Positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services are the invisible backbone of modern life. Almost all technologies, power grids, financial markets, communications networks, transportation systems, and national defense all depend on them. America is overwhelmingly dependent on weak and easily imitated signals from GPS for PNT services. A significant outage — even a brief one — would have cascading, catastrophic consequences for the economy and national security.

GPS is one of the most transformative technologies ever developed, and it will remain central to America’s PNT infrastructure for decades. But its very success has made it a single point of failure. With an estimated 10–15 billion user devices worldwide, the entire global economy is riding on one system. That’s not a strength — it’s a vulnerability.

GPS signals are remarkably weak by the time they reach Earth. They can be jammed accidentally, jammed deliberately, or spoofed — meaning a bad actor can feed false location and timing data to receivers without users knowing. Europe’s STRIKE3 project identified over 450,000 potentially interfering signals in a monitoring period. Only about 10% were intentional. The accidental threats alone are significant.

The U.S. government formally recognized GPS over-dependence in 1998. A presidential mandate for a backup system was issued in 2004. Studies have been conducted repeatedly — in 2001, 2009, 2014, and 2021 — all reaching similar conclusions. Yet in 2026, the nation’s PNT is not meaningfully more resilient. The problem isn’t knowledge. It’s leadership and action.

No serious voice in this space is proposing we replace GPS. The goal is to complement it with additional PNT sources so that no single point of failure can bring down critical systems. A resilient architecture combines space-based signals, terrestrial broadcast PNT, and fiber-based timing — what the RNT Foundation calls the resilient PNT triad. The technology exists today. The U.S. Department of Transportation confirmed this in its 2021 report.

A backup will:

• Make users safter by ensuring they have PNT even if GPS signals are not available for some reason.
• Make GPS satellites and signals safer and more reliable by deterring deliberate interference. Why bother to interfere if your target has another PNT source? GET THE BULLSEYE OFF GPS!

The UK, France, South Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia have all deployed or are deploying resilient PNT architectures. The U.S. is falling behind its allies — and its adversaries — on an issue of fundamental national and economic security.

China and Russia’s terrestrial systems that backup space-based PNT give them huge tactical and strategic advantages over the U.S. and much of the West. Read Assistant Secretary for Space Policy, Department of War, Marc Berkowitz’ paper on this.

GPS is a public utility, provided free by the government. There is no commercial business case for a private company to build a national-scale utility-level PNT backup to something people already get for free. This is exactly the kind of infrastructure — like lighthouses, navigation beacons, and the Naval Observatory’s time signal — that government has always provided. Waiting for the market to act is waiting for something that will never come.

Government leaders need to establish clear performance requirements for a resilient national PNT architecture and empower an executive agent to make it happen. There are many models for how to make this happen. A government provided service, a public-private-partnership, regulation and requirements for industries, are just a few. Mature, commercially available technologies can be deployed quickly through multi-year service contracts. This doesn’t require building something from scratch — it requires leadership and a decision