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Most conversations about quantum technology begin and end with the quantum computer,  while another part of the stack edging very close to real-world deployment receives a fraction of the attention. That part is quantum sensing.

Quantum sensing, one of the broad domains of quantum technologies, has moved from laboratory novelty to deployable capability faster than your typical deep technology; the reason is technical but worth understanding. Quantum sensors require far fewer qubits than computers, tolerate higher error rates, and operate in more forgiving environments. They do not need the elaborate error correction that has challenged fault-tolerant computing. In many cases they already outperform their classical counterparts, and the question has shifted from whether the physics works towards engineering questions such as whether the device can be shrunk, ruggedised, and integrated into platforms that were never designed with quantum technology in mind.

Why navigation quietly became a quantum problem

For most of the past three decades, knowing where you are has been treated as a solved problem. The Global Positioning System (GPS) and its peers, including Europe's Galileo, Russia's GLONASS, and China's BeiDou, form a constellation of four global navigation systems that the world economy has quietly woven into container shipping, emergency response, and high-frequency trading alike.

The trouble is that these signals are extraordinarily faint by the time they reach the ground, which makes them trivially easy to disrupt. Jamming floods the relevant frequency with noise and denies a receiver any signal at all. Spoofing is more sophisticated, broadcasting a counterfeit signal that the receiver accepts as genuine and uses to compute a false position. Both have moved from theoretical concerns to operational realities, amplified by geopolitical instability.

European ministers reported in 2025 that GPS interference attributable to Russia and Belarus had been observed across the Baltic since 2022, with Estonia recording disruption on roughly85% of its flights and Lithuania logging more than 1,000 jamming events in a single month. In March 2026, electronic interference around the Strait of Hormuz, which carries roughly 20% of the world's seaborne oil and gas, distorted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 vessels in a single 24-hour period, with tracking signals appearing nonsensically over airfields, nuclear sites, and inland deserts. UK government modelling has put the cost of a 7-day GNSS outage at £7.6 billion, with emergency services, maritime, and road transport accounting for nearly 88% of the loss. The vulnerability has moved well past theoretical, and it is growing at a rate that should give policymakers pause.

Finding your bearings without a satellite