The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has exposed the importance of resilient PNT for a nation’s safety and security. It has opened up doors to discussions on the fragility of GPS signals that can cost millions of human lives, when data is available to an enemy entity.
In February 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, GPS interference was detected along the Ukraine-Belarus border. After analysing GPS signals around Ukraine for over four months in March, HawkEye 360 called it a demonstration of the “integration of electronic warfare tactics into Russian military operation to further degrade Ukraine’s ability for self-defence.”
Not just HawkEye 360, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies reported GPS spoofing by Russia as far back as 2019. The non-profit C4ADS also documented 10,000 separate GPS spoofing incidents conducted by Russia.
This means with tech advancement, the dependency of a nation’s critical infrastructure on Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) signals has only increased with time. These PNT signals are received from the space-bound GPS network and are vulnerable to hacking, spoofing, and manipulations.
HawkEye 360 CEO John Serafini told Geospatial World, “This clearly bares the tactics that Russian troops are deploying to degrade the effectiveness of space-based assets, such as the United States Global Positioning System. GPS jamming is one facet that we are seeing evidence through the use of our signal detection constellation and processing capabilities.”
Also Read: HawkEye 360 Develops Space-based GPS Interference Detection Capability
Besides, a 2019 report sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology estimated that the loss of GPS would cost the US economy USD 1 billion a day.
As per the US space-based PNT policy, the widespread and growing dependency on GPS by military, civil, and commercial applications, system and infrastructure makes the performance of many of these systems vulnerable in case of disruption or manipulation of GPS signals. GPS users must plan for potential signal loss, and take steps to verify, or authenticate the integrity of the received GPS data, and ranging signal, especially in applications where even small degradations can lead to fatal loss.
Airing his concerns at the second annual Assured PNT Summit, Dana A. Goward, President, Resilient Navigation & Timing Foundation; Proprietor Maritime Governance, LLC, pointed out that China has a comprehensive PNT architecture that includes satellites at GEO, MEO, and LEO, extensive and precisely measured fiber networks able to transfer highly precise time, plans to use 5G infrastructure for PNT, and a national eLoran network specifically deployed to protect the nation from interruptions of space-based signals.
Whereas, Russia’s architecture, while less extensive than China’s, includes a Loran-like system that serves the most developed parts of the nation. And, because its armed forces’ doctrine assumes that signals from space will be denied during any major conflict, Russia’s armed forces seem to have a mobile terrestrial PNT system for expeditionary operations.
“So where does this leave the United States? Clearly in PNT we are at best, in third place. Domestically and militarily, PNT, a fundamental piece of tech infrastructure, is vulnerable. And unlike our major adversaries, we have no widely deployed fallbacks should GPS/GNSS be denied,” he stated.
Policy makers of both UK and US are looking to adopt cost-effective alternate resilient PNT sources, which can ensure operational procedures are in place even when GPS/GNSS is facing disruption. The alternative resilient PNT sources from ground-based GPS, could include improved antenna technology and investment in multi-constellation, multi-frequency GNSS receivers.
Alternative or complementary PNT sources can be a feasible if improved technologies are fused with the existing systems and if looked for options where ground-based PNT services can be used as back up for space-based PNT services.
Also Read: How Critical is the Role of PNT for Drone-Based Delivery Service?
With the US government starting to take note of a potential threat to national security and the world economy, in its Executive Order 13095, it laid down the first policy marker and weighed resilient PNT services as a national security concern. The federal agencies were asked to carefully strategize to “ensure critical infrastructure can withstand disruption or manipulation of PNT services.
The DHS report on alternative sources of PNT points out that “no single technology can count for the wide variety of use cases that PNT services address”, which is why multiple technologies will be required to work in unison in order to serve both as supplement as well as complements to GPS.
Some of the prominent examples of alternative PNT sources are terrestrial PNT systems, enhanced long-range navigation (eLORAN), geotriangulations using low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN) or other IoT gadgets, which can provide location data as an alternate source.
As applications of GNSS capabilities have increased in recent years, nations need to be prepared with alternative PNT backups in case of dire scenarios.
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