Military Readiness and Civilian Awareness – Operating in a GNSS-Denied World
- Bridge Connect
- Jul 28
- 5 min read
Introduction: Preparing for a Day Without Coordinates
What happens when GPS—and its European counterpart Galileo—suddenly disappear from your aircraft, your mobile network, or your command system? In Ukraine, the answer has been clear since 2022: adaptation. Soldiers navigate with paper maps, drone operators switch to visual line of sight, and power engineers rely on internal clocks and analog fallback.
Now, European governments are recognising a sobering truth: GNSS denial is not just a wartime contingency—it’s a peacetime probability. Jamming and spoofing by Russia, primarily from Kaliningrad, Crimea, and Belarus, are now routine across civil airspace and digital infrastructure zones.
This article explores how military, civil, and public sectors are building capacity for degraded or denied GNSS conditions:
Tactical retraining and fallback navigation in armed forces
Airline procedures and pilot readiness
Preparedness in power grids, telecoms, and emergency services
Citizen awareness and systemic resilience
1. A Military Doctrine Shift: Navigating Without Satellites
Across NATO-aligned countries, military doctrine is undergoing a significant shift—from satellite dependence to satellite resilience.
Finland: Back to Map and Compass
Since 2023, every Finnish conscript is trained in:
Terrain navigation using topographic maps and compasses
Celestial techniques for Arctic winter conditions
GNSS outage drills during field exercises
Finland’s new defence doctrine assumes PNT denial as a baseline in any conflict scenario with Russia.
Germany: Air Force and Army Exercises
The Bundeswehr has introduced GNSS-denied scenarios into:
Air Force pilot simulator programs (with loss of GPS midway through missions)
Land force manoeuvres using electronic warfare simulators
Artillery units trained in manual angle setting and fire correction
Commanders report that many junior officers are being exposed to pre-GNSS tactics for the first time in their careers.
UK: Integration into Multi-Domain Exercises
The British Army and Royal Navy have adopted:
“Navigate dark” missions during annual Joint Warrior and Defender exercises
Use of inertial navigation and DR (dead reckoning) as mission-critical skills
Awareness programs for electronic warfare spoofing in drone operations
In 2024, the UK MoD issued a directive to all commands to ensure “minimum 48-hour operational capability without GNSS.”
2. Airspace Resilience: Aviation Without GPS
GNSS denial has serious implications for flight safety. EASA reported over 3,000 confirmed GNSS interference incidents in European airspace in 2024. Airlines, air traffic control centres, and aircraft manufacturers are adjusting their operating models.
Pilot Retraining
Ryanair, Finnair, and LOT Polish Airlines now mandate GNSS-denied training in recurrent simulator checks
Emphasis placed on VOR/NDB approach procedures, dead reckoning, and manual DME arcs
Pilots now briefed pre-flight on potential GNSS degradation zones (e.g. Baltic FIR, Kaliningrad FIR overlap)
“Flying a non-precision approach from raw data used to be an exercise. Now it’s insurance,”— Senior pilot trainer, Lufthansa Technik, 2025
Aircraft Adaptations
New Airbus and Boeing aircraft now include hybrid navigation packages integrating:
INS (Inertial Navigation Systems)
Barometric pathing
Multi-constellation GNSS spoof detection
EASA is currently assessing whether GNSS spoofing countermeasures will be required for all new Type Certificates from 2026 onward.
3. Critical Infrastructure Operators: Losing Time and Position
GNSS provides not just location but precise time—needed for:
5G cellular handovers
Power grid phase balancing
Bank timestamping
Air traffic sequencing
Railway safety
Power Sector
France’s RTE, Germany’s 50Hertz, and Poland’s PSE have implemented triple-layer timing:
GNSS
PTP (Precision Time Protocol) over optical fiber
Atomic clock holdover (rubidium/cesium)
Grid operators now run monthly failover drills, simulating a 24–48 hour GNSS outage with impact scenarios on SCADA and PMU systems.
Telecoms
Vodafone, Orange, and Deutsche Telekom have introduced:
Multi-source GNSS receivers (GPS + Galileo + GLONASS)
Integration of eLORAN and fiber PTP modules into cell tower timing units
Software-defined GNSS spoof detection based on signal distortion and satellite geometry mismatches
Many Tier 1 operators in Europe now require GNSS outage logs and failover evidence as part of SLA compliance.
4. Emergency Services: Dispatching Without Digital Anchors
Ambulances, fire services, and law enforcement are increasingly GPS-reliant for routing, dispatch, and coordination. GNSS outages risk:
Misrouted emergency calls
Delays in ambulance arrival
Failure of geo-fencing for public safety zones
Estonia’s Example
Developed offline dispatch mapping for EMTs using local caching
Equipped emergency vehicles with triangulation-based fallback tracking
Trains responders to validate location verbally with on-scene callers in GPS-denied zones
In Finland and Latvia, emergency services have conducted urban scenario drills using only RF triangulation and line-of-sight coordination—especially near suspected jamming zones.
5. Civilian Awareness and Preparedness
While institutional awareness is growing, public understanding remains low. Few citizens know:
What GNSS is
How reliant their phones, cars, and services are on it
What to do in a disruption
Several countries have initiated public awareness campaigns, including:
Finland’s "Where Are You Without GPS?" initiative, educating citizens on non-digital navigation
Estonia’s "Resilient Digital Citizen" training for GNSS-degraded environments
UK’s planned "PNT Resilience Week" to be hosted in 2026 by the National PNT Office
The EU’s civil protection agencies are exploring integrating GNSS failure into the RescEU disaster scenario catalogue.
6. Cyber and Information Security Linkages
GNSS spoofing and jamming can serve as attack triggers in blended operations:
Spoofed timing can confuse cybersecurity logging and audit trails
GNSS-dependant authentication systems (e.g. SIM provisioning, blockchain) may fail
Civil-military dual-use systems (e.g. maritime AIS) can be deceived into false alerts
Germany’s BSI and France’s ANSSI have issued GNSS risk assessments for critical infrastructure operators and now require multi-source time integrity verification in compliance protocols.
7. Sector Simulations and War Gaming
In response to the growing threat, NATO, the EU, and national agencies have begun incorporating GNSS denial scenarios into training and exercises:
NATO’s Trident Juncture (2024): 72-hour GNSS blackout for land-air-sea joint operations in Norway
Germany-Poland “DIGITAL NIGHT” Exercise (2025): Simulated cross-sector outage in Brandenburg and Silesia including telecoms, finance, and power grid impact
UK’s Critical Infrastructure Tabletop (2024): Multi-agency response to coordinated spoofing attack on GPS + Galileo + GLONASS over Southern England
Results show that human fallback training is a better predictor of success than equipment sophistication alone.
8. Psychological Preparedness and Cognitive Rewiring
At its core, GNSS denial creates cognitive risk: the loss of trust in systems that users assume “just work.”
“We have a generation that has never had to think about where they are,”— Estonian national resilience advisor, 2025
The move toward GNSS-resilience includes:
Reintroducing manual skills (e.g. reading maps, verifying coordinates)
Rehearsing degraded operations as standard rather than exceptional
Building system transparency, so operators understand what they’re relying on
This cultural change is perhaps the most difficult but most necessary transition.
Conclusion: Denial Is No Longer Optional
The age of absolute GNSS trust is over. Whether through intentional disruption, collateral interference, or natural degradation, satellite signals will not always be available. Europe’s response has begun—but needs to accelerate.
From armed forces retraining, airline pilot skill refreshers, and critical infrastructure adaptation to public education and policy reform, the move to a resilient PNT culture is underway. The key now is coordination—and acceptance that denial is not an edge case, but a recurring condition.
“Prepare for it, drill it, design for it—because it’s not a question of if, but when.”