The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has unveiled its plan for the future, and it’s a huge shift, marked by new goals in four main areas. Arguably the biggest change is its plan to reinvent complex military systems and make them more modular, in an effort to ensure “superiority in the air, maritime, ground, space, and cyber domains.” Among the planned developments is a brand new global positioning, navigation, and timing system (GPS) that doesn’t depend on satellites and is resistant to jamming. According to a document posted Thursday, DARPA’s new system will be much more advanced than what we have now, and will eventually trickle down to our cars and phones.

First, let’s step back for a moment and look at how current GPS systems work. Many ExtremeTech readers know this already, but the GPS navigation in our cars and phones depends on what was originally a military operation, just like the Internet itself. The U.S. Department of Defense first developed satellite-based GPS, and had an early system called TRANSIT up and running in 1960. By the 1980s, the military had gradually refined its technology to the point where it relied on multiple satellites orbiting the earth.

The system depends on Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity to work. It figures out where you are based on signal time stamps from a number of satellites, as well as how far apart those are from each other. Thus enabled, the system triangulates your position on the ground. But the clocks on the satellites advance just a bit faster than ones on the Earth, and moving clocks are slightly slower than ones standing still. Relativity accounts for these differences, which amount to about 38 microseconds per day — a tiny amount, but just enough to misread your position by miles.

Incidentally, consumer technology could use GPS back then as well, but it was rare, being extremely expensive. GPS receivers, once giant backpack-sized behemoths, began to shrink over time as the technology improved. But the real reason you didn’t see much GPS in use in the 1980s and 1990s was because the military purposely scrambled the data civilians could see, rendering it pretty inaccurate, and kept the most accurate data for itself.

In the year 2000, president Clinton signed a bill ordering the military to stop scrambling the satellite data for civilians. This move instantly improved the accuracy of existing consumer systems by a factor of 10, and made room for wide civilian adoption of GPS navigation. Today’s network involves several dozen U.S.-based GPS satellites orbiting the earth. The newer Russian GLONASS system augments our own, and the European GNSS (Galileo) system in development soon will do so as well. The network ensures that at least 24 satellites are functioning at any one time, and that at least three are available for any device’s positioning request worldwide.

Ground-based systems may seem like a good alternative, but there are pitfalls. One design would involve hundreds of thousands of transmitters, which would be ridiculously difficult to build and maintain. Another possibility is differential GPS, which currently sees use in some maritime and nautical settings, but it’s also subject to jamming like satellite GPS. The other is LORAN, a radio-based system that originally saw use in World War II and has seen some renewed interest today thanks to its resistance to jamming, but its accuracy was never very good.

In the paper, DARPA hints at how it’s going to develop a positioning system without the use of satellites: “The need to be able to operate effectively in areas where GPS is inaccessible, unreliable or potentially denied by adversaries has created a demand for alternative precision timing and navigation capabilities. To address this need, DARPA is investing in radically new technologies that have the potential to deliver GPS-quality position, navigation and timing information for military systems, including novel inertial measurement devices that use cold-atom interferometry; chip-scale self-calibrating gyroscopes, accelerometers and clocks; and pulsed-laser-enabled atomic clocks and microwave sources.”

In addition to the GPS news, DARPA also said it’s refocusing on deriving insights from massive datasets, including automated cyber defense and developing more secure systems while ensuring privacy. Back in 2014, DARPA opened its Biological Technologies Office for research in neurotechnologies, synthetic biology, and intercepting the spread of infectious diseases. It’s also doubling down on quantum physics research, and inventing new chemistries and materials.