Category: Strategic Pings

Oceanology International 2026 in London (10–12 March) saw a large wave of new sonar, autonomy, data, and sensor‑platform launches, rather than a single “master list,” but several key themes and headline products stand out.

Major new hardware and platforms

Teledyne Marine unveiled the SeaBat D100 (first of a new “D‑Series” deep‑water multibeam echosounder) plus SeaBat T51 Integrated Dual Head systems that combine two multibeam heads into one processor, increasing swath coverage and along‑track density while simplifying cabling and footprint.

GeoAcoustics launched a new low‑voltage boomer (GeoPulse LF 101) and a major expansion of its bathymetric sonar range, including a new sub‑bottom profiler and updated multibeam and side‑scan systems aimed at marine, offshore‑energy, and geotechnical survey workflows.

Cerulean Sonar introduced Omniscan 3D, a high‑resolution imaging sonar that adds full 3D point‑cloud rendering on a true spatial mesh, building on the existing Omniscan family.

RBR launched the Generation⁴ logger family (RBRsolo⁴, RBRduet⁴, RBRduraturo⁴) with multi‑rate sampling, fast downloads, and large memory, plus a new RBRcoda chl‑a sensor for real‑time chlorophyll‑a in deep ocean profiles.

AUVs, ROVs, and autonomy

Skarv Technologies launched the Corax 600 AUV system, marketed around simple operation and very fast on‑board processing to turn data into actionable insights in minutes.

EIVA introduced NaviSuite ROV Autonomy, a software package aimed at standardizing ROV inspection workflows and enabling higher‑level automation.

Teledyne also showcased a Gavia AUV with integrated SeaBat T20 multibeam and Compact Navigator, plus the Slocum Sentinel glider “Redwing” on its around‑the‑world mission.

New sensing and imaging products

OceanSight (formed by Xpv Water Partners) used Oi26 to present an expanded multi‑brand platform for subsea sensing and intelligence, including the recently acquired Sound Metrics high‑resolution imaging sonar assets; this is more of a strategic platform than a single product, but it bundles several underlying imaging capabilities.

SeaSignal introduced a next‑generation Digital Recording Hydrophone with ultra‑high‑fidelity audio, >24 hours battery life, scriptable operation, and Gigabit‑Ethernet offload so an 8‑hour 100 kHz / 32‑bit recording can be downloaded in 2–3 minutes.

Cloud, data, and connectivity

The Marine Technology Society (MTS) launched BlueConneX, an AI‑powered platform that maps and connects the ocean‑enterprise landscape, providing AI‑driven summaries, trends, and industry insights.

WSense debuted WCloud, a cloud‑based platform for wireless underwater monitoring and communications that can ingest and visualize dozens of sensors in real time, with analytics and generative‑AI‑driven KPIs.

Notable developments and themes

Best Stand goes to R3Vox, which had an amazing display

Multiple exhibitors pushed integrated dual‑head multibeam systems, AI‑enabled quality control, and automated workflows for survey and USV deployments, especially around GeoAcoustics, Teledyne, and Exail (which highlighted its Sams synthetic aperture & mapping sonars and related sub‑bottom profilers).

The “COAST” focus at Oi26 highlighted coastal resilience and real‑time monitoring platforms, with new products emphasizing real‑time data, predictive modelling, and integrated ocean‑data platforms for coastal protection and adaptive infrastructure.

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Originally published in the Strategic Pings ))) newsletter on LinkedIn on 2026-03-18. Subscribe there to get new editions first.

The underwater world is very good at making smart systems look stupid.

A sonar sees a clean contact. Crisp shadow. Nice shape. Looks important. Then the camera arrives and discovers a rock, a tire, or some innocent piece of seabed clutter with delusions of grandeur. Other times, video picks up something suspicious, but without sonar context, nobody knows where it sits, how far it extends, or how to find it again without wasting half the mission.

This highlights the core challenge.

In subsea operations, relying on a single sensor is insufficient—whether for mine countermeasures, critical infrastructure inspection, or autonomous systems operating with reduced supervision, bandwidth, and error tolerance.

Sonar and optical systems are complementary, not competing, technologies.

Sonar provides range and functions effectively in darkness, turbidity, sediment clouds, and poor visibility, where cameras offer limited value. Cameras deliver confirmation by revealing texture, edges, corrosion, color, and structural details that transform a “contact” into a decision.

Separately, each is useful.

Together, they become operationally decisive.

Many still overlook this: the underwater challenge is no longer detection—modern sonar excels at that. The true challenge is identifying the contact’s nature, significance, and appropriate response. Detection is inexpensive; understanding is costly.

Data fusion is how you lower that cost.

High-resolution sonar, especially SAS, gives autonomous platforms the ability to detect, classify, and map targets at stand-off range with remarkable consistency. Forward-looking sonar adds the immediate awareness needed for obstacle avoidance and close navigation when visibility collapses. Multibeam provides the wider terrain context, the seabed geometry, and the route structure. Then optical sensors move in and do what they do best: confirm, inspect, and remove doubt.

That handoff from acoustic detection to visual verification is where the mission becomes faster, safer, and far more credible.

In mine countermeasures, sonar quickly surveys wide areas and identifies candidate contacts. However, the main effort begins when operators determine which contacts warrant further inspection. Fusing sonar with video reduces false positives, enhances re-acquisition, and accelerates classification, narrowing suspicious shapes to actual issues.

That is not just efficiency. That is an operational advantage.

The same applies to offshore energy and subsea infrastructure. Sonar detects changes in burial, free spans, seabed scouring, and structural exposure across large areas. Video confirms asset condition up close, including corrosion, marine growth, coating damage, weld integrity, and mechanical defects. Proper fusion of these data streams produces defensible asset intelligence, not just inspection footage.

Of course, none of this works by magic.

Fusion delivers value only when geometry is correct. Calibration, timing, and spatial alignment are critical. Misaligned sonar data and video frames lead to confidently incorrect results, which underwater can be costly and embarrassing.

Done right, though, fusion changes the entire logic of autonomy.

Now the vehicle is not just reacting to isolated sensor feeds. It is building layered understanding. It can detect with sonar, verify with video, correlate with bathymetry, update a 3D model, and support much better decisions in real time. That means fewer wasted dives, less operator overload, more reliable maps, and far better mission confidence.

The industry often assumes intelligence starts with software.

It does not.

Intelligence begins with perception. Good perception begins with sensor fusion. And underwater, the smartest move is to stop forcing sonar and cameras to operate like separate tribes with separate truths.

Sonar finds. Video proves. Fusion wins.

That is not a nice-to-have feature.

That is the future of subsea autonomy.

— Thomas Meurling Strategic Pings Global USV Strategy, Sensors and Seabed Warfare

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Originally published in the Strategic Pings ))) newsletter on LinkedIn on 2026-03-09. Subscribe there to get new editions first.

Everybody loves talking about the “shiny” parts of undersea warfare. The submarines. The sonars. The torpedoes. The AI. The autonomy.

But the most underappreciated technology in the whole kill chain is the humble decoy.

Because decoys are not accessories. They are the moment the fight becomes unfair. They turn “detection” into “doubt”. And in ASW, doubt is oxygen.

First, a reality check

A sonar contact is not a submarine. It is a hypothesis.

A torpedo warning is not a kill. It is a countdown.

Decoys exist to break the enemy’s confidence, timeline, and geometry. Not in theory. In the one place that matters: the operator’s screen and the weapon’s seeker head.

And here is the controversial bit.

If your ASW plan has no serious decoy and countermeasure story, you do not have an ASW plan. You have a hope-based concept of operations.

World War II: bubbles, ghosts, and operator psychology

The decoy story starts where so many undersea stories start: WWII.

German U-boats deployed Bold decoys, basically bubble generators. A canister produced hydrogen bubbles that created a false target for Allied ASDIC sonar. The intent was simple: make the escort chase the wrong echo long enough for the real boat to slip away.

They also used Sieglinde, a more “active” deception concept. Instead of just bubbles, this decoy could move and vary depth to imitate submarine-like behavior and sonar returns. In modern language, it was an early attempt at a programmable acoustic lie.

German U-boats used sensitive acoustic detection (passive sonar with beamforming) to track convoy ships by propeller noise. British engineers sought help from Scottish whaler Angus McCloud, who suggested using whale bones as underwater acoustic decoys. He claimed certain bones produced resonant harmonics when struck, a trick whalers used to imitate boats. The Royal Navy built metal frames holding whale bones with mechanical strikers. In blind tests, trained sonar operators reportedly mistook the sound for real propellers and cavitation. Produced from spring 1943, the decoys created phantom targets, drawing attacks away and reducing convoy losses.

The key lesson from WWII is not the chemistry or the mechanics. It is the human factor.

A decoy does not need to be perfect. It needs to be believable under stress.

ASW has always been a race between classification and doubt. The decoy’s job is to inject doubt faster than the hunter can classify.

Cold War: decoys become “platforms”

Fast forward to the Cold War, when sonar performance, processing, and torpedo seekers improved. Bubble tricks alone were not enough.

Enter systems like the Mobile Submarine Simulator (MOSS). This was not a noisemaker. It was closer to a small underwater vehicle designed to imitate the launching submarine’s signature, creating multiple credible “submarines” in the water. In other words: deception scaled up from a single false echo to a false tactical picture.

Read that again.

Decoys were quietly becoming unmanned underwater platforms decades before “UUV” became a PowerPoint word.

And the logic was ruthless:

• If the seeker is listening, give it something better to listen to.
• If the attacker is building a track, give them a more tempting track.
• If the kill chain needs confidence, poison the confidence.

Surface ship ASW and torpedo defense: the “Nixie era”

Decoys are not only for submarines.

Surface ships faced the same uncomfortable truth: torpedoes do not care about your flag, your pedigree, or your crew’s morale. They care about physics and signal processing.

That is where towed decoys like AN/SLQ-25 Nixie became iconic. A ship drags an acoustic source behind it to seduce incoming torpedoes away from the hull. It is simple in concept, brutally practical in execution, and widely fielded.

NOTE: I did a study about underwater decoys a long time ago. At the same time, we acquired a dog, a Weimaraner, who looked a bit like a small gray torpedo, so we called her Nixie.

This is the part people miss: towing a decoy is also about geometry. You are physically separating the “target” from the thing you cannot afford to lose.

And over time, towed decoys were no longer “just emitters”. They became part of integrated torpedo defense suites with detection, classification, tactics, and effectors.

Modern decoy technology: from gadgets to systems

Today’s threat torpedoes are faster, smarter, and harder to spoof. They can adapt, reacquire, and discriminate. The response has been to stop treating decoys as standalone items and start treating them as sensor-to-effector architectures.

Look at the UK’s Surface Ship Torpedo Defence (SSTD), known as Sea Sentor / Sonar 2170. It combines a towed sensor for torpedo detection with processing, tactical decision support, and both towed and expendable countermeasures. The point is not just to “throw noise”. The point is to recognize the threat and deploy the right lie at the right time.

And the development is accelerating. Ultra Maritime has recently discussed next-generation acoustic device countermeasures and ongoing modernization, which is a polite industry way of saying: “torpedoes got better, so our decoys must get nasty.”

On the submarine side, the same trend is visible. The U.S. Navy’s “next generation” countermeasure efforts with industry partners point to more capable acoustic devices intended to decoy torpedoes, not just distract them.

So what changed?

• Signal realism improved (frequency content, modulation, temporal behavior).
• Tactics became algorithmic (threat evaluation, recommended maneuvers, timing).
• Integration became the differentiator (the decoy is only as good as the detect-to-react loop).

The next step: decoys that are autonomous vehicles

Here is where it gets interesting for anyone working with autonomy.

The boundary between “decoy” and “USV/UUV” is dissolving.

A modern decoy already has:

• power
• processing
• an acoustic projector
• some level of programmability

Add propulsion, navigation, and a touch of onboard autonomy, and you have a disposable autonomous vehicle whose primary payload is deception.

Now imagine what that enables:

• A decoy that moves like the target, not just sounds like it.
• A decoy that adapts based on what it detects (active pings, weapon behavior, own-ship maneuvers).
• A decoy that creates multi-target confusion, not a single false contact.
• A decoy that cooperates with other assets, including other USVs and AUVs, as part of a distributed undersea defense screen.

This is not science fiction. It is simply applying autonomy to the oldest mission in undersea warfare: make the other guy wrong.

The uncomfortable conclusion

In undersea warfare, the side that sees first is dangerous. The side that makes the other side see wrong is lethal.

Decoys are not a bolt-on. They are a strategy. They buy time. They break tracks. They bend probability.

And as autonomy spreads across USVs, AUVs, and seabed infrastructure protection, the decoy stops being a “thing you deploy” and becomes a platform you operate.

The future decoy is not a noisemaker. It is an unmanned underwater actor in your tactical formation.

If you are designing an autonomous maritime system and decoys are not part of the architecture, you are building a race car without seatbelts.

Fast. Impressive. And one bad day away from becoming a very expensive reef.

Call-To-Action

Please comment and repost so we all can learn from each other.

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Originally published in the Strategic Pings ))) newsletter on LinkedIn on 2026-03-04. Subscribe there to get new editions first.

Finding something underwater has never been easier. Understanding
what it is, why it is there, and what to do about it has never been
harder.

Modern sonar systems are extremely good at detection. Almost too
good. Multibeam. SAS. Forward-looking sonar. Passive arrays. Magnetic
sensors. Environmental feeds. AI classifiers. All running at once. All
producing contacts.

Lots of contacts.

This is the uncomfortable truth. Detection is no longer the
bottleneck. Meaning is.

The Comfortable Assumption

The industry likes to believe that better sensors automatically lead
to better decisions. Add more resolution. Add more beams. Add more
bandwidth. Add more AI. The picture will magically become clear.

It usually does not.

What actually happens is this. More sensors generate more data. More
data creates more ambiguity. Operators drown in contacts. AI systems
flag everything as interesting. And someone, usually a tired human,
still has to decide what matters.

Detection is cheap. Understanding is expensive.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Most undersea systems today are optimized for sensing, not for
sense-making.

They are very good at answering the question, “Is something there?”
They struggle with the question, “So what?”

A rock looks suspicious at the wrong grazing angle. A fish school
becomes a potential intruder. A benign ROV suddenly has a very
threatening acoustic signature. AI does its best. AI also lies
convincingly.

False positives scale faster than confidence.

What the Physics Say

Sonar does not see objects. It measures sound interacting with the
environment.

That environment is dynamic. Temperature layers shift. Salinity
changes. Bottom types vary. Noise comes and goes. Self-noise matters
more than anyone likes to admit.

Physics does not care about marketing slides.

If you increase sensitivity, you increase clutter. If you increase
resolution, you increase processing load. If you increase coverage, you
increase uncertainty at the edges.

This is not a software problem. It is a reality problem.

What Operators See

Operators do not complain about missing targets anymore. They
complain about having too many.

In exercises and real operations, the pattern repeats. The system
detects something. Then something else. Then ten more. The tactical
picture fills up. Confidence goes down.

At some point, the operator asks the most dangerous question in
maritime operations. “Is this real?”

That hesitation is where advantage is lost. Not because the sensor
failed. But because the system did not help the human trust the
output.

From Sensors to Systems

This is why the real shift is not about better sonar. It is about
better systems.

Data fusion is no longer a nice-to-have feature. It is the core
capability.

Good fusion does three things well.

It reduces clutter, not just displays it.

It provides context, not just classification.

It communicates uncertainty, not false confidence.

The undersea domain is moving from platforms to networks. From
individual sensors to collaborative sensing. From single detections to
persistent understanding.

Some call this a kill web. That sounds dramatic. It is actually very
practical.

A network that cannot explain itself is not a weapon. It is a
liability.

Strategic Consequences

Navies and operators that invest only in sensors will continue to be
surprised. Those that invest in fusion, validation, and trust will move
faster and act earlier.

This also changes procurement logic. The most important performance
metric is no longer range or resolution. It is decision latency.

How fast can the system move from detection to confidence? How fast
can a human say, “Yes, this matters”?

In asymmetric warfare, that time difference is everything.

Strategic Ping

Detection finds contacts. Understanding wins battles.

And understanding is the part that costs real money.

Call To Action

Please comment on this and start a dialogue, so we all can learn from
each other.

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Originally published in the Strategic Pings ))) newsletter on LinkedIn on 2026-02-24. Subscribe there to get new editions first.

Shallow water is where submarines go to be clever… and where sonar engineers go to lose sleep.

Acoustics may be complicated in the open blue ocean, but at least the physics behaves predictably. In the littorals, Baltic-style basins, archipelagos, straits, coastal shelves, sound bounces off everything like a pinball machine with commitment issues: surface, bottom, rocks, wrecks, thermoclines that appear and disappear, and enough reverberation to make a choir sound like static.

Add dense traffic, biologics doing an interpretive dance on your spectrogram, and a seabed that changes from mud to cobble to granite in one coffee break… and you get the reality of littoral ASW.

I was fortunate to receive training from Professor Urick, who compared the Baltic with a portion of the South China Sea with respect to the hydroacoustic environment. Very complicated, he made one comment, “Avoid it if possible…”

Which is exactly why the strategic stakes are rising. Coastal waters aren’t just “nearby.” They’re gateways: ports, sea lines, chokepoints, and the corridors where critical infrastructure lives. If an adversary submarine can operate in your backyard, it’s not only hunting ships. It’s mapping patterns of life, sniffing undersea cables, and quietly rewriting your risk calculus. ASW in littoral and shallow coastal water relates to seabed warfare.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: in littoral ASW, you have two valid ways to win.

You find the submarine.

You create deterrence, A2/AD, so submarines don’t dare to loiter in your operating box in the first place.

Those are not competing ideas. They’re a matched pair.

The Deterrence Frame: ASW as A2/AD, not just “search and maybe prosecute.”

A2/AD—Anti-Access / Area Denial, is the maritime equivalent of putting a “Keep Out” sign on the sea and then wiring the fence to the national grid.

Anti-Access (A2) is about stopping an opponent from getting into the fight. In ASW terms, that means controlling the gateways: straits, archipelagos, shelf breaks, and the transit routes submarines and their supporting forces depend on. If you can threaten the aircraft, ships, bases, and logistics that enable sustained ASW, you can keep the hunter outside the operating box—no presence, no search pattern, no persistence.

Area Denial (AD) assumes the opponent makes it in anyway and focuses on making operations slow, risky, and inefficient. This is where ASW becomes a layered trap: seabed sensors, USVs towing passive arrays, UUV patrols, mines, decoys, jamming, spoofing, and enough ambiguity in the acoustic environment to keep commanders awake. The goal is not always a dramatic kill. Often it is simpler: deny tempo, deny confidence, deny freedom of maneuver.

A2 keeps the door closed. AD turns the room into a maze of tripwires.

Now—where does multi-static USV ASW fit? Right in the sweet spot: it supports both. It can actively find submarines, and it can also help create the perception (and reality) that your shallow-water approaches are simply not comfortable to operate in.

That discomfort is deterrence.

The submarine’s favorite shallow-water playing card: Zero Doppler

Submarines don’t need to be truly invisible. They need to be hard to classify and hard to hold. In shallow water, the ocean gives them plenty of cover: boundary reverberation, multipath, shipping noise, biologics, and bottom clutter.

One of the most useful tactical tricks is Zero Doppler geometry.

If the submarine can maneuver so that its radial velocity relative to your active sonar geometry is near zero, Doppler cues get weak. Your discrimination suffers. Your tracker gets less confident. Your contact starts looking like “maybe something,” which is operationally deadly because “maybe” burns time—and in the littorals, time is what the submarine is stealing.

If Zero Doppler provides a strategic edge, the key question is: how can we remove that advantage?

The Multi-static answer: Geometry that the submarine can’t game

Monostatic active sonar (source and receiver on the same platform) is vulnerable to geometry games. A multi-static network is not.

In multi-static operations, you separate the source from multiple receivers distributed in space. A submarine can try to be zero Doppler to one receiver, but it cannot maintain zero Doppler to several receivers spread across different bearings and ranges at the same time. If it’s “boring” to one node, it will be moving relative to another. That means Doppler diversity returns to your side of the chessboard.

This isn’t a small technical upgrade. It’s a strategic shift: you deny the submarine control of the engagement geometry.

And that denial is exactly what AD is supposed to feel like.

The Multi-Static USV Swarm: One illuminator, many ears (and no single point of failure)

The clean basic CONOPS is a “1+4” USV formation:

1) Source USV (the illuminator)

One USV carries a high-power coherent source, typically 2–4 kHz for wide-area search in shallow basins. Coherent matters because the littorals punish lazy waveforms. You want control: multiple pings, variable durations, better processing gain, and the ability to adapt to a reverberation floor that changes by the hour.

Think controlled flashlight, not fireworks.

3–4 Receiver USVs (the listeners)

Three to four USVs tow passive towed arrays—digital, high dynamic range systems designed to capture high-fidelity snippets for fusion. These nodes stay acoustically passive, which helps survivability and reduces self-noise issues, while providing the geometry diversity that makes multi-static worth doing.

This architecture is also inherently resilient. Lose one node? The web degrades gracefully rather than going blind. That matters in contested littorals where attrition is not a hypothetical—it’s a planning assumption.

Shallow-water reality check: timing, navigation, and “ghost discipline”

Multi-static processing is unforgiving. If your timing is sloppy or your positions drift, you don’t get “slightly worse tracks.” You get false tracks. Ghosts. Expensive arguments.

This is why serious multi-static USV ASW needs:

• Tight clock discipline (microsecond-level timing),
• High-quality navigation fusion (INS + DVL + pressure, plus sanity checks), and
• Geometry control so your bi-static ellipses actually mean something.

Your system must keep behaving even when you have issues, because the submarine will not politely pause while you reboot your confidence.

Search Patterns: Don’t “swarm,” orchestrate

A swarm is a marketing word. Formation is an engineering word.

Receiver USVs should execute structured search patterns designed to maintain baseline spacing, angle diversity, and revisit rates that support tracking. A practical approach is coordinated “lawnmower” sweeps with controlled offsets, where:

• The source illuminates on a schedule,
• Receivers maintain geometry to maximize bistatic angle diversity,
• Network adapts spacing based on propagation and bathymetry.

The goal isn’t just detection. It’s hold. Hold is what enables deterrence, because a submarine that expects to be held behaves differently than a submarine that expects to slip away.

How this feeds A2/AD: Deterrence by Transparency

Here’s the strategic payoff:

A distributed multi-static USV field doesn’t just hunt submarines. It creates a perception—backed by physics—that your littoral approaches are becoming transparent.

That supports A2 by controlling gateways. Place these fields intelligently near straits, archipelagos, and shelf breaks, and you complicate transit planning. You force route deviations, slower speeds, and higher risk. You also threaten the supporting ecosystem, tenders, ISR assets, surface escorts, that submarines rely on for sustained operations.

And it supports AD by turning the operating area into a maze of tripwires. Even if the submarine enters, it cannot rely on its best stealth geometry. It cannot assume it can “go zero Doppler and disappear into clutter.” The web denies tempo and denies confidence—and a commander who lacks confidence becomes conservative.

That is deterrence in practice: not always a kill chain, often a decision chain.

Summary: Two ways to win, one architecture that supports both

Littoral ASW is not a single game. It’s two:

Find the submarine when it enters your operating box.

Prevent submarines from operating there comfortably through A2/AD deterrence.

A multi-static USV architecture, one coherent source USV and 3–4 receiver USVs towing passive arrays, supports both missions. It handles the shallow-water physics with spatial diversity, resilient geometry, and edge processing. And it delivers the strategic punch: it removes the submarine’s zero-Doppler playing card by forcing it to face multiple receivers at once.

A2 keeps the door closed. AD turns the room into a maze of tripwires. Multi-static USV ASW does something even better: it makes the submarine wonder if the room was ever safe to enter at all.

Call-To-Action

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Originally published in the Strategic Pings ))) newsletter on LinkedIn on 2026-02-17. Subscribe there to get new editions first.

GNSS jamming, spoofing, and the hard lessons from NATO exercises

During a NATO Task Force exercise in 2025, I watched a USV quietly lose its mind.

On the screen, our unmanned surface vehicle was suddenly “turn starboard 90 degrees and doing 50 knots” sideways. The track jumped inland. Position fixes wandered like a drunk reindeer in the archipelago. The hardware was fine. The environment was not.

We were sitting inside a live GNSS jamming and spoofing bubble.

For a manned ship, this is annoying but manageable. A human on the bridge says “this is garbage”, switches to radar, visual bearings and paper charts, and carries on. For an unmanned system, there is no salty navigator to shout at the GPS.

If your USV believes bad PNT, it does bad things.

That is the real problem.

The fragile keel: USVs built on weak PNT

Modern USVs are deeply GNSS-centric. Position, timing, comms pointing, collision avoidance, and route following. Much of it assumes that satellite navigation is “good enough, most of the time”.

In a real-world contested environment, that assumption quickly dies. Luckily, there was a skilled engineer (whose last name I cannot mention, as it is bad luck) who had the solution.

• Jamming makes you blind
• Spoofing makes you confidently wrong

For critical missions around naval exercises, offshore energy, or subsea infrastructure, that is not a nuisance. It is an operational risk.

And unlike a crewed vessel, the USV will happily:

• Track to a spoofed waypoint
• Violate a safety box
• Misalign a towed sensor
• Lose alignment with its AUV swarm

Simply because the math checked out on a compromised GNSS stream.

Navigating in the dark: sensor fusion or nothing

The path out of this trap is not a magical “GPS replacement”. It is ruthless redundancy.

For USVs, that means building a resilient PNT stack, not just “adding an INS”.

At minimum:

• Good IMU + INS for dead reckoning
• DVL or water-track speed, where the draft allows it
• Radar and EO/IR for shoreline, buoys, and traffic
• Multi-constellation + authenticated GNSS where available

With decent inertial quality and a DVL locked on the seabed, drift over tens of minutes becomes manageable. Sensor fusion algorithms can then do what they do best. They compare “what GNSS says” with “what the rest of physics says”.

If your Kalman filter sees a perfect satellite position disagreeing with inertial, DVL, and radar ranges, it does not need a PhD in electronic warfare. It just needs to vote GNSS off the island.

The key is architectural: Treat GNSS as one sensor among many, not the truth.

Design for failure: behavior when PNT goes bad

Resilient PNT is not only about sensors. It is also about what the USV does when things get weird.

For unmanned systems, I like to see three explicit modes:

• PNT Healthy — Normal operation. GNSS + fusion. All constraints green.
• PNT Degraded — GNSS flagged as suspect or lost. USV shifts to INS / DVL primary. Speed limits come down. Safety corridors widen. Autonomy level drops.
• PNT Lost / Corrupted — Pre-defined “lost nav” behavior. Slow to safe speed, hold last safe box using non-GNSS sensors, or return along a radar-matched corridor. No heroic improvisation.

These modes must be tested in anger. In a jammer. In a harbor full of multipath. In a fjord with poor DVL lock. If your USV only behaves well under perfect GNSS, it is not autonomous. It is domesticated.

From convenience to survivability

GNSS gave us a very comfortable decade. Cheap antennas. Easy integration. Pretty tracks. For manned shipping it will remain an amazing convenience.

For USVs operating near conflict zones, hybrid warfare, or critical underwater infrastructure, GNSS is no longer a convenience issue. It is a survivability issue.

The takeaway from this exercise was simple:

• The threat is real.
• The tech to handle it exists.
• The gap is in system design and in testing.

If your unmanned platform strategy does not include:

• A serious, fused PNT architecture
• Defined degraded-mode behaviors
• Regular exposure to jamming and spoofing environments

Then your shiny USV is only autonomous as long as nobody touches the satellites.

Strategic Ping: Do not ask “what GNSS do we have on the USV?” Ask “what happens when it lies?”

Call-To-Action

Please comment, repost, and discuss this important issue. I’m not a specialist in this, but I learned from colleagues who are experts.

We need to learn from each other and create best practices.

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Originally published in the Strategic Pings ))) newsletter on LinkedIn on 2026-02-10. Subscribe there to get new editions first.