Modern Warfare: The Rise of Swarming Technology

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This article was published by Defence iQ — an industry-leading defence news and events company — in May 2019.

Unmanned operations have swiftly become a reality on the battlefield. Integrated with weapons, sensors and a variety of gadgets, autonomous weapons systems are able to wield enormous destructive power.

“All of the component technologies – flight control, swarming, navigation, indoor and outdoor exploration and mapping, obstacle avoidance, detecting and tracking humans, tactical planning, coordinated attack – have been demonstrated,” said Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in a recent article for The Security Times. “Building a lethal autonomous weapon […] is easier than building a self-driving car […] And the capabilities are not ‘decades away’ as claimed by some countries.”

With creative thinking and inventive engineering, small-scale unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have already been used to support conventional and unconventional strikes. For instance, on October 2, 2016, fighters of the so-called Islamic State (IS) booby-trapped a fixed-wing recreational UAS with an improvised explosive device (IED), killing two Kurdish soldiers and injuring two French paratroopers in the process. In Ukraine in 2014, the Russian military utilized as many as 16 different models of UASs, reportedly flying the aircraft in pairs over Ukrainian troops to assist artillery units with rapid targeting in the deployment of indirect fire systems (howitzers, missiles, and BM-21 “Grad” platforms).

But with the proliferation of small, commercially available, and cheap autonomously guided systems landing on the international market, a new concern is beginning to emerge, according to a report from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, an influential U.S.-based nonprofit: “The threat of swarms and collaborative groups of UASs and how they may be countered.”

Drawing its inspiration from how insects collaborate in groups, swarms are comprised of individually autonomous components, each deciding what to do on their own, whilst simultaneously managing to organize themselves with a common objective in mind. The United States Army defines swarming as follows: “Swarming is a method of operations where large numbers of autonomous systems actively coordinate their actions to achieve operational outcomes. Swarming overwhelms targets by using mass and attrition in combination with decentralized maneuvers or combined fires from multiple directions.”

Although seemingly amorphous in nature, swarm technology holds the potential to revolutionize the dynamics of modern-day warfare and alter the future military and strategic balance of the world. P.W. Singer, author of Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, told Defence IQ: “There are a number of countries that are working on swarming and how it might be applied into battle. The US military, for instance, has sponsored research projects on everything from swarms of small drones that dogfight in the air, to swarms that could go after naval targets. Similarly, China has worked on swarms, dating back several years […] Robotics is definitely an arms race, as arms races are defined by sides competing to gain an edge, but, as a result, driving even more competition. That is clearly what is happening now between the US, China, and other actors in this space.”

In one of the most significant demonstrations of autonomous swarms to date, in October 2016, the U.S. military’s Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) — in partnership with the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) — successfully trialled their largest ever test of a micro-UAS swarm released from fighter jets in flight at China Lake, California. Broadcast on the CBS News programme 60 Minutes on January 8, 2017, the display consisted of 103 Perdix micro-UASs launching from three F/A-18 Super Hornets. The micro-UASs then exhibited “advanced swarming behaviour such as collective decision making, adaptive formation flying, and self-healing,” according to the U.S. Department of Defence.

Impressively, each component of the micro-UAS swarm is not aware of its role — and how to go about it — prior to release. As SCO Director William Roper explained: “Due to the complex nature of combat, Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature. Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has no leader and can gracefully adapt to entering or exiting the team.”

Practical military uses for such technology may involve deploying the Perdix micro-UASs as decoys to confuse enemy air defences, or strapping electronic equipment to them to jam opposition radars.

Whilst the United States may appear to be in the lead when it comes to swarming UASs, its competitors and allies are catching up. By way of illustration, China’s UAS industry, already one of the world’s most prolific, has seen some major breakthroughs. For example, at the Global Fortune Forum in Guangzhou in December 2017, 1,180 Ehang UASs coordinated autonomously to fly in a synchronized formation, with a mere 2 cm horizontal and 1 cm vertical separation. (Crucially, the UAVs were able to land if they didn't fulfil their assigned objective).

The UK is also seeking to adopt swarming UASs designed to saturate enemy air defences by the end of 2019. Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London in February of this year, UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said that the Royal Air Force (RAF) will acquire “swarm squadrons of network-enabled drones capable of confusing and overcoming enemy air defence systems.”

With all of this in mind, it must be noted that developing effective countermeasures to combat a swarming UAS adversary is indeed a difficult proposition. Any aircraft, manned or unmanned, can be destroyed by a single missile, whereas, theoretically, a swarm can take multiple hits and keep going. Therefore, to eliminate such threats, the defending force must rely on three steps: Detection, identification, and neutralization. But according to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “neutralizing a UAS is a separate and even greater challenge [as] swarming UASs can be employed to overwhelm most existing kinetic countermeasures.”

Accordingly, as P.W. Singer told Defence IQ: “You counter swarms by either going after the control and communication networks (electronic warfare (EW), cyber etc.) or by using weaponry that can fire quickly and cheaply on-scale, or by using a competing swarm.”

Fortunately, defence industry partners are experimenting with a wide variety of solutions in this field. For example, Lockheed Martin attests that its ICARUS system is already able to identify and intercept small UAS threats: “Its multi-spectral sensor system detects and characterizes incoming drones within seconds, before using cyber electromagnetic activity to disable it or allowing the operator to take control of the drone and move it to a safe area.”

Engineers at Lockheed Martin are even said to be working on directed energy systems, such as the Advanced Test High Energy Asset, or ATHENA, which has reportedly successfully halted attacking UASs.