Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has introduced HYPNOSIS, a high-power navigation warfare (NAVWAR) system designed to defend fixed, high-value sites against GNSS-guided aerial threats — chiefly the large drone swarms that have become a defining feature of recent conflicts — by attacking their satellite navigation link rather than shooting them down.
How it works
The system is built around a network of mobile jamming and spoofing stations arrayed around a protected site, each tied into a central command-and-control (C2) unit that handles threat detection, analysis, and response in real time. IAI says the C2 architecture can run autonomously, without an operator manually directing individual stations — a design choice aimed at compressing response time when a coordinated, multi-directional attack can unfold in seconds.
HYPNOSIS works both ends of the interference spectrum. Jamming overpowers the legitimate GNSS signal with a stronger transmission on the same frequency, denying a receiver any usable position or timing data. Spoofing is subtler: it feeds a receiver counterfeit satellite signals engineered to look authentic, steering the target toward a false position without triggering any onboard indication that something is wrong. IAI says the system is built to do both across multiple frequency bands and constellations at once, and to handle threats converging from several directions simultaneously.
The company is positioning HYPNOSIS as a complement to, not a replacement for, kinetic interceptors — a “soft-kill” layer meant for situations where hard-kill intercepts become impractical simply because of the number of airborne objects. Guy Barlev, EVP and GM of IAI’s Systems, Missiles and Space Group, described it as a cost-efficient addition to a multi-layered defense concept that still includes kinetic systems.
The PNT angle
HYPNOSIS is the offensive counterpart to IAI’s ADA GNSS Anti-Jamming System, a defensive CRPA-based receiver-protection technology the company has fielded for over two decades, including reported operational use during Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021. Where ADA is built to keep a friendly receiver locked on despite hostile interference, HYPNOSIS applies the same NAVWAR expertise in the other direction — deliberately denying or corrupting GNSS for an adversary’s receiver. For readers tracking the anti-jam/anti-spoof receiver market, it’s a useful reminder that the underlying signal-processing and RF expertise is dual-use: the same CRPA and signal-authentication know-how that hardens a receiver against jamming and spoofing informs how to jam and spoof one.
The unveiling comes as GNSS-guided drone and missile exchanges have intensified across the Russia-Ukraine and Iran-linked Middle East theaters, underscoring continued demand for layered counter-UAS defenses that don’t depend solely on interceptor inventories.
