NATO EDGE 2024 — NATO has been “looking at” overcoming Russian or Chinese GPS jamming by relaying satellite signals through ultra-high-flying aircraft, a NATO official told Breaking Defense.
“These are big, high-altitude planes that can stay for weeks in the air based on solar energy, and they can capture the GPS signal and send it down to earth with much more power that is more difficult to jam,” Brig. Gen. Sam Raeves, who serves as the assistant chief of staff of J6 Cyberspace at NATO, said in an interview on the sidelines of the NATO Edge conference here.
Extremely high-altitude platforms (HAPS), which can come in the form of balloons in addition to light-weight drones like the spindly Airbus-made Zephyr, are not yet in widespread use by NATO, Raeves said. But their potential for them to serve as GPS relays comes as officials have grown increasingly concerned about electronic warfare, a now-ubiquitous feature of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
When and if NATO does actually start implementing these types of HAPS, it could help improve the situational awareness issues that arise with GPS jamming, Raeves said.
“So this is what we try to do, to have combined situation awareness fusion,” he said. “This is really something that can solve it.”
In a separate interview, Artem Martynenko, the deputy head of the Center for Innovations and Defense Technologies at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, bemoaned the constant need to stay ahead of Russian forces in the EW realm.
“The usage of the EW on the battlefield is massive in Ukraine and from day to day, even with the sanctions from the West, Russians still have a capability to build EW systems effectively, and it’s providing us with a lot of issues,” he told Breaking Defense, likening the EW race to a similar back-and-forth when it comes to cyber capabilities.
Raeves acknowledged what he called the current “cat and mouse game” in Europe. He said although NATO is not at war with Russia, the alliance still experiences jamming from the Kremlin. In May NATO publicly accused Russia of “cyber and electronic interference,” among other acts of “hybrid activity” — though it didn’t appear to do much to slow Moscow down.
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“Of course, then we know where they are, but we can do nothing, because we are not at war with Russia,” Raeves said. “So we cannot take them out. That’s the big issue here. We can only geolocate them.”