Air systems
Eye of the swarm
Militaries all over the world are moving ahead with swarming attack drones, investing considerable amounts of time and money in the still-nascent technology. Nicholas Kenny hears from Steve Wright, senior research fellow for the Engineering Design and Mathematics department at University of the West of England, and Zak Kallenborn, policy fellow at Schlar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, about what a drone swarm actually is and why it could prove to be a highly effective war-fi ghting tool.
the manifold misery brought by war to Spain and to China? Who can think without horror of what another widespread war would mean, waged as it would be with all the new weapons of mass destruction?” Speaking in 1937 about the aerial bombing of Guernica, Spain, this very prescient speech by Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, contained the first known use of the term “weapons of mass destruction”. Of course, this was years before the development of nuclear weapons or, indeed, many of the chemical, biological and radiological technologies that the term has since grown to refer to. Ever since
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ho can think at this present time without a sickening of the heart of the appalling slaughter, the suffering,
this origin, however, the term has proven malleable and indefinite, and the conditions that must be met to warrant the definition has been hotly debated by experts in the field.
This issue had only been amplified by the ever- ongoing development of increasingly lethal and efficient weapons. But it’s a relatively new technology that has taken hold of the ambitions of militaries around the world, resulting in billions of dollars of investment – drone swarms.
What’s in a swarm?
During the past few years, conflict zones around the world have increasingly witnessed the presence of small unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs). While the
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
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