GUEST BLOG: AI will help to navigate the newest defense frontier: the Arctic
BlogMay 09, 2025
Drew Arenth
Pendulum Systems
At 4% of the Earth’s surface, the Arctic is both the latest and least-explored global frontier. The region will define U.S. and European defense strategies for a generation, and scaling polar preparedness is now recognized as an imperative across all military domains.
The melting of the ice caps is creating new shipping routes, and China is investing heavily in the Arctic under its Polar Silk Road initiative. They are securing everything from mining rights to research bases, and alarm bells are starting to ring over whether some of this ostensibly civilian infrastructure may have dual-use capabilities.
From a military standpoint, Russia already dominates in Arctic readiness. Their bases outnumber NATO’s by three to one. From icebreakers to subsea radar, they lead in the deployment of polar hardware.
Equally advantageous is their ability to navigate the Arctic: At higher latitudes, GLONASS (the Russian equivalent to GPS) significantly outperforms the limited-at-higher-latitudes GPS and Galileo, while additional satellites in high-inclination Molniya orbit equip Russia with the most reliable polar GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite System] coverage of any nation-state.
With every step Russia has taken to make the Arctic easier to navigate themselves, they have also made it one step harder for everyone else. Their armed forces have long led in the active deployment of electronic warfare (EW) capabilities – and the northern passages are no exception. With ranges of as far as 8,000 km (4,971 miles), the jamming and spoofing systems deployed by their Northern Fleet’s dedicated EW centers can effectively blanket vast portions of the pole.
Residents of northmost Scandinavia have even come to accept this type of interference as a part of everyday life, while NATO’s Arctic exercises have been dogged by GPS interference for over a decade.
Compounded by indirect interference from geomagnetic storms and ionospheric activity, both Europe and the U.S. now have to monitor, and ultimately navigate, an 8-million-square-mile satnav blind spot.
The Arctic also remains Earth’s most challenging operating environment, with sub-zero snowstorms, 24-hour winter darkness, and rapid glacial calving all standard. To maintain a strategic foothold there, the U.S. will not only need to improve its polar GNSS coverage but must also entirely rethink its positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) playbook.
The U.S. software advantage should be at the center of this strategy. Recent advancements in quantum, inertial, and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered navigation will help safeguard cross-domain situational awareness in these very conditions.
Where hardware solutions are successful at protecting larger, major defense acquisition program assets against jamming and spoofing, hardware largely remains far too costly, bulky, and power-hungry to be used at scale across a vast, harsh polar landscape. By comparison, sensor-based solutions that leverage advanced geolocation models will deliver accurate PNT when and where more conventional solutions cannot be deployed. The U.S. must now rapidly accelerate their adoption.
With data points available on everything from the latest uncrewed aerial vehicles to consumer-grade smartphones, these emerging technologies will be crucial to equipping armed forces with PNT where traditional satellite and radio methods fail. They collectively stand to serve as much more than just anti-jamming or spoofing solutions, but instead represent a new paradigm in offline, GPS-free navigation across land, sea, and air.
In the short term, what remains clear is that neither the U.S. nor Europe can continue to rely on the improvement of Arctic GNSS coverage alone. AI-powered geolocation solutions can serve as a single source of truth across an Arctic landscape where both direct and indirect interference is increasingly common.
Reliable navigation now divides global Arctic readiness. The U.S. must lead in closing that gap with rapid research and development into alternative PNT solutions, thereby bolstering its command and control (C2) capabilities across this fast-evolving environment.
