THE PENTAGON IS PREPARING FOR A WORLD WITHOUT GPS.

[william]

In June, the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit launched Project Farseer worth $200 million. It's one goal is to move quantum sensors out of labs and into the hands of warfighters, fast. Prototypes must be testable at a government facility within 3 to 9 months of award. Not a research program but a fielding pipeline.

What Farseer is buying:

Quantum clocks. Portable atomic clocks so precise a vehicle tracks its own position by timing alone. No satellite required.

Quantum gravimeters. Every place on earth has a unique gravitational fingerprint. Read it, match it to a map, know where you are.

Farseer's spec: sensors under 20 kilograms, accurate enough to find things underground.

Quantum magnetometers. Navigate by the earth's magnetic field. Detect submarines and buried structures by the field they disturb.

Rydberg atom sensors, named in the solicitation. Radios that use atoms instead of antennas, hearing the entire spectrum at once, through jamming. That's exactly what Infleqtion is already delivering to the Army.

Farseer runs under a presidential executive order on quantum signed this year, alongside the White House naming atomic clocks and navigation as critical national security technology, and NASA launching the first space based quantum gravity sensor in 2030. Everyone argues about quantum computers, machines that might matter in 2030. Quantum sensing works today, and it's what the military is buying now, because losing GPS in a war stopped being hypothetical. China knows it too, they have the same programs building its quantum network are building its quantum navigation.

https://twitter.com/x/status/2094779932714930557

 

[william]

@DIU_x and Honeywell have successfully flown an aircraft for more than four hours from Seattle to Alaska over the Pacific without GPS, using quantum magnetic navigation.A major step toward GPS-independent navigation in jammed environments, with plans to demonstrate the technology on a U.S. military C-17 Globemaster III later this year.

https://twitter.com/x/status/2096280472561263052

 

[DEFCON Warning System]

I have long advocated less reliance on satellites.