Starlink and GPS-Free Drone Navigation in Modern War

The war in Ukraine has left a fact that is hard to overstate: a large part of a warring army's tactical communications has depended on a commercial satellite internet service operated by a private American company. Starlink, run by SpaceX, went from consumer product to de facto military infrastructure within weeks of February 2022, with tens of thousands of terminals deployed on the ground.

Why it worked where nothing else did

The low-Earth-orbit constellation offers three things traditional military networks struggled to provide: low latency, small and cheap terminals, and enormous redundancy, since losing a few satellites out of a constellation of thousands barely dents the service. Against an adversary that destroyed phone masts and struck communications centres, the ability to deploy a suitcase-sized terminal anywhere proved decisive for command, fire coordination and relaying drone footage.

The underlying problem: who decides

That dependence brings with it a question no doctrine manual had addressed: the service's availability depends on corporate decisions. The most publicly debated episode is the 2022 limitation of coverage over Crimea, recorded in Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk and later the subject of correspondence and hearings in the US Congress. Whatever interpretation one takes of that specific case, it set a precedent: a private actor can, in practice, condition a military operation.

The institutional response has moved in two directions. On one hand, contracts that bring the service under government control — the US Department of Defense contracted Starshield, the military variant, and several European governments fund terminals. On the other, sovereign constellation programmes such as the European Union's IRIS², approved in 2023 precisely to reduce this dependence. In parallel, the legal debate has resurfaced over whether civilian infrastructure used for military purposes becomes a legitimate target, a question the ICRC has explicitly raised.

Navigating with no signal

The other side of the problem is navigation. Jamming and spoofing of satellite signals — GPS, Galileo, GLONASS — are now the norm in conflict zones, and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency has issued bulletins on their effect even on civil aviation over the Baltic and the Middle East. A drone that depends solely on satellite signal is a drone that does not arrive. The alternatives, none of them new, are combined in layers:

• Inertial navigation: accelerometers and gyroscopes calculate position from the vehicle's own motion. It works with no external signal at all, but drift accumulates over time and needs periodic correction.
• Terrain correlation: the aircraft compares the terrain relief or ground imagery with an onboard map. The principle is the same one used by cruise missiles with TERCOM and DSMAC since the 1970s.
• Visual reference navigation: the camera identifies and tracks fixed landscape features — road junctions, bridges, distinctive buildings — and estimates movement relative to them.
• Visual odometry and SLAM: techniques from robotics that build a map of the surroundings while simultaneously locating the aircraft within it; useful indoors and in low-level flight.
• Alternative references: navigation by star sightings, by Earth's magnetic field, or by signals of opportunity such as television or telephone transmissions.
• Anti-jamming antennas: arrays that null out signal coming from the direction of a hostile emitter; they raise equipment cost but let satellite signal be preserved.

The role of offline AI

What has changed in recent years is the ability to run computer-vision models on the aircraft itself, using low-power processors. That allows three things with no connectivity at all: recognising the terrain being overflown, maintaining track of a target when the link is cut, and completing the final approach. Several manufacturers have unveiled terminal-guidance modules built on this logic, and their use has been widely reported in Ukraine.

This is also where military effectiveness and human control come into tension, because the more autonomous the final phase, the less room there is to revoke the decision. The systems publicly described keep target designation in the operator's hands before the link is lost, but the regulatory discussion in Geneva on autonomous weapons stems exactly from this grey area.

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