals the consequences.

Validated Vulnerabilities: Three Years of Operational Data

The Russia–Ukraine war has produced the most comprehensive publicly documented dataset on PNT-denial operations. Russia jammed GPS throughout the conflict, measurably degrading the accuracy of US-supplied precision munitions and forcing rapid iteration of counter-PNT and counter-counter-PNT techniques on both sides. A July 2025 investigative report in Defense News traced systematic GPS jamming in the Baltic to an antenna facility near Okunevo on the central Kaliningrad coast, and found that jamming techniques had evolved from direct signal suppression to sophisticated "meaconing" methods capable of defeating conventional detection.

The phenomenon has spread far beyond Ukraine. Israel began spoofing its own GPS signals in 2024 to counter incoming drones, causing receivers in Tel Aviv to register Beirut's airport as their location. According to RUSI analyst Thomas Withington, spoofing may have contributed to deceiving Iranian radar systems during Israel's strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025. In April 2024, 117 vessels in the eastern Mediterranean were simultaneously spoofed to display their position as Beirut airport; in a subsequent incident, 227 ships in the same region experienced location displacement. NATO established Operation Baltic Sentry in early 2025 specifically to address GNSS interference, reflecting alliance-level concern about the issue.

Most significantly, recent investigations traced GPS jamming affecting European Commission President von der Leyen's aircraft in 2025 to a space-deployed platform—indicating that GNSS interference is beginning to migrate from ground-based to orbital sources. This shift carries major strategic implications: space-deployed jamming offers vastly greater geographic coverage. Analysis by Computing.co.uk characterises this as a qualitative escalation in the GNSS threat environment. The vulnerability has been validated across three years and multiple theatres; the doctrinal community has not kept pace.

The Quantum Counter: A Technology Maturing on an Operational Timeline

Quantum PNT technology offers the most credible path toward GNSS-independent operational capability. DARPA has invested in quantum sensing for more than two decades, through programmes including the Chip-Scale Atomic Clock programme (2001–2009), the Quantum-Assisted Sensing and Readout programme (2010–2018), and the current Robust Miniature Atomic Clock programme targeting stability one thousand times greater than existing chip-scale systems. The most operationally significant current programme is Robust Quantum Sensors, launched in February 2025, with Phase 1 awards announced that year—including approximately $24 million to Q-CTRL, with Lockheed Martin as a subcontractor.

The quantum PNT toolkit comprises three core technologies. Chip-scale atomic clocks provide precise timing, the foundation for all PNT functions. Cold-atom interferometric inertial measurement units enable navigation without external signals at approximately five metres of drift per hour—a capability being validated under DARPA's Precise Inertial Navigation System programme. Quantum gravimeters and magnetometers navigate by detecting variations in Earth's gravitational and magnetic fields, providing a positioning reference frame fully independent of external signals. The AUKUS Pillar II framework conducted maritime quantum PNT testing across all three partner navies in May 2025, focusing on environmental sensitivity and platform integration for operational deployment.

The CNAS Atomic Advantage report concludes that quantum PNT capabilities suitable for submarines, drones, and precision munitions will be realised within years, not decades. The report simultaneously recommends that the US Department of Defense establish a Joint Quantum Office at the Pentagon to coordinate quantum technology funding, prototyping, and acquisition across the services. The strategic implication is this: from demonstrated GNSS exploitability to quantum alternatives reaching operational maturity, there is approximately a ten-year vulnerability window. Small wars will be conducted inside that window throughout the 2020s and early 2030s.

Implications for Small-Wars Practitioners

From Callwell and Galula to contemporary counterinsurgency scholarship, the small-wars literature has consistently emphasised that operational effectiveness depends on adaptation to the physical and political environment of the specific conflict. PNT-degraded environments are now part of that physical reality—and they create concrete operational consequences that doctrine has not systematically addressed. Drone operators trained on GPS-reliant navigation find their platforms unable to execute pre-planned routes. Indirect-fire systems calibrated against satellite positioning lose accuracy. Intelligence fusion architectures that synchronise multi-source data via GPS timing degrade in ways that affect target cueing. Command-and-control systems relying on synchronised time across dispersed nodes lose coherence precisely when commanders most need clarity.

The doctrinal response cannot wait for quantum PNT to mature, because the conflicts of the next decade will unfold inside the gap. Small-wars practitioners must therefore prepare along two parallel tracks simultaneously. The first is operational adaptation to PNT-degraded environments using existing technologies: terrestrial reference systems, regularly updated inertial navigation, celestial navigation training, optical and visual reference methods, and the systematic incorporation of PNT-denial scenarios into exercises and training programmes. The second is institutional preparation for the quantum PNT transition—ensuring that when deployable quantum sensors emerge in the late 2020s and early 2030s, the doctrine, training, and acquisition infrastructure required for integration is already in place.

Middle Powers and the Pakistan Air Force: A Strategic Choice

Middle powers operating in PNT-contested environments face structural challenges distinct from those of major powers. They cannot match the research-and-development budgets of the United States or China, nor replicate the multilateral coordination mechanisms of AUKUS or the European Defence Fund. Yet the environments in which they operate—from the Baltic–Black Sea corridor to the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea periphery, and the increasingly contested India–Pakistan border—are environments where PNT denial is an operational reality. The strategic choice is whether to continue depending on services that cannot be guaranteed or to invest immediately in the technologies, doctrine, and partnerships that will provide GNSS-independent capability over the next decade.

The Pakistan Air Force provides an instructive case. Pakistan operates in one of the most electronically contested airspaces in the world, facing an adversary that has deeply integrated NavIC (India's regional navigation satellite system) while itself benefiting from access to China's BeiDou system through strategic partnership. The Pakistan Air Force's operational performance in May 2025 depended on resilient PNT services—and those services, in any future conflict, will be challenged from the first minutes, across integrated kill chains fusing ground radar, airborne early warning, and space assets within a common data-link architecture. For the Pakistan Air Force and comparably positioned middle-power air forces, the doctrinal task is to ensure that future operational architectures treat PNT resilience as a foundational requirement rather than a graceful-degradation mode.

Three concrete actions follow. First, middle powers should invest in multi-constellation receiver architectures integrating GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, and NavIC where geographically relevant, combined with high-quality inertial backup and investment in indigenous quantum PNT research. Second, PNT-denial scenarios should be embedded in routine training and exercise programmes at all operational levels, ensuring that no commander or operator encounters PNT degradation for the first time in combat. Third, partnerships with more advanced quantum PNT programmes—Western, Chinese, and Turkish—should be pursued, recognising that capability transfer in this domain will follow the political logic of broader strategic alignment. For the Pakistan Air Force, integrating these three tracks within a coherent doctrinal framework, building on the institutional culture that produced the operational results of May 2025, represents the kind of strategic foresight that middle-power air forces increasingly need to demonstrate.

Four Doctrinal Imperatives

Four imperatives emerge from the empirical record, bearing directly on the strategic choices facing small-wars practitioners and the institutions that train them.

First, PNT denial must be an explicit planning assumption, not an edge case.

Second, the institutional architecture for assessing, acquiring, and integrating quantum PNT technology must be established immediately—during the decade in which these systems transition from laboratory to operational deployment.

Third, training programmes must incorporate PNT-degraded environments as a standard element, with operators across all specialities required to demonstrate GNSS-independent operational capability.

Fourth, the doctrinal community must engage seriously with the implications of space-deployed GNSS jamming—a qualitative escalation in the PNT threat that demands defensive and offensive responses not yet provided by existing frameworks.

Conclusion: A Decade That Must Be Used

The Christmas Day 2024 crash of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 should have reshaped the strategic conversation about positioning, navigation, and timing. It did not. Part of the reason is that the cost of silent dependency on GNSS services is distributed across so many systems and operational contexts that no single event can make the underlying vulnerability fully visible. The doctrinal community cannot wait for the next mass-casualty PNT event before taking this seriously.

The decade between now and the operational maturation of quantum PNT technology is the window during which small-wars practitioners must build the doctrine, training, and institutional architecture that allows their forces to fight effectively when GPS signals fail—or, worse, when those signals lie. Middle powers face this challenge most acutely, because they have the fewest resources with which to address it. But the experience of Ukraine, the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and the South Asian theatre in May 2025 all point to the same conclusion: the silent dependency has become a strategic vulnerability. The technology to address it is coming. The institutional preparation must begin now.

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