Jamming in Ukraine and spoofing in the Middle East have turned satellite navigation into a contested tool. The military's answer is a stack of layered GPS free systems: chip scale gyroscopes, quantum sensors, and camera based navigation that work when satellites do not.
The U.S. military isn't trying to retire GPS. It is trying to demote it, from the single source of truth for where things are to one input among many. Jamming and spoofing have turned the satellite constellation into a contested battlefield tool rather than an invisible utility, and the autonomous systems now driving Pentagon procurement cannot afford to go dark when the signal does.
That timing is what makes the current wave of GPS-denied navigation investment unusual. In April 2026, NorthStrive Defense Tech announced the acquisition of a patented GPS-denied drone navigation technology option built for defense and counter-drone use, according to a company press release. Around the same period, DARPA selected quantum-sensing firm Q-CTRL to develop next-generation quantum sensors for navigation on advanced defense platforms under the agency's Robust Quantum Sensors (RoQS) program, a move Q-CTRL publicly confirmed.
GPS fails in three distinct ways, and each is producing its own line of replacements. Electronic jamming floods the receiver with noise so no usable signal gets through. Spoofing broadcasts false signals that quietly misreport a platform's position. Physical obstruction, from tunnels and dense foliage to buildings and water, simply blocks the satellite signal from reaching the device at all. The military has watched all three move from theoretical to operational. Jamming and spoofing of GPS receivers have been documented in Ukraine and the Middle East, according to a Military.com interview with ANELLO Photonics CEO Mario Paniccia, who frames GPS-denied navigation as a baseline requirement rather than a specialized capability.
The Pentagon's response is not a single replacement. It is four parallel pathways being bought at once, because none of them is ready to carry the load solo.
The first is chip-scale inertial navigation: sensors that track motion and rotation internally without any outside signal. ANELLO Photonics, a Silicon Valley firm, is commercializing a silicon photonic optical gyroscope built on a chip that combines micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and photonics on a single die, per the same Military.com interview. The pitch is that the device keeps estimating position when GPS is degraded or absent, including during the cold-start window when a spoofed receiver first tries to reacquire truth.
The second is quantum sensing. DARPA's RoQS program is building quantum sensors hardened against real-world noise, including vibration, temperature swings, and electromagnetic interference, that can deliver GPS-free positioning on defense platforms. Q-CTRL's selection signals commercial-vendor momentum in a category that has spent years in the lab. That capability is still pre-deployment. DARPA and its contractors are pushing it from research toward platform integration, but no quantum-sensor navigation system is fielded at scale yet.
The third is visual navigation: cameras and computer vision that localize a platform by reference to terrain, landmarks, or stored imagery. Palantir's defense blog outlines a camera-based, GPS-free localization approach for drones, and Spain-based UAV Navigation's VNS01 visual navigation system is one commercial product already targeting this lane.
The fourth is signals-of-opportunity: using whatever non-GPS radio transmissions happen to be in the air, from cell towers to commercial broadcasts, to triangulate position. The Pentagon has explicitly funded non-space positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) alternatives including signals-of-opportunity approaches, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. A distributed, swarm-style version of this idea, with platforms sharing timing and position cues among themselves when GPS is denied, is described in Military Embedded's coverage of the HORDE PNT concept.
The money trail follows the same shape. The Defense Department's fiscal 2026 budget request includes billions for uncrewed and autonomous systems and counter-drone technology, according to Defensescoop's breakdown of the request. Those figures reflect the request stage, not final appropriations, so they should be read as a directional demand signal rather than committed spend. Defense One reported in May 2026 that the Pentagon is pushing smarter, self-organizing drones as autonomous warfare budgets are poised to expand, reinforcing the demand-side pull for navigation that survives jamming and spoofing.
Two GAO reports put a hard floor under that demand. GAO-24-106841 documents continued delays in delivering more secure GPS capability to warfighters, and GAO-21-145 finds that M-Code, the military's jam-resistant GPS signal, is still years away from widespread fielding. As long as the secure GPS replacement is slow and the threat is fast, the alternative-navigation market has a guaranteed buyer.
That is the structural shift. GPS is no longer the center of military navigation. It is one input, layered with inertial, quantum, visual, and signals-of-opportunity systems, each carrying a different failure mode the others cannot. The watch item is whether any of the four pathways collapses to a single procurement standard before the threat catches up, or whether the Pentagon ends up buying all of them at once and pushing the integration burden onto the platforms themselves.