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What’s New: An examination of spoofing on large groups of drones.

Why It’s Important: One plan for the U.S. military to counter the numerically larger forces of other nations (China) is with drone swarms. How the drones/ UAVs will avoid colliding with each other, find their targets, etc. without GNSS is a question on the minds of many.

What Else to Know: 

• There is near universal agreement among analysts that in any major conflict between the great powers, GPS/GNSS will be denied. Either in the region of the conflict, or globally.
• All signals from space may be denied.
• The U.S. Department of Defense has numerous projects on-going to develop non-GPS navigation. None seem to have gotten traction. 
• While there are lots of non-GNSS navigation technologies available, to be effectively implemented for UAV swarms (per the article), they would have to be mass produced and low SWAP-C. Then integrated into the UAVs.
• Some analysts have posited DoD has adopted and will be using an at-present secret navigation technology for UAV swarms. Others have speculated the DoD drone and navigation people aren’t talking to each other.

Breaking the Formation: The Impact of GNSS Spoofing on UAV Swarms