Aerospace and defense timing: dual-use opportunities with telecom?

The timing and synchronization challenges facing aerospace and defense aren’t new. The solutions, however, might already exist – in an industry you wouldn’t immediately think to look at.

At WSTS 2026, Adam Paterson, Head of Product Management at Calnex Solutions, made the case that telecom – as one of the world’s most demanding critical infrastructures – has spent years solving some of the key timing problems that aerospace and defense are grappling with right now.

Why timing is a bigger problem than it looks

Modern military platforms depend on precise time across a wide range of systems: navigation, guidance, electronic intelligence, surveillance and detection, IFF systems, synthetic aperture systems, and electronic countermeasures. Each has its own requirements – and each can fail in distinct ways when synchronization goes wrong.

Timing is also a security function. Time drift creates openings for malicious actors – enabling them to insert false information, delay emergency signals, interfere with industrial controllers, or launch denial-of-service attacks. Robust time awareness closes those loopholes.

Aerospace and defense also introduce challenges that simply don’t exist in commercial telecom – covert operation requirements, moving platforms operating in contested or denied environments, and resilience requirements that take precedence over raw performance.

Five telecom solutions worth leveraging

Telecom has faced sustained pressure to build timing systems that don’t fail – under network disruption, GNSS outage, and deliberate attack. Several translate directly to defense and aerospace:

• Redundant architectures. Deploying redundant Primary Reference Time Clocks (PRTCs) and Grandmaster clocks with redundant paths eliminates single points of failure – a principle that applies equally in defense contexts.
• Multi-constellation GNSS. Distributing GNSS receivers geographically and drawing on multiple constellations – GPS, Galileo, and others – reduces vulnerability to jamming or spoofing of any single system.
• The Travelling Clock (ITU-T G.8272.1). An ePRTC system locked to GNSS before departure can operate in holdover as a powered-up mobile timing reference – for measurement, delay compensation, or disaster recovery where GNSS can’t be relied upon. For platforms that must operate covertly, this is a compelling model – particularly for submarines or autonomous systems, where precise time must be maintained throughout a mission without reliance on GNSS or external infrastructure.
• Advanced sync monitoring. ITU-T G.8275 defines statistics for monitoring PTP network performance – enabling detection of misconfigurations, failures, and security attacks. The same logic flags anomalies indicating a timing attack, providing early warning capability.
• Timing over 5G. 3GPP work on 5G industrial automation has produced solutions for UTC-traceable timing over 5G radio, with target accuracy of 700-900 ns. Early discussions have already identified crossover potential with Private 5G for next-generation ship-to-ship communications.

These aren’t theoretical – they’re proven, deployed at scale, and continuously evolving.

Dual use: The opportunity and its limits

The convergence of requirements across telecom, aerospace, and defense creates a real opportunity. Standards like PTP are already shared. 5G network slicing allows infrastructure to serve multiple demanding use cases. And telecom’s commercial scale means technologies benefit from investment and iteration that these sectors cannot match on their own – with corresponding economies of scale.

But dual use has limits. Defense often reverses telecom’s priority ordering – resilience over performance, security over openness. For security-critical components, there is a clear preference for disaggregated solutions that allow in-house ownership, reducing dependence on commercial supply chains.

The right approach is selective adoption: take what telecom has proven, adapt it – don’t assume a straight transplant will work.

Why now is the right time

Both industries are evolving simultaneously. Telecom continues to innovate under the demands of 5G, AI, and distributed infrastructure. Aerospace and defense face increasing urgency around timing resilience as the threat environment intensifies. The conditions for cross-industry learning have rarely been better.

About the Author Adam has over 15 years’ experience in the Test and Measurement business and is Head of Product Management at Calnex Solutions. He presented “How Can Aerospace and Defense Benefit from Telecom?” at WSTS 2026.