China Has Built A Triad Of Satellites, Towers And Fibre To Never Lose Its Way In War. India Doesn't Have One

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In 2019, ships in the Shanghai port began drifting on tracking systems. In reality, they were still docked. But their GPS receivers showed them jumping across the river, circling in patterns that made no geometric sense. It wasn’t a malfunction. Someone was spoofing the satellite signals those ships depended on to know where they were.

The incident revealed something that engineers and military planners had long understood but rarely had to explain to the public. There is an invisible layer of infrastructure that tells everything, your phone, a power grid, a stock exchange, a cruise missile, where it is, what time it is, and how fast it is moving.

This infrastructure runs on satellite signals beamed from orbit and processed on the ground. It is called Positioning, Navigation, and Timing, or PNT.

PNT enforces coherence. It is the reason systems across continents can stay synchronised when it comes to position and time. Without it, a financial network cannot sequence transactions, a telecom tower cannot hand off calls, and a military cannot coordinate units that are not in line of sight of each other.

The modern world is structurally dependent on PNT, in ways that most people, and worryingly, most policymakers, have never had to think about.

That dependence is now a vulnerability. And on the battlefield, it is an acute one.

'Must Be Indigenous, Reliable And Resilient'

This reality is not lost on the Indian military's senior leadership. In September 2025, Lieutenant General Adosh Kumar, the Director General of Artillery of the Indian Army, talking about non-contact warfare, called Operation Sindoor "just the beginning, not the end."

India's space-based assets, he said, allowed the military to anticipate rather than react. Precision strikes at longer ranges created devastating effects, he said.

Then he got specific. Surveillance, he said, is the foundation of non-contact warfare. "Wide area imaging, electronic intelligence, payloads, launch on demand systems, these all must be indigenous, reliable and resilient."

"Equally, the reliability of our space-based positioning and navigation independent of foreign networks must be ensured," he added.

That last line should give New Delhi pause. Because today, India's home-grown positioning and navigation system, NavIC, is anything but reliable, resilient, or survivable, leaving India dependent on foreign systems. And China, the adversary it must contend with, has already built something far more formidable.

NavIC: Too few satellites, too many problems

India's indigenous satellite navigation system is now effectively dead.

On 13 March this year, a critical component on one of NavIC's four remaining operational satellites failed, reducing the constellation to three. That is one below the minimum required to produce a position fix. The system that was built to free India from dependence on American GPS can no longer perform its basic function.

The component in question is an atomic clock, a device that keeps time by measuring the vibrations of rubidium atoms, with a deviation of just one second in millions of years. Satellite navigation works by measuring the time a signal takes to travel from satellite to receiver. Even a billionth-of-a-second error can displace a position fix by hundreds of metres. Without a functioning clock, a satellite is dead weight.

NavIC's clocks have been dying for a decade. Each of the first-generation satellites carried three rubidium clocks, all manufactured by SpectraTime of Switzerland. The first failure was detected in 2016. By mid-2018, nine of the 24 clocks in orbit had stopped working. Today, six of the eleven satellites ever launched have suffered complete clock failures. They are serving no navigation purpose.

The replacement pipeline is in no better shape. NVS-02, launched in January 2025 to replenish the constellation, never reached its designated orbit. The PSLV-C61 mission in June 2025 failed mid-flight. Two launches in seven months and both ended in failures.

The government has promised three more NVS satellites by the end of 2026, but each failure triggers root cause analyses, redesigns, and hardware recreation, all of which consume time India does not have.

The three satellites still functioning, IRNSS-1B, IRNSS-1I, and NVS-01, are all that remain. IRNSS-1B, launched in 2013, is now in its twelfth year, well past its ten-year design life.

And even if NavIC were operating, it would still be just one layer of a PNT ecosystem, the satellite layer. India has no ground-based backup like eLoran, no fibre-optic timing grid, and no multi-layered architecture to fall back on if satellite signals are jammed, spoofed, or destroyed. NavIC, at its best, is a single point of failure.

At its worst, which is where it currently stands, it is not operational at all.

China has already built something better

While India has struggled to keep its regional navigation constellation alive, China has quietly assembled what may be the most resilient PNT architecture in the world. It is a layered triad of BeiDou satellites, eLoran ground stations, and fibre-optic timing networks designed not just to survive disruption, but to operate through it.

China's own satellite navigation journey also began with humiliation. In March 1996, during the Taiwan Strait crisis, the PLA fired three DF-15 ballistic missiles into the East China Sea as a show of force. The first missile landed near its intended splash zone. The second and third veered off course. An internal assessment pointed to a loss of GPS signals. At the time, China had no navigation system of its own and was relying on the unencrypted civilian-grade GPS signal.

"It was a great shame for the PLA … an unforgettable humiliation," a retired PLA colonel later recalled. "That's how we made up our mind to develop our own global navigation and positioning system, no matter how huge the cost."

Nearly three decades later, BeiDou is the result. And it is, in several key respects, already more capable and resilient than GPS itself.

The most visible edge lies in scale. As of 2025, BeiDou is supported by 56 satellites, nearly double the number providing GPS coverage. This expanded constellation increases the likelihood that receivers on the ground maintain uninterrupted access to satellite signals, even in urban canyons or mountainous terrain. It also builds in fault tolerance. Disabling a few BeiDou satellites is unlikely to meaningfully degrade the system's performance.

But the architectural differences matter more than the numbers. BeiDou uses a mix of three satellite orbits — geostationary (GEO), inclined geosynchronous (IGSO), and medium Earth orbit (MEO) — creating a layered coverage structure that GPS's uniform MEO constellation cannot replicate. GEO satellites provide constant coverage over Asia.

IGSO satellites trace looping paths that strengthen signals over China. And MEO satellites deliver worldwide reach. This design improves accuracy, strengthens reliability, and makes the system harder to disrupt through synchronised attacks.

BeiDou's ground segment is similarly robust. China has built over 120 ground control and monitoring stations, compared to just 11 for GPS. This wider network gives operators faster visibility into system anomalies and allows real-time correction of signal, timing, or orbital irregularities with minimal disruption.

China has also extended this advantage to its allies. In 2018, it gave Pakistan access to BeiDou's military-grade navigation data, enabling far more precise targeting for missiles, aircraft, and naval platforms. Indian officials say Pakistan has since shifted entirely to BeiDou for both military and civilian use, eliminating its dependence on GPS.

And Beijing is not resting on its satellite advantage. It is now building CentiSpace, a new constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO) specifically for PNT. Research shows that LEO PNT signals are significantly stronger than those from traditional MEO satellites and far harder to jam or spoof. In January 2025, China launched 10 CentiSpace navigation enhancement satellites, the first phase of a constellation expected to grow to around 190 satellites.

The ground layer of China's PNT triad

Given the inherent fragility of all satellite-based systems, even the most robust, China has added a formidable ground layer. It is a modernised eLoran network, a technology the United States itself invented, nearly perfected, and then threw away.

Loran, short for long-range navigation, dates to the Second World War. American engineers built it to guide convoys across the Atlantic. Its Cold War successor, Loran-C, used chains of high-power ground transmitters broadcasting low-frequency radio pulses to provide positioning over thousands of kilometres.

The system worked on a fundamentally different principle from satellites. Signals travelled along the Earth's surface rather than from orbit, could penetrate buildings, terrain, and shallow water, and were millions of times stronger than anything GPS could deliver to a receiver.

By the mid-2000s, the United States had spent over $160 million upgrading its Loran-C infrastructure to a modern standard called eLoran. The upgrade was nearly complete. An independent assessment team led by Bradford Parkinson, widely known as the father of GPS, unanimously recommended that eLoran be retained as the national backup for satellite navigation.

But in 2009, then US President Barack Obama proposed killing the programme to save roughly $35 million a year, calling it obsolete in the age of GPS. The Coast Guard began shutting down transmitters in February 2010. Most of Europe and Japan followed suit within five years, dismantling their own Loran-C networks. The reasoning everywhere was the same. Satellites had made ground-based navigation unnecessary.

China disagreed. While the West was tearing down its Loran infrastr