Method and apparatus are provided for the tactical nagivation and communiion of a community of aircraft. Each of the aircraft in the community is provided with an inertial navigation system capable of providing accurate short term navigational information and a time synchronized ranging system capable of providing accurate long term navigational information. One of the aircraft is designated as the airborne control unit and establishes a relative grid coordinate system within which the community of aircraft operate. The origin of the relative grid is established by the airborne control unit. When stationary ground time synchronized ranging system units are present, highly accurate georeferenced information may be supplied to the airborne control unit by operation of its time synchronized ranging system. When such ground units are not present, accurate georeferenced information may be obtained by the airborne controller from navigational systems such as satellite, Loran or Omega systems. The remaining or "user" aircraft in the community determine their position in the relative grid by interrogating the airborne control unit with their time synchronized ranging systems. A Kalman filter technique is employed to update the short term navigational information derived from the inertial navigation system in each user aircraft with the long term navigational information obtained from the time synchronized ranging system, so that the highly accurate georeferenced navigational information from the airborne control unit is provided to each member of the community of user aircraft. Novel computer programming permits each aircraft in the community to derive navigational information having the best characteristics of navigational information available from several sources, so that very accurate navigation in the area defined by the relative grid is made possible. The system of the invention may also perform communication and identification functions for the members of the tactical community.