The Precision Paradox: Why NATO Keeps Buying Weapons Russia Has Learned to Defeat
GPS-guided munitions have failed catastrophically against Russian jamming in Ukraine. Yet Western militaries continue building doctrine around these vulnerable systems. The explanation lies not in ignorance but in institutional structures that profit from fragility.
The Precision Paradox
In May 2024, Ukrainian commanders stopped ordering Excalibur shells. The GPS-guided artillery rounds, which cost $100,000 each and once hit targets with 70% accuracy, had become expensive confetti. Russian electronic warfare had driven their effectiveness below 10%. The Washington Post investigation that revealed this failure should have triggered a reckoning across Western defence ministries. It did not.
NATO continues to build its warfighting doctrine around precision-guided munitions that Russian jammers have learned to defeat. The alliance’s 2024 Washington Summit pledged to enhance “precision strike capabilities.” Defence contractors are booking record orders for GPS-dependent weapons. The anti-jamming market is growing at 10.5% annually, projected to exceed $7.6 billion—not because the problem is being solved, but because the vulnerability has become a product category.
This is not institutional blindness. It is something more troubling: a system that has made peace with its own fragility.
The Physics Cannot Be Negotiated
GPS signals arrive at Earth’s surface thirty decibels below thermal noise. A satellite twenty-two thousand kilometres away transmits at thirty watts. A ground-based jammer with line-of-sight can overwhelm that whisper with a few watts of interference. The power asymmetry is not a bug to be patched. It is thermodynamic reality.
The Pentagon has understood this for decades. The Government Accountability Office noted in September 2024 that the Department of Defense “has worked for more than 2 decades to modernize its GPS with a more secure, jam-resistant, military-specific signal known as M-code.” Two decades. The upgraded signal remains years from full deployment. Meanwhile, Russian forces in Ukraine operate jamming systems that cost orders of magnitude less than the weapons they neutralise.
The mismatch extends beyond physics. Software-defined radios can replicate new jamming waveforms within weeks. Defence acquisition programmes take seven to fifteen years from concept to deployment. By the time a countermeasure reaches the battlefield, the threat has evolved three generations. This is not a race that hardware can win.
Ukrainian forces adapted as soldiers do: they changed tactics, fired HIMARS at night when jamming was less effective, reverted to unguided munitions for some targets. But these workarounds reveal the deeper problem. The world’s most sophisticated military alliance has built its theory of victory around weapons that require field expedients to function against a near-peer adversary.
Why the Machine Cannot Correct Itself
The straightforward explanation—bureaucratic inertia—captures part of the truth but misses the structural dynamics that make correction nearly impossible. Four interlocking mechanisms sustain the status quo.
The revenue architecture. Defence contractors have discovered that vulnerability is more profitable than resilience. Lockheed Martin’s chief financial officer has identified sustainment as becoming the most profitable segment of the F-35 programme. The same business logic applies to GPS-dependent systems: each jamming incident validates the need for the next “Block” upgrade. The anti-jamming market’s double-digit growth depends on the problem persisting. A permanently solved vulnerability is a closed revenue stream.
The procurement system reinforces this. Long-lead contracts lock in component specifications five years before delivery. Radiation-hardened chips certified for military use cannot run modern adaptive algorithms. By the time platforms reach the field, their guidance software is fighting the last war’s electronic environment.
The moral permission structure. Precision weapons do not merely kill more accurately. They provide legal cover. NATO’s joint targeting doctrine, codified in Allied Joint Publication 3.9, operationalises proportionality assessments through statistical models calibrated to known circular error probable values. The “Risk Estimate Distances” and “Desired Mean Point of Impact” parameters assume GPS-guided accuracy. When Russian jamming degrades that accuracy by ninety percent, the legal framework that authorised the strike becomes fiction—but the strike proceeds anyway.
This creates a perverse incentive. Precision capability makes force easier to justify. The presence of GPS-guided weapons does not reduce violence; it legitimises it by transforming “we can hit precisely” into “we may strike.” Abandoning these systems would require rebuilding the entire legal and ethical architecture that permits Western militaries to use force.
The interoperability trap. GPS-guided munitions became NATO’s common language. Smaller alliance members, structurally unable to develop full-spectrum capabilities, were encouraged to specialise under Smart Defence initiatives. Their pre-existing gaps became formalised dependencies. A Lithuanian artillery battery trained on Excalibur cannot easily revert to unguided shells without rewriting doctrine, retraining crews, and recertifying logistics chains.
The NATO Electronic Warfare Advisory Committee acknowledged in November 2024 that electromagnetic warfare “has become a crucial domain in modern warfare.” But acknowledging a problem and restructuring an alliance around it are different orders of difficulty. Thirty-two nations must agree. Each has domestic constituencies, industrial interests, and sunk costs in existing systems. Consensus requirements that protect alliance cohesion also prevent rapid doctrinal shifts.
The phantom capability. Research on phantom limb syndrome reveals that the brain maintains neural maps of amputated limbs indefinitely, “almost like it’s waiting to reconnect.” Military organisations exhibit the same phenomenon. Doctrine retains operational templates for capabilities that have been functionally eliminated. Staff officers plan around precision strike as if Ukraine had not happened. The organisational cortex refuses to accept what the battlefield has demonstrated.
When evidence of vulnerability enters the system, the response is not silence but antibody production. Counter-studies proliferate. Theatre-specificity arguments emerge: Ukraine’s electronic warfare environment is uniquely dense; future conflicts will differ. These arguments ignore that Russian GPS jamming now affects civilian flights over Estonia and the Middle East, hundreds of kilometres from the front lines. The geographic containment thesis has already collapsed.
The Temporal Mismatch
The deepest structural problem is temporal. Russia operates on generational timescales. Its strategic culture measures success across decades. NATO democracies reset strategy every four years when governments change. Ukraine exists in perpetual present, where survival depends on ammunition deliveries measured in days.
These three temporal frameworks cannot be reconciled. A Russian investment in jamming capability made in 2015 pays dividends in 2024. A NATO programme initiated in 2024 might reach initial operating capability by 2032. Ukrainian adaptation happens in weeks—but tactical workarounds cannot substitute for strategic resilience.
The Defence Science Board stated the matter plainly in May 2024: “The availability and accuracy of GPS and Global Navigation Satellite Systems may not be guaranteed at all places and times.” This is the polite version. The operational translation: NATO’s precision strike doctrine assumes a condition that adversaries can deny at will.
M-code, the jam-resistant GPS signal that was supposed to solve this, has been in development since the early 2000s. Full deployment remains scheduled for the 2030s. By then, Russian electronic warfare will have evolved through multiple generations. The pursuit of a technological fix to a physics problem resembles a dog chasing its tail—except the tail is accelerating.
What Breaks First
If current dynamics continue, the failure mode will not be dramatic. It will be cumulative.
First, the gap between stated capability and actual performance will widen. Weapons will continue to be procured, deployed, and occasionally used. Classified assessments will note degraded effectiveness. Public doctrine will not change. The distance between what NATO claims it can do and what it can actually accomplish in a contested environment will grow until a crisis forces the issue.
Second, adversaries will calibrate accordingly. Russian and Chinese military planners already incorporate GPS denial into their operational concepts. Each successful jamming operation in Ukraine provides data for refining techniques. The learning curve favours the jammer: disruption is cheaper than precision, and adaptation cycles are faster.
Third, alliance credibility will erode. Deterrence requires adversaries to believe in capability. If precision strike—the foundation of NATO’s conventional deterrent—is known to be defeatable, the calculus of aggression changes. This does not mean war becomes likely. It means the threshold for risk-taking by adversaries drops.
Fourth, the legal and ethical framework that justifies Western military operations will face stress. If precision cannot be guaranteed, proportionality assessments become guesswork. The distinction between combatant and civilian, already difficult, becomes harder to maintain. The moral permission that GPS-guided weapons provide evaporates.
The cascade is slow but compounding. Each year of delay in developing alternatives adds months to the eventual correction. The GAO’s finding that the Department of Defense implements only seventy-five percent of four-year-old recommendations suggests the institutional metabolism cannot match the threat evolution rate.
Paths Not Yet Foreclosed
Three intervention points remain available, each with costs that explain why they have not been pursued.
Accept degraded precision and rebuild doctrine accordingly. NATO could acknowledge that GPS-dependent weapons will not function reliably against sophisticated adversaries and restructure targeting doctrine around that reality. This would mean larger munitions expenditures per target, higher collateral damage estimates, and a legal framework that permits less surgical operations.
The trade-off is political. Western publics have been conditioned to expect clean wars. The imagery of precision strikes—a building destroyed while neighbours stand untouched—has become the visual language of legitimate force. Reverting to area effects would require explaining why military necessity now permits what precision was supposed to prevent.
Invest massively in alternative navigation. Inertial navigation, terrain-relative systems, and quantum sensors offer GPS-independent positioning. Each has limitations. Inertial systems drift over time. Terrain-matching requires detailed prior mapping. Quantum sensors remain laboratory technology. But a portfolio approach—multiple navigation sources that degrade gracefully—could restore resilience.
The trade-off is fiscal. Alternative navigation systems are expensive, and the defence industrial base is optimised for GPS-dependent production. Shifting investment would strand existing contracts, anger powerful constituencies, and require sustained funding across electoral cycles. The procurement system’s structural inertia makes such pivots difficult.
Develop offensive electronic warfare parity. If Russian jamming cannot be defeated defensively, NATO could invest in jamming Russian systems symmetrically. This would not solve the precision problem but would impose costs on adversary operations.
The trade-off is escalatory. Electronic warfare exists in a grey zone between peacetime competition and armed conflict. Aggressive jamming of Russian military systems could trigger responses NATO is not prepared to manage. The alliance’s ambiguous doctrine on whether electromagnetic attacks constitute armed attacks complicates strategic planning.
None of these paths is easy. All require accepting losses—political, fiscal, or strategic—that the current system is designed to avoid. The most likely trajectory is therefore the current one: incremental adaptation, continued procurement of vulnerable systems, and hope that the next conflict will be more permissive than Ukraine.
FAQ: Key Questions Answered
Q: Can software updates fix GPS-guided weapons’ vulnerability to jamming? A: Software can improve resistance at the margins, but the fundamental problem is physics. GPS signals are inherently weak, and no amount of processing can overcome a sufficiently powerful jammer. Ukrainian field modifications have restored some effectiveness, but these are tactical patches, not strategic solutions.
Q: Why doesn’t NATO just switch to European alternatives like Galileo? A: Galileo uses similar signal architectures and faces the same power-at-receiver limitations as GPS. European initiatives like the ELSA programme aim to improve resilience, but they do not escape the basic vulnerability of satellite navigation to ground-based interference.
Q: How long until M-code GPS is fully deployed? A: The Pentagon has been developing M-code for over two decades. Full deployment across military user equipment is projected for the 2030s. By then, adversary electronic warfare capabilities will have continued evolving, and the advantage may remain with the jammer.
Q: Are there weapons that don’t rely on GPS at all? A: Yes. Inertially guided munitions, terrain-matching systems, and optically guided weapons exist. But they are generally more expensive, less flexible, or require more pre-mission preparation. NATO doctrine has not been restructured around these alternatives.
The Comfortable Vulnerability
The alliance will not change course until forced. This is not a prediction of doom but an observation about institutional behaviour. Organisations optimise for the problems they know how to solve. GPS vulnerability is a problem NATO knows how to study, fund, and defer. Actual resilience would require confronting trade-offs that the current system exists to avoid.
Somewhere in a Russian electronic warfare unit, technicians are refining jamming waveforms based on data from Ukraine. Somewhere in a Pentagon conference room, programme managers are briefing the next Block upgrade. Somewhere in Brussels, diplomats are drafting communiqués about enhanced precision strike capabilities. Each is doing their job. The system is functioning as designed.
The question is not whether the vulnerability is known. Everyone knows. The question is whether knowing will prove sufficient. Ukraine suggests it will not. The alliance has watched its signature capability degraded in real time and responded with more of the same. This is not blindness. It is the institutional equivalent of a patient who understands the diagnosis but cannot bring themselves to change their habits.
The precision weapons will continue to be built. The jammers will continue to defeat them. And the doctrine will continue to assume a world that adversaries have already learned to deny.
Sources & Further Reading
The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:
- GAO GPS Modernization Report (2024) - Documents two decades of delays in deploying jam-resistant M-code signals
- Washington Post Investigation on Russian Jamming - Revealed the extent of GPS-guided weapon failures in Ukraine
- NATO Electronic Warfare Advisory Committee Proceedings - Alliance acknowledgment of electromagnetic warfare’s centrality
- Defence Science Board PNT Report - Assessment of GPS availability limitations
- Allied Joint Publication 3.9 on Joint Targeting - NATO’s doctrinal framework for precision strike
- CSIS Analysis on Acquisition Reform Cycles - Structural analysis of procurement timelines
- GAO Weapon Systems Annual Assessment - Implementation rates for defence recommendations
- Anti-Jamming Market Analysis - Market growth projections for counter-jamming technology
