From MIT's Technology Review, October 24:
Budget documents reveal plans for the Super Swarm project, a way to overwhelm defenses with vast numbers of drones attacking simultaneously.
The US Navy is working on ways to build, deploy, and control thousands of small drones that are able to flock together to overwhelm anti-aircraft defenses with sheer numbers, budget documents reveal.
The conflict in Ukraine has proved the worth of small drones, including consumer quadcopters, which have carried out reconnaissance, guided artillery fire, and destroyed tanks. Such drones are currently limited by the fact that each one needs its own operator. In a swarm, however, hundreds or thousands of drones are controlled as a single unit.
“The significance of drone swarms is that they can be conceivably applied to virtually any mission.” says Zachary Kallenborn, a policy fellow at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
Many nations are working on such swarms, including China, Russia, India, the UK, Turkey, and Israel, which in 2021 became the first nation to use swarming drones in combat. The US Navy has always been a leader in this field, and while they did not respond to requests to discuss their work, the budget documents that MIT Technology Review has read reveal ambitious plans for swarms vastly bigger than anything yet seen. Buried in hundreds of pages of budget numbers are details of several projects not previously revealed, which involve drone boats and submarines as well as uncrewed air vehicles. Together they fall under a project named Super Swarm.
Flock like a bird
You might have seen drone light shows, in which hundreds or thousands of drones fly together with perfect synchronicity. These are not swarms; each drone flies along a choreographed, predetermined route. The individual drones have no awareness of their surroundings or each other. By contrast, in a swarm the drones fly together and are aware of their surroundings, how close they are to one another, and use algorithms to avoid obstacles while not getting in each other’s way, like a flock of birds. More advanced versions use AI to coordinate the actions for tasks such as spreading out to search an area or carrying out a synchronized attack.
The US Navy has already made considerable progress in this area. In 2017 it demonstrated a swarm of 30 drones flying together. The idea is that the drones carry explosive warheads for kamikaze attacks, making them into miniature cruise missiles. The same approach has been used by Russia against Ukrainian cities in recent days. That project, named LOCUST (for “low-cost UAV swarming technology”), now falls under the bigger Super Swarm mission. In April last year a Navy drone swarm carried out an attack on a ship in a war game exercise for the first time. Even in a real mission, Kallenborn notes, the drones would carry just a few pounds of explosive each, compared with the 488-pound warhead on a Harpoon anti-ship missile. That means they would be used in different ways, taking advantage of their high precision.
“The drone swarm could attack from multiple angles, aiming to damage or destroy critical systems like radar antennas, deck guns, and weapons systems,” says Kallenborn.
The Navy’s plans in the budget document include swarms launched from ships, submarines, aircraft, and ground vehicles, in what they term “multi-domain operations.” The drones will have a variety of payloads: some might carry sensors, some will have jammers or other electronic warfare gear, and some will have warheads. But drone swarms still struggle with the problem of limited range. The 13-pound Raytheon Coyote used in the LOCUST program, for example, can cruise for only two hours at 50 miles per hour, so it needs to hitch a ride.....
....MUCH MORE
Previously on this type of nastiness:
"Meet the future weapon of mass destruction, the drone swarm"
From The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists....
"Autonomous 'Slaughterbot' Drones Reportedly Attack Libyans Using Facial Recognition Tech"
It gets worse:
“You can order them from a drone
manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: ‘Here are
thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.’ A
one-gram shaped charge
can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can
also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of
those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks
and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to
be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target.”
Manufacturers will be producing millions of these drones, available for
purchase just as with guns now, Russell points out, “except millions of
guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only
three guys to write the program and launch.” In this scenario, the K/K
ratio could be perhaps 3/1,000,000, assuming a 10-percent accuracy and
only a single one-gram shaped charge per drone....
