Quantum computing enables a more ready military.

Highly precise sensors that could enable aircraft to navigate without satellite-based GPS. Tiny atomic clocks that could ensure perfect timing in the face of GPS jamming. Wideband, low-power antennas that could guarantee secure communications.

These are among the breakthrough capabilities promised by quantum technologies that experts say could give the U.S. Air Force crucial advantages in a future conflict with China—provided, that is, that the U.S. military invests in developing those technologies sooner, not later.

“We have to make decisions about what technologies to pursue, and we have to understand quantum to do that,” said Heather Penney, senior resident fellow at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and the author of a series of papers on the topic. “We need to be able to focus on high potential—the practical science makes sense, the technology is ready. We need to focus on high payoff—what will actually make a difference to the warfighter.”

Penney highlighted three quantum technologies for reporters at a Jan. 29 rollout event. The three high-potential, high-payoff applications: timing, inertial sensors, and radio frequency receivers.

“Quantum timing integrated with quantum inertial sensors could provide warfighters with an internal, self-contained [precision navigation and timing] capability whose accuracy exceeds current GPS solutions,” Penney writes.

Air Mobility Command experimented with just such a capability in May 2023, placing a quantum magnetic sensor the size of a small crate in the back of a C-17—then measuring changes in the Earth’s magnetic field and using those calculations to navigate the aircraft to its destination.

Air Force leaders increasingly express concern about their aircraft’s dependence on GPS satellites to know where to go. Were GPS jammed or disabled, however, quantum devices like magnetometers and gravimeters could still get aircraft to their destination using precise measurements of the behavior of sub-atomic particles.

Such sensors promise other benefits, including the ability to “detect and map underground tunnels [and] enhance undersea sensing and navigation,” Penney wrote.

Atomic clocks have been around for decades, but quantum tech can make them even more precise in even smaller packages—expanding the number of platforms they could go on and again freeing them from relying on external timing signals that could be jammed.

Such precise instruments could “provide resilient position, navigation, and timing in highly contested environments,” Penney wrote—and they’re not that far off from being a reality, said Michael Hayduk, deputy director of the Air Force Research Lab Information Directorate.