Every GPS signal on the battlefield is a vulnerability waiting to be exploited, and Russia, China, and Iran have all demonstrated the willingness to exploit it. DARPA just announced it is going to solve that problem from the inside out, by building a navigation sensor so precise that it no longer needs GPS to know exactly where it is.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s research arm responsible for developing technologies that define the next generation of American military capability, published a special notice on May 29, announcing the forthcoming PINPOINT program, formally titled Precision Inertial Navigation and Positioning On an Integrated Tesseract.
The program, managed through DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office by Program Manager Sunil Bhave, aims to develop a revolutionary approach to inertial navigation that would allow military platforms to maintain precise positioning even when GPS has been jammed, spoofed, or denied. A formal solicitation with specific technical requirements and performance metrics is expected in the near future, with industry responses to the preliminary notice accepted through July 13, 2026.
To understand why PINPOINT matters, some background on how modern military navigation works is necessary. The Global Positioning System is a network of satellites orbiting approximately 20,200 kilometers (12,550 miles) above the Earth that broadcasts precise timing signals. A receiver on the ground, in the air, or at sea calculates its position by measuring the time it takes signals from multiple satellites to arrive. The system is extraordinarily accurate and has become the backbone of modern warfare: guided missiles use GPS to hit targets. Drones use GPS to navigate. Artillery use GPS for position reporting and fire control. Soldiers use GPS for blue-force tracking and navigation. Virtually every precision capability the U.S. military fields depends on GPS signals that an adversary can jam.
When GPS is jammed or spoofed, military systems fall back on inertial measurement units, known as IMUs. An inertial measurement unit is a device that measures acceleration and rotation using gyroscopes and accelerometers, allowing a platform to estimate its current position based on where it started and how it has moved since. The problem is that IMU errors accumulate over time. A small measurement error in acceleration or rotation rate compounds with every subsequent reading, so a drone that starts its flight knowing exactly where it is will drift further and further from its true position the longer it relies exclusively on inertial measurement. High-quality IMUs using fiber-optic or ring-laser gyroscopes can limit this drift to acceptable levels, but those systems are large, expensive, and power-hungry, unsuitable for the small, cheap, expendable drones that define modern warfare.
Hellbound and Down 