Air systems
term ‘weaponised drone’ is more likely to bring to mind larger UAVs along the lines of the US’s Predator drones, SUAVs have contributed hugely to what Steve Wright, senior research fellow for the Engineering Design and Mathematics department at University of the West of England, refers to as “the democratisation of aerial warfare, in the same way that the AK-47 democratised landed infantry warfare”. By that, Wright is referring to the fact that weaponised SUAVs have seen considerable use by militant forces in the Middle East, most notably by Isis fighters during the 2016–17 Battle of Mosul in Iraq. A fleet of small drones armed with bombs attacked Russian bases in western Syria in early January 2018, while in November 2021, an SUAV was used in an assassination attempt on Iraq’s prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who was slightly injured. Drone swarms, however, are a different beast
entirely. “At the moment, we’re seeing attacks around the world where these sorts of vehicles, whether it be winged or rotorcraft, are coming in half-dozens,” says Wright. “It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that in a couple of years’ time, they’ll be coming in tens. And in ten years’ time, they’re coming over the horizon in hundreds.” However, drone swarms aren’t merely defined by numbers. Two drones could technically be a swarm, with the right software in place – ultimately, what separates a group of drones and a drone swarm is the latter’s ability for its various parts to communicate with each other.
“A swarm is where it’s effectively an autonomous formation – where the behaviour of the entire group of drones is an emergent property of simple interactions between the drones themselves,” explains Wright. Zak Kallenborn, policy fellow at Schlar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, offers his own definition. “I would define a swarm as simply unmanned systems that are communicating and making collective decisions on their actions, which incorporate some form of artificial intelligence and autonomy,” he says, taking care to point out that this can consist of everything from small numbers of aerial drones to multi-domain drones working across air, surface, subsurface and ground vehicles. Like Wright, for Kallenborn “the real key issue within a swarm […] is that communication”.
Militaries around the world are investing heavily in this still-largely nascent technology. There’s the French Icarus project, the Russian Lightning, the Spanish RAPAZ, the UK’s Blue Bear and the UAE/ South African N-Raven, among others. The US Marine Corps is developing kamikaze drone swarms, while the Army, Air Force, Navy and DARPA are working on their own separate initiatives, with some services working on multiple projects. At the same time, China has also been working on a number of its own swarm programmes.
From past to present
Kallenborn traces the development of drone swarming technology back to the late ’90s, when the work John Arquilla, an American analyst and academic of international relations, was doing for RAND, looking at swarming as a military tactic in which you have a group of small, dispersed units that work together collectively to overwhelm a target from multiple directions. “That’s not unique to unmanned systems,” Kallenborn adds, noting that the Mongol hordes would implement a similar system using horse archers, splitting them into separate units that would then converge on a point from different angles of attack.
Drones are already used to conduct huge light shows, moving together in perfect synchronisation to enthral viewers. The displays are not examples of swarming, however, as every movement is preplanned and controlled from a centralised point. True swarming is much more similar to that carried out by birds, which take place at higher speeds with far greater coordination than drone light shows. “I live here on the Somerset Levels, and I always see these extraordinary murmurations of birds gathering,” Wright notes, with starlings usually being the preferred example used by drone swarm experts. In a murmuration, tens of thousands of starlings perform complex, intricately coordinated patterns as though part of the same organism, seemingly without communicating with one another. “A murmuration of starlings is a beautiful and extraordinary emergent property of a handful of very simple rules of interactions between the different birds in the flock,” Wright says, noting that this part of drone swarming is relatively straightforward to program. Moving a swarm of drones from place to place without causing collisions, however, is only the first step towards a militarised drone swarm – the hard part is programming the swarm to carry out tasks independently of a controller. A swarm can consist of all manner of disaggregated units working together – some might have multiple types of ISR sensors, while others might be armed with explosive devices, firearms or ballistic missiles. The drones with sensors could feed information back to the collective swarm, enabling it to take aggressive action if needed. Kallenborn sees this ability as particularly interesting, and worrisome, when you look at integrating chemical and conventional weapons together into a single swarm. This could involve a few drones spraying a sarin-gas-like nerve agent, paired with other drones with guns or bombs, presenting a complex challenge for armed forces on the ground. “Do I run away from the guns and bombs?” he asks. “Or do I don my MOPP [Mission Oriented Protective Posture] suit to protect myself from the chemical agent, which is going to make it harder for me to run away from the guns and bombs?” Similarly, there has been some discussion of using undersea drone swarms
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com 31 75 Forbes
The number of drones used in the field demonstration for the Indian army’s drone swarm.
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