The success of high-speed air-to-air combat engagement accelerated flight into enemy fire against air-defenses, aerial surveillance missions, and precision-strikes on enemy ground targets of course rest upon a pilot’s ability to know a plane’s exact location, movement patterns and angle of attack.

This kind of combat operation is often heavily interwoven with, or even reliant upon, “secured” navigational systems such as GPS and Inertial navigational technologies. GPS, while ubiquitous and critical to military operations, is also known to in some cases be vulnerable to hacking, jamming and various kinds of enemy intrusion. The risk of having combat maneuvers and tactics compromised is therefore significant, a circumstance that continues to inspire widespread Pentagon efforts to both “harden” GPS and establish supplemental and alternative guidance systems.

An emerging, shoe-box size navigation capability is being developed to address these challenges and vastly improve and strengthen what’s known as positioning, navigation and timing (PNT)