Andrzej Marszewski
When the post-Ukraine war analysis begins, at least one clear conclusion will emerge. The war that started as a classic armoured thrust will have morphed into a futuristic multi-domain battlespace in which uncrewed solutions are king. Yet one constraint will stand out. In a GPS-denied environment, one simple unseen variable will prove decisive: navigation.
For decades Western armed forces have had a sense of technological entitlement, believing their complex high-end systems would always work unhindered. For strike, ISR and logistics applications, the perpetual availability of satellite navigation was unquestioned. That naïve assumption is now history.
In Ukraine, Russian EW units demonstrated this from the start, first disrupting, then routinely denying GPS-dependent systems. Jammers suppressed satellite signals and spoofing deceived receivers, denying access to operational data and manipulating reality.
What’s the effect on the ground? Without assured navigation, operational effectiveness nose-dives. Drones veer off course, reconnaissance aircraft fail to locate the enemy, precision weapons miss their targets and drone swarms lose their decisive cohesion. While Western militaries faced technologically deficient opponents, they could bask in their ‘GPS dividend’. No longer. Likely adversaries such as Russia and China are serving notice that the good times are over. In any peer conflict, GPS degradation should be assumed from the first moments. Navigation is more than a sub-system. It is the very foundation on which operational autonomy depends.
Seeking an effective way forward, industry’s response has been high-end inertial navigation systems, vision-based navigation and terrain matching. Each is valuable but cost, weight, processing requirements or environmental limitations mean none can offer what is most needed: affordable mass deployment. Ukraine’s war brought home the effectiveness of cheap, mass ‘good enough’ systems for daily reconnaissance, strike and EW missions. They need resilient navigation software, produced cheaply, at scale. Across defence, software upgrades already deliver new capabilities to aircraft, ships and land vehicles; navigation is following the same trend.
Flare Bright Ltd in the UK exemplifies this approach. Rather than depending on expensive, exquisite hardware, it assures resilient Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) through advanced software engineering. Its Tactera system is designed precisely for the problem Ukraine has made impossible to ignore, keeping autonomous air systems navigating when GNSS is jammed, spoofed or unavailable. Flare Bright describes Tactera as an all-terrain, GPS-free navigation capability, built around a full-stack fusion system operating without communications or cameras, while exploiting existing onboard hardware, signals and data.
What makes Tactera strategically interesting is that it does not seek to solve GPS denial through one expensive sensor or fragile alternative signal. Instead, it uses software to fuse the aircraft’s inertial data, flight model behaviour and input from low-cost sensors such as LiDAR or altimetry to constrain drift and re-establish a reliable position estimate. Flare Bright states that Tactera can typically limit drift to around 5km over the first hour, when enhancing industrial grade INS, and supports 30m accuracy for low-altitude flight from approx 30 to 1,000 feet at speeds from 30 knots to above 0.8 Mach, when using terrain navigation.
In a March demonstration, Flare Bright showed how LiDAR terrain ranging, combined with digital elevation data, could periodically re-baseline a drone’s position and keep error lower than inertial navigation alone. The same demonstration highlighted a Tactera Swarm concept, in which several drones shared navigation data to improve the group’s assessed position — pointing towards resilient navigation not just for single platforms but for collaborative autonomous formations.
Just as importantly, Tactera appears aligned with the practical economics of drone warfare. The decisive question for NATO is not whether a single high-value platform can carry a premium navigation suite, but whether hundreds or thousands of smaller systems retain useful autonomy once GPS disappears. Tactera can reportedly be offered both as a small avionics box with plug-in sensor options and as a software-only Tactera Inertial+ solution that improves a host platform’s existing navigation without adding new hardware. That flexibility matters because the platforms most likely to shape the future battlefield will include cheap reconnaissance drones, loitering systems, attritable decoys, maritime drones and low-level strike assets.
Flare Bright’s contribution is therefore not simply another navigation product, but a model for how Britain and its allies can make autonomy survivable at scale. If autonomous systems are to operate beyond line of sight, at low level, at speed, in poor weather, at night and over mixed terrain or open water, they will need navigation that is resilient, affordable and platform-agnostic.
For nations on NATO’s eastern flank resilient navigation is no longer a desirable enhancement but an operational necessity. Procurement decisions will increasingly turn on how autonomous systems perform when the electromagnetic spectrum is under sustained attack.
Britain has an opportunity to lead. Resilient navigation combines aerospace engineering, software, artificial intelligence and operational experience in an area of growing strategic demand. Companies able to provide scalable and affordable solutions will be well placed as allied nations expand their autonomous capabilities.
The lesson from Ukraine is unmistakable. Future battlefields will not reward those with the largest number of drones alone. They will reward those whose drones remain effective after GPS disappears.
Navigation has become a strategic capability. The ability to operate confidently when satellites fall silent may prove just as decisive as firepower itself.
Andrzej Marszewski is Defence Alternative’s Correspondent-at-Large
Headline image shows a Flare Bright team at work testing the capabilities offered by the Tactera solution. (Flare Bright Ltd)
