Air systems
Drone swarming aims to emulate bird murmurations, which take place at high speed and with great coordination.
to create a distributed sensor network to coordinate searches over huge swaths of ocean in order to identify submarines. Such a network could then be used to identify an enemy’s entire nuclear fleet, potentially ending the concept second-strike deterrence – though this remains unlikely. Such sensor networks could also be used to detect underwater mines. Others are looking at drone swarms for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons defence, using drones to decontaminate an area. There’s also the potential for drone swarms to relegate tank warfare to history, which Wright describes as “a parallel to the end of the battleship era”, where vast numbers of relatively cheap flying weapons were able to be dispatched beyond the range of a battleship, and sweep in and destroy it.
Weapons of mass destruction First and foremost, the future of military drone swarms lies in their potential as offensive weapons, and as with Archbishop Lang, many experts are reflecting on the potential of the technology to become weapons of mass destruction. For Kallenborn, that moment is here. “There’s already militaries that are testing what I would consider weapons of mass destruction, and are developing that technology,” he says. As noted, the conditions that a weapon must meet to be considered a weapon of mass destruction are unclear, but for Kallenborn, two commonalities must be present. The first is sheer destructive capacity, such as the ability to destroy an entire city with nuclear weapons. Of course, that aspect isn’t unique to WMDs – you have other weapons, such as the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, known as the ‘Mother of All Bombs’, which could potentially cause more damage. The second aspect, therefore, is to do with a lack of controllability. The damage a nuclear weapon provides isn’t just from the initial blast, but also from all the harm that comes from its fallout. Chemical weapons can also be thrown off course by an unexpected change in wind direction. “So, there’s those two criteria – mass destruction and moral concern around the controllability aspect of it. I see drone swarms as
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potentially meeting both of those criteria, as we get scale with greater levels of autonomy,” Kallenborn says. In theory, you could make a swarm of a million drones or more – the question is whether you want to. At what size, then, does a swarm have enough destructive capacity to check off that first box in WMD status? Wright brings up the sorites paradox, also known as the ‘paradox of the heap’ – by removing individual grains of sand from a heap, at what point does it become a non-heap? Kallenborn puts the boundary at around 1,000 drones with small explosives as a rough rule of thumb, working off a threshold of 1,000 casualties in a single attack with a single weapon system. Current military systems often struggle to distinguish between non-combatants and military personnel, but the nature of the swarm exacerbates that risk of error and lends to the lack of controllability – specifically, that need for intra-swarm communication. When an individual drone makes a decision, it feeds that decision back to the entire swarm, which makes decisions based off that information. Therefore, if a drone mistakenly identifies a target, the whole swarm has now made that error. The building that a false target is in could be labelled as one that is enemy- occupied, and that could then increase the likelihood of other people being identified as collaborators. These problems will need to be ironed out, and soon, as militaries jostle against one another in their race to weaponise drone swarms. In May 2021, Israel claimed to be the first nation to use an actual drone swarm in combat during its conflict with Hamas in Gaza. This involved a simple aerial swarm, consisting of a small number of drones conducting coordinated searches and reportedly feeding information on enemy hiding spots back to mortars and ground-based missiles on the other side of the border. However, there has been some debate over whether this truly constituted the work of a drone swarm.
In January 2021, the Indian army carried out a demonstration of a 75-drone swarm, also claiming that it possessed true swarming capabilities. They also announced their intention to create a swarm of 1,000 drones, which would meet Kallenborn’s threshold for a weapon of mass destruction. At the same time, the US have been developing cluster munitions that would release a number of small drones upon detonation, with the aim of rapidly deploying hundreds, if not thousands, of drones in an area.
The technology is out there, then, even if the many of the kinks still have to be ironed out. The real question will be how quickly militaries can develop the technology to the point that it could have value in peer and near-peer conflicts – and, of course, which nation will get there first. With tensions rising along the Russia/Ukraine border, and around China’s ambitions for Taiwan, drone swarms could prove pivotal in defining the face of 21st-century warfare, just as nuclear weapons were for the 20th. ●
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
Albert Beukhof /
Shutterstock.com
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