Australia Invents a Compass That Can't Be Lied To
Quantum Gravimetry, GPS-Free Navigation, and the Coming Revolution in Warfare
Spoofed satellites, jamming towers, and tactical fake-outs are starting to become a real issue. This has sent defense nerds (aka government scientists) on a quest to find a backup for GPS on the battlefield.
Now, that quest might be wrapping up. Scientists on both sides of the globe, Australia and the United States, have built motion sensors so precise that they don't care where the GPS satellites are or if someone’s trying to deceive them.
Gravity doesn’t lie. And now, for the first time, ships, missiles, and maybe even foot soldiers might navigate by Earth’s pull instead of Uncle Sam’s satellite constellation.
Australia’s Quantum Leap: Navigating by Gravity Alone
To the untrained eye, the MV Sycamore looks like any other Australian naval training vessel: sleek, gray, unassuming. But during a six-day voyage off the Australian coast, it became a floating laboratory for something much more disruptive than torpedoes or sonar.
Beneath deck, humming quietly next to the ship’s control center, was a server-rack-sized experiment in defiance: Q-CTRL’s quantum gravimeter.
For 144 hours, Sycamore cut its digital leash to GPS and let gravity steer the way. No satellite uplinks, no inertial drift, just raw gravitational data from deep inside the Earth interpreted by a machine smarter than most Marines. ZING!
The result was a precise, uninterrupted voyage along Australia’s coastline. And perhaps more importantly, the quiet birth of a future where navies can sail without GPS and still know exactly where they are.
The gravimeter worked by reading variations in local gravitational force as the ship passed over underwater ridges, sediment layers, and tectonic wrinkles; basically, Earth’s fingerprint in gravitational form.
These micro-variations, invisible to the human body, were clocked by clouds of cooled atoms falling inside a vacuum chamber. The atoms' motion, manipulated by lasers and compared against a preloaded gravity map, became the ship’s position fix. No orbiting satellites required.
This was a world first. As Q-CTRL’s CEO Michael Biercuk was quick to point out, this marked the debut of a quantum gravity sensor being used in real-world, mobile conditions. Up until this point, quantum sensors lived sheltered lives, safe in university basements, measuring seismic tremors or scanning for oil fields, not bobbing around on ocean swells in a 200-foot training vessel.
And ocean swells were only part of the problem. Deploying a sensor this sensitive in a real-world maritime environment is the equivalent of trying to hear a whisper during a Metallica concert, in an Oklahoma thunderstorm, while upside down.
Noise from mechanical vibrations, electromagnetic interference, and hull sway threatened to drown out the data entirely. It wasn’t until the Q-CTRL team developed sophisticated real-time noise filtering software that the sensor started playing nice with Mother Nature.
That’s when things clicked. The ship’s position remained accurate. Navigation held. And for six days, the system delivered consistent tracking data, untethered from the tyranny of satellites.
Even the Australian Navy, known for a healthy skepticism toward new tech that hasn’t survived a war game, was impressed.
And they should be. In an era when GPS signals are as vulnerable as a 1990s dial-up router, this new class of passive, jam-proof, spoof-proof navigation might be the most important innovation since radar.
"We expect the quantum sensing market to reach $3bn-5bn by 2030,” said Jean-Francois Bobier, Partner & Vice President, Deep Tech, at the Boston Consulting Group.
So, while the world’s powers argue over sea lanes and freedom of navigation, the Australians just casually proved that gravity will show you the way, quietly, reliably, and without asking permission from space.
Why GPS is Now a Liability, Not a Luxury
Once upon a time, GPS was the crown jewel of modern warfare and civilian convenience. It turned F-16s into precision snipers, made Uber drivers marginally less lost, and ensured the global economy could synchronize banking transactions down to the millisecond.
But that time is over.
In 2025, GPS is less of a strategic asset and more of a glass cannon: powerful, but disturbingly fragile.
The problem isn’t the technology itself, it’s that the enemy knows how to break it.
Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and even some non-state actors now have the means to jam, spoof, or outright blind GPS receivers from miles away. And they’re not keeping it theoretical.
In Ukraine, Russian forces have been jamming US-supplied precision-guided munitions like Excalibur shells and even interfering with HIMARS launches. In the Arctic, China is testing GPS-denial tech alongside its naval buildup. And in the Middle East, commercial airlines flying near conflict zones routinely report “ghost” locations; planes jumping around the map like a bad internet connection.
In the past, jamming GPS required a truck full of antennas and a PhD in radio engineering. Now, a teenager with a soldering iron and a $25 jammer from Alibaba can kill signals across city blocks.
That’s not hypothetical. In 2013, a New Jersey trucker with a GPS jammer meant to hide from his boss accidentally blocked air traffic control signals at Newark Airport. He was fined $32,000, which is probably still less than the cost of any US bomb that lost its way over Syria due to jamming.
And spoofing? Even scarier. Instead of blocking signals, spoofing feeds false coordinates to a GPS receiver. That means your $40 million drone thinks it’s flying over friendly territory when it’s actually doing figure eights over a SAM battery. In May, a commercial ship in the Red Sea saw its GPS signal teleport it inland to the Sahara Desert. That’s not navigation, that’s cyber voodoo.
What’s worse, all of this is happening before the first shots are fired in a potential US-China or US-Russia conflict. These are peacetime attacks. So, imagine what happens when the gloves come off.
This is why the Department of Defense, NATO, and US allies are scrambling to decouple from GPS… or at least harden themselves against its inevitable failure. Relying on GPS alone today is like storing your entire life savings on a flash drive labeled “Totally Not Important” and leaving it at a coffee shop.
The bottom line? GPS was built for a world where the US had orbital dominance and adversaries couldn’t touch it. That world doesn’t exist anymore. If you're planning to fight in a theater saturated with drones, jammers, and precision-guided chaos, you’d better have a Plan B. Preferably one that doesn’t involve trusting 31 satellites floating 12,550 miles above a war zone.
Inertial navigation systems (INS) were the old Plan B. Gyroscopes and accelerometers track motion, but they drift. A little error becomes a big one over time. Quantum gravity sensors fix that by constantly anchoring position based on Earth’s gravitational “fingerprint.”
And here’s the kicker: you can’t spoof gravity without actually altering mass distribution, meaning you’d have to move a mountain. Literally.
They also emit nothing. No signals. No detectable emissions. For militaries who want to move without being seen, that’s golden.
Sandia’s “Mother of All Motion Sensors”: The US Response
Not to be outdone, scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, yes, the same folks who helped build nukes, just unveiled a quantum motion sensor so precise it could rewrite the rules of navigation.
Using atom interferometry and silicon photonic chips, they’ve built a miniaturized, ruggedized unit that could slot into aircraft, submarines, or even the next-gen munitions that rely on pinpoint accuracy. All while laughing in the face of GPS jammers.
Their key breakthrough? A silicon photonic modulator that kills signal interference by nearly 100,000 times; 47.8 decibels to be precise. That means clear signals, even in high-vibration environments like missiles, artillery shells, or stealth aircraft doing barrel rolls over Belarus.
Right now, the Australian Q-CTRL version is about the size of a server rack, and Sandia’s isn’t quite palm-sized either. But thanks to chip-scale photonics, we're heading into territory where these devices could shrink to the size of a shoebox or smaller.
That means integration into everything from long-range strike missiles to submarines prowling under the Arctic ice; hell, even a Ukrainian drone could carry one before long. And when that happens, GPS spoofers become about as useful as an AOL CD in 2025.
Let’s not kid ourselves. The US defense community is going to slap a “Top Secret” sticker on this stuff faster than you can say “DARPA.” But that hasn’t stopped Pentagon-affiliated contractors from quietly shipping prototype systems to Ukraine. After all, who needs a lab when you’ve got real-time Russian EW to jam against?
We’ve seen this movie before. The Soft Recoil artillery system, the Phoenix Ghost drone, and even new AI-powered optics have shown up in Ukraine for field trials. A GPS-independent targeting system would be right at home.
And if it works there, amid the heaviest jamming environment since Vietnam, it’ll work anywhere.
For decades, the United States has sold its military doctrine with one word: precision. From the Gulf War’s infamous “smart bombs” to the laser-guided love letters dropped on ISIS targets in Syria, US power projection has been less about brute force and more about scalpel-like strikes. Precision isn’t just a tactical preference; it’s strategic branding. It says: We can kill the bad guy in the third-floor window without knocking over his neighbor’s satellite dish.
But as GPS becomes increasingly unreliable, that doctrine is wobbling.
Enter the rebirth of precision, but this time, without the satellite crutch. With quantum gravimeters and atom interferometry-based motion sensors entering the fray, we're witnessing the next evolution of strike accuracy: inertial systems that don’t rely on a vulnerable radio signal from orbit, but on immutable physical constants.
Instead of asking, “Where am I?” from a satellite constellation that might not answer, these systems look inward, relying on gravitational anomalies, atomic motion, and miniaturized physics experiments that used to require a lab the size of a garage.
It’s like swapping your Google Maps app for a Sherlock Holmes–style memory palace, only the palace is built from quantum particles and lasers.
This shift changes everything. Without GPS, the Pentagon’s $25 million Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) becomes a really expensive guess. But with next-gen inertial guidance? It’s back to being a scalpel: silent, stealthy, and accurate at ranges that still boggle the mind. Likewise, precision artillery, loitering munitions, and even naval strike systems can now hold targets at risk without requiring satellite hand-holding.
That has profound ethical implications too. In an age where adversaries routinely embed military assets among civilians, precision isn’t just a technological luxury, it’s a moral one.
Look, the US isn’t perfect. But when people ask me why I think the US military is the “good guys,” it’s because we make an effort to avoid civilian casualties.
The ability to surgically dismantle a command node without flattening a hospital across the street is what separates Western doctrine from Russia’s “If it moves, shell it” approach in Mariupol.
The rebirth of precision doctrine also reintroduces something rare in modern warfighting: trust. Soldiers and sailors need to trust that the missile will strike what it’s aimed at. Planners need to trust that they can sequence hundreds of fires across time and space without cascading errors. And allies need to trust that America’s warfighting machine can still do what it promised in the brochures.
Quantum-driven precision is a doctrinal lifeline. It preserves the credibility of the US military’s global posture while acknowledging the brutal realities of contested electronic terrain.
So, while the physics might be different, the mission remains the same: Hit what matters. Don’t hit what doesn’t. Welcome to Precision 2.0.
This is about making military operations possible when GPS is denied. It’s about defending Taiwan, sailing the Arctic, drilling for oil, or keeping aircraft safely spaced in blackout zones.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s about giving Ukraine a fighting edge against an opponent who thinks technological intimidation equals victory.
“You can’t spoof gravity,” said Biercuk.
No, you can’t. And in this new age of deception, that might be the only truth we can still trust.
Слава Україні.
Loved “You can’t spoof gravity,”
#GlassCannon 🤣