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What’s New: RNT Foundation President Dana Goward’s column in the July issue of GPS World. In it he discusses how the UK’s planning and governance could give its government and businesses advantages and opportunities.

Why It’s Important: While national PNT resilience is an crucial issue, few western governments seem to be taking it seriously.

What Else to Know: Read the column 😉

 

UK’s PNT Foresight Could Presage World Leadership, Profits

By Dana Goward, President, Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation

In October 2023 the United Kingdom’s government announced a ten point “policy framework” to greatly increase the nation’s resilience to disruption of vital positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services.

Two months later Vladimir Putin began regularly jamming and spoofing GPS for aircraft and ships across a broad swath of the Baltic and northern Europe. It was the world’s first instance of such extensive activity in the absence of armed combat.

Properly executed, Britain’s policy framework will position it as a global leader in sovereign and resilient PNT. It will also provide ample new opportunities for British businesses to fill this growing need.

Awareness and Planning

The product of years of effort under both Coalition and Conservative governments, the PNT policy framework addresses challenges that have been extensively documented and studied.

The nation’s over-reliance on space-based PNT has long been recognized. Its National Risk Register listed solar activity as a threat to PNT in 2012. When, despite extensive lobbying by the UK, the rest of Europe shut down its Loran transmitters in 2015 to prevent competition with Galileo, Britain kept its single transmitter on air as a national precise time reference. In 2018 a “Blackett Report” documented the nation’s over-dependence, estimated the consequences of service outages and made a series of recommendations. A 2021 economic report further estimated the scale of the problem.

All well before Russia’s demonstrations of GPS and GNSS fragility with its attacks on Ukraine and recent aggression in the Baltic.

Yet action on Britain’s way forward was repeatedly deferred.

The sticking point seems to have been deciding upon the mechanics of how government would deal with the invisible PNT utility. A capability essential to every government department and every sector of the economy and society. Should it be in the Department of Transport? Perhaps Business and Trade, or Defence? Some suggested the Cabinet Office should lead addressing the PNT challenge.

The final decision was a cross-government office hosted by the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology. The office includes members from the Ministry of Defence and is tasked with leading and coordinating a whole-of-government approach.

Moving Forward

It is easy to be skeptical about the success of this new enterprise. Regardless of the nation, government policy frameworks, strategies and the like can often be a way for politicians and bureaucrats to create the impression of action without having to ever really do anything. Documents are often published and then go on a shelf, never to be seen again.

That does not seem to be the case here, though.

The very first action item in the PNT policy framework is “Establish a National PNT Office …to improve resilience and drive growth with responsibility for PNT policy, coordination, and delivery.”

And while several of the ten items begin with “develop a proposal for…,” the projects are both considered and specific, such as a timing system “of last resort” for the Ministry of Defence, and expansion of eLoran.

Britain’s integrated governance and system-of-systems approach to PNT has the opportunity to make the nation virtually immune to the kinds of disruptions and infrastructure challenges being seen in the Baltic and conflict zones around the world.

Achieving that goal will involve development of new user equipment, systems to prioritize and integrate different PNT sources, new interfaces for various infrastructures, improvements to existing technologies (e.g. an encrypted component for eLoran to make it even more secure and reliable), and new policies for responsible PNT use in critical applications.

When complete, the UK will have the sovereign and resilient PNT it needs to support national, homeland, and economic security.

Global Leadership and Profit

Yet Great Britain is not the only nation over-dependent on fragile PNT signals from space provided by others. Most of the world is in the same situation.

By actively promoting and sharing its developing expertise and tech stack, the UK will become a global thought leader and technology provider for sovereign and resilient PNT. A capability that will be in greater and greater demand as malicious actors, both large and small, continue to exploit the weaknesses of satellite-based navigation and timing.

Yet, to realize these benefits, the UK must act swiftly and seize the moment.

At present there is a leadership vacuum in this field. While China has its own incredibly robust and integrated PNT system based on a combination of clocks, fiber, terrestrial broadcast eLoran, and space, it does not seem eager to export that to others. China may prefer to woo nations into dependence on its Bei Dou satellite PNT system, rather than enabling others’ sovereignty.

And while entrepreneurial South Korea has implemented its own space-based, eLoran, and fiber PNT, it is unclear how integrated the various sources are. And we have seen no evidence they have plans to share (or sell) their success to others.

As disruptions to GPS and other GNSS continue to increase around the globe, so too do calls for and moves toward solutions that include alternatives.

Last year the European Union issued a tender for an integrated GNSS/eLoran receiver. Türkiye has implemented its own local terrestrial PNT systems in several port and urban areas. India envisions expanding its regional navigation satellite system to cover the globe.

Britain has the plans, capability, and resources to become the world leader in this essential and growing technology sector. And the government is working with the Royal Institute of Navigation and other learned bodies to make it a reality.

Yet its window of opportunity may already be closing.

Rather than regarding its PNT policy framework as a routine item of work, we hope the UK government seizes this opportunity for international leadership and reaps all the diplomatic, security, and economic benefits that will appertain thereto.

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