Preparedness and PNT – what do we need to do?
The recent FT article by Clara Murray and colleagues on GNSS jamming and spoofing and their impact on civil uses of GNSS, should be congratulated in the way it communicates this serious problem in readable ways. It has some good visualisations to indicate the scale and nature of what is happening in those geographic areas regarding disruptions to GNSS and some of the impacts.
PNT systems, mostly GNSS based, have become indispensable tools in our modern world, facilitating everything from coordinated global communication, to high frequency trading and precision agriculture and those applications noted in the FT article.
The growth in the dependence on GNSS can disrupt critical services when its vulnerabilities are exploited, mainly by interference/jamming and spoofing. These threat vectors are not new, in fact in 2001, the Volpe report highlighted the risks and the threat, together with a series of options to prevent these vulnerabilities being exploited.
Why then are we still talking about them impacting critical services, more than 20 years later?
Despite widespread awareness of these vulnerabilities in the PNT community and within various Governments, the adoption of solutions to mitigate risks has been slow. Alternative GNSS systems to GPS, like GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou provide additional redundancy, yet they face similar vulnerabilities.
The integration of non-GNSS alternative technologies or resilience measures has been limited, modifying existing infrastructure poses significant technical, regulatory, and financial hurdles. These technologies exist, in fact the UK has, and can access, a diverse portfolio of non-GNSS PNT technologies already, many of which can be purchased and integrated straight away.
This slow adoption of resilience measures stems from a combination of factors; for example, in the aviation industry, retrofitting aircraft with alternative PNT technologies can require adherence to stringent certification processes, lengthy testing periods, and substantial investments. Moreover, the perceived reliability of GNSS, coupled with a lack of prominent disruptions, may lead operators to prioritise immediate operational needs over long-term resilience planning.
In the UK, the National Preparedness Commission (NPC) highlights that our infrastructure is “highly fragmented, in terms of both delivery and governance, and is significantly vulnerable to systemic failure…maintenance backlogs have been allowed to grow”. But the PNT risk as noted in the UK National Risk Register must compete for resources with the other risks identified.
Additionally, Sir Oliver Letwin, writing in 2022 states that “short-term political pressures and the dynamics of Whitehall can combine to prevent serious efforts to improve our resilience.”, and that “the short-term political necessity to deal with current crises will always tend to displace efforts to improve long-term national resilience against crises that aren’t currently happening.”
This reality impacts the willingness of governments to step in and take demonstrable action regarding PNT.
Addressing the gap between awareness and action requires a concerted effort from industry stakeholders as well as government and academia.
Raising awareness about the potential consequences of PNT vulnerabilities is essential to garner support for risk mitigation and resilience initiatives. It is not enough to repeat old, un-actioned recommendations, or call for government leadership yet again. Unfortunately, competing against the easy to implement and free to use GNSS is difficult unless there is a tangible benefit.
On positive notes, the NPC and others sharing success stories and best practices from sectors that have implemented resilience measures can inspire confidence and serve as practical examples, and the UK Government has made a start with its PNT Framework.
Education and awareness of the financial impact of losing GNSS is one thing, but the financial benefits of implementing resilient PNT need to be highlighted throughout organisations. A side effect from the UK’s 5G mobile roll-out could easily be a more resilient (to the loss of GNSS/against PNT threats) infrastructure because improving the reliability, accuracy and availability of PNT services has a positive financial outcome through enabling new services and can deliver competitive advantage. (although don't get me started on a reliable data signal on the train south of Taunton!)
However, building resilience is not merely a technical challenge; it also requires having and implementing a resilience strategy that includes PNT and its role in enabling critical assets, navigating regulatory frameworks, an in-depth understanding of the possible failure modes and impacts, building a workforce with the required capabilities, fostering collaboration across industries, allocating resources effectively, and finally being able to test and validate (audit and assure) that the processes and methods do indeed to what they are supposed to.
Many actions to improve resilience can be done by the commercial sector today, and in some cases are doing, without being so directed by government(s).
Those who are successful in building systems that are robust and resilient against PNT issues have generally taken the words of Sir Patrick Vallance to heart when he said, admittedly referring primarily to government departments, that organisations should consider if “they have the operational expertise, and, if not, what would be the plan to bring it in should an emergency arise”. In this context organisations must understand their use of PNT and the performance it needs to deliver, under all circumstances (including threat and failure modes) it might encounter, including "downstream" functions that rely on PNT.
Will Grannis the leader of Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO put it well, "True resilience isn't about managing a particular instance of risk, but being ready for anything through the way you operate."
The UK Ministry of Defence, and some UK and European telecom operators, plus national timing institutes, are leading the way in this complex systems thinking by taking real action on the path of preparedness and planning. Too many organisations however, are waiting for governments to supply solutions, or to direct them what action to take - some could say this is the impact of CEO's focussing on short term return, not long term survival.
As we navigate towards the utopia of systems which use PNT being resilient, the imperative to look beyond just technical solutions becomes increasingly clear.
Too often engineers jump straight to which clock to use, what nanosecond do we need to measure, or what integrity metric is most important. The role of planning and preparedness is under valued; vulnerabilities have been well-publicised but the path to implementing solutions is fraught with complexities, even when those solutions exist today. A recent round table at Cranfield University brought some of these points out when it recommended planning, holistic design, understanding risk, and and increased focus on testing, but in my opinion there is still too much talk of technologies, bits, bytes and antennas.
The inertia observed in addressing these challenges underscores the need for a holistic, systematic approach that addresses strategy, systems engineering, technology, regulatory, operational, and (often forgotten) audit and assurance considerations.
My call to arms here is to raise awareness that by prioritising understanding of risk and resilience, fostering collaboration, investing in both existing and new innovative solutions, organisations and nations (the latter not having told the former to) can navigate these PNT uncertainties with confidence; ensuring the resilience, reliability and integrity of PNT systems for generations to come.