Washington and Beijing have both pushed their military quantum programmes out of the laboratory and into procurement, and much of the hardware now on order is meant to fly, sail and navigate before the decade is out.
The popular image of quantum warfare features a machine that shreds encryption. The contracts actually being signed describe something duller and nearer: clocks, magnetometers, gyroscopes and fibre.
American policy hardened on June 22nd, when the White House issued two orders on quantum technology. One accelerated the federal migration to post-quantum cryptography.
The other, on quantum innovation, declared it national policy to “maintain a strategic technical advantage” and gave the Pentagon 60 days to name at least three next-generation quantum sensor projects, with instructions to field them by September 30th 2028. That is a fielding deadline rather than a research aspiration, and it falls inside a single presidential term.
The Defense Innovation Unit answered within days, announcing a multi-phase effort to move mature quantum sensing and timing directly to the joint force, with as much as $200m to be committed within a year.
The unit already runs a Transition of Quantum Sensing programme organised around five lines of effort: inertial sensors, gravimeters, magnetic anomaly detection, magnetic navigation and component development. SandboxAQ joined in late 2025 to test magnetic-anomaly navigation software on military aircraft, building on trials flown aboard C-17 transports.
Timing is where American procurement has travelled furthest. In August DARPA extended a contract with IonQ worth $28m, with an unexercised option of a further $30m, to produce 125 compact optical atomic clocks for government customers.
The Evergreen-05 unit occupies five litres, roughly a shoebox, and holds nanosecond accuracy across ten days of holdover. IonQ is adding $15m of its own capital for a production line due to open in 2027. The significance lies in the verb: the agency is funding manufacture, not another demonstration.
Navigation follows the same logic. The Space Force’s X-37B spaceplane has been in orbit since August 2025 carrying what the service describes as the highest-performing quantum inertial sensor yet flown, supplied by Honeywell and Vector Atomic.
Atom interferometers of this type measure acceleration and rotation without any external signal, which makes them impossible to jam or spoof. In DARPA-sponsored trials under GPS denial, Q-CTRL’s Ironstone Opal reported positioning accuracy 111 times better than a high-end classical inertial unit. The Air Force Research Laboratory has separately put $49.7m behind maturing alternatives to satellite navigation.
Computing is the laggard. DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative promoted 11 companies to its second stage in November 2025 and is testing a single proposition: whether any architecture can reach utility-scale operation, meaning computational value above total cost, by 2033.
Its new managing director, Micah Stoutimore, has said that “it now seems likely that someone will build a utility-scale quantum computer”, while conceding that which team gets there remains unclear.
Applied military work is correspondingly modest. In August the Air Force Research Laboratory awarded Eaton $7m, with Infleqtion supplying the hardware, to attack grid contingency analysis, an optimisation problem that strains classical machines.
China’s effort is noisier in some quarters and more opaque in others. In January the People’s Liberation Army’s Information Support Force disclosed…
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