Swarm Storm
Allies and Partners developing drone deployments guided by artificial intelligence
FORUM Staff
Great Britain and the United States developed the first pilotless vehicles during World War I. Britain tested its Aerial Target, a small radio-controlled aircraft, in March 1917 and the U.S. Kettering Bug, an aerial torpedo, flew its maiden voyage in October 1918, according to the London-based Imperial War Museums Institute. Both showed promise in tests, but neither flew operationally during the war.
More than a century later, uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones, are an expanding staple of deterrence and warfighting, providing the U.S. and its Allies and Partners with intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, targeting and payload capabilities. The rapidly advancing technology has focused attention on developing swarms of nimble, autonomous drones that can communicate with one another to operate as a cohesive unit, providing potential combat effectiveness and deterrence.
UAVs will be critical in the Indo-Pacific, military leaders said.
“If you want to extend out the range of defense for an island nation or country within the Indo-Pacific area of responsibility [that has] large bodies of water — although very difficult for logistics and sustainment — it can be very helpful for extending out that defensive perimeter,” U.S. Army Col. Chae Gayles, of the Department of Defense’s Security Assistance Group – Ukraine, said at the Pacific Operational Science and Technology (POST) conference in Hawaii in March 2024.
Globally, 39 countries had armed military drones, according to 2020 estimates from New America, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Those numbers are changing as Allies and Partners invest in technology to enhance defense capabilities.
• In February 2024, Australia said it would spend $260 million to manufacture military drones.
• India plans to acquire 31 armed drones from the U.S. for nearly $4 billion.
• In January 2024, Germany said it would provide drones to the Philippine Coast Guard after aggressive actions by the People’s Republic
of China’s (PRC) coast guard, including using water cannons and military lasers to harass Philippine vessels.
• Taiwan will get two drone types from the U.S.
in 2026 and another two by 2027 under a
$467 million agreement.
• As part of its Defense Buildup Program announced in late 2022, Japan called for long-range UAVs and ship-borne assets for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting for its Self-Defense Forces, as well as potentially using drones to supply remote bases and units.
• The Maldives paid $37 million to acquire surveillance drones from Turkey in March 2024 to patrol the island nation’s vast exclusive economic zone, the online publication Adhadhu reported.
“The strategic implications of military drone proliferation in the Indo-Pacific region cannot be underestimated,” Sri Lanka Navy Cmdr. Amila Prasanga of the Institute of National Security Studies, a think tank under Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Defence, wrote in a November 2023 article published by the Center for International Maritime Security. “Drones have reshaped traditional naval operations, offering advanced surveillance, reconnaissance, and strike capabilities. Their ability to operate in contested areas, gather real-time intelligence, and project power with minimal risk to human lives has fundamentally altered the dynamics of maritime security.”
The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) plans to spend $1 billion initially on its Replicator program, announced in August 2023, to rapidly field thousands of autonomous systems in multiple domains by 2025.
“It’s clear they aren’t just lower cost. They can be produced closer to the tactical edge. They can be used consistent with our principles of mission command, where we empower the lowest-possible echelons to innovate and succeed in battle,” U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said at the 2023 National Defense Industrial Association conference in Washington, D.C. “And they can serve as resilient, distributed systems, even if bandwidth is limited, intermittent, degraded or denied.”
She boosted that message during a visit to California’s Silicon Valley: “It’s clear that the character of warfare is changing. Replicator is part of how at DOD we’re putting our thumb on the scale to make sure America, not our strategic competitors and adversaries, are the ones who see, drive and master the future character of warfare.”
Lessons from Ukraine
That changing character of warfare is evident in Ukraine’s stand since the illegal Russian invasion in February 2022. It has been amplified by Iran-backed Houthi rebels using drones to attack vessels in the Red Sea. And in October 2023, Hamas terrorists began their attack on Israel by using explosive-laden, commercially available drones to strike surveillance posts.
Ukraine has been innovative in deploying camera-equipped UAVs to transmit video wirelessly, Curry Wright, science and technology advisor to the commander of the DOD’s Security Assistance Group – Ukraine, said at the POST conference. The drones are “a change in warfare as we know it.”
The compact video drones, deployed in large numbers, “play a critical role for us, as these toys are essentially mobile artillery that compensate for the lack of artillery ammunition,” a Ukrainian drone operator told The New York Times newspaper. “We work at the same distance as a mortar, but our accuracy is much higher.”
Ukraine has deployed the UAVs as guided projectiles to suppress and harass Russian invaders’ trenches and vehicles, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining such low-cost, expendable drones with more advanced UAVs. For instance, combating the Iranian-designed drones used by Russia with a surface-to-air missile system is “highly effective,” Wright said, but expensive when considering cost per shot.
“We’re shooting multimillion dollar missiles at the [drones],’’ said Wright. From a defense perspective, there are opportunities to pair expensive, highly sophisticated capabilities with lower cost expendable capabilities “to defeat what the enemy is using against us.”
Procuring munitions can be time consuming. Ukraine, however, is producing its video drones with 3D printing, then “mating those with explosives or munitions that we [the U.S.] give them and they’re employing them to great effect,” Wright said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the nation plans to produce 1 million drones in 2024, and in early 2024 announced the creation of an Armed Forces branch devoted to drones. “This is not a question for the future. Rather, it must provide concrete results in the very near future,” Zelenskyy said.
It’s imperative for militaries to expedite development of drones and other technology and then convert such advances into practical applications for warfighters.
Doug Beck, head of the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit, said speed and private sector involvement are key to maintaining a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. Speaking at the POST conference, Beck pointed to information technology collaboration under the security partnership among Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., known as AUKUS, and the U.S.’s 10-year, $280 billion investment in semiconductor research, development and production under the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. Still, more must be done, and quickly.
“It takes time to build a whole new industry almost … from scratch, with all the clusters around that,” Beck said. “And we don’t have that time. So, we must leverage the incredible capability that’s represented in the commercial tech sector for that speed, but also for capability.”
Swarming drones
Drones will further change warfare when employed in swarms directed by artificial intelligence (AI), analysts say. “The future of warfare won’t be decided by weapons systems but by systems of weapons, and those systems will cost less. Many of them already exist,” Elliot Ackerman, a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, and retired U.S. Navy Adm. James Stavridis, former NATO commander, wrote in a March 2024 essay in The Wall Street Journal newspaper. “What doesn’t yet exist are the AI-directed systems that will allow a nation to take unmanned warfare to scale. But they’re coming.”
Dozens or hundreds of drones in AI-directed swarms could overwhelm defenses. Nations that depend on large, expensive defense systems such as aircraft carriers or stealth aircraft “could find themselves vulnerable against an adversary who deploys a variety of low-cost, easily dispersed and long-range unmanned weapons,” Ackerman and Stavridis wrote.
Russia attacked Ukrainian targets in 2022 using swarms of dozens of inexpensive, explosives-laden drones.
The world got a preview of the vulnerability of civilian infrastructure to drone swarms in December 2018, when the U.K.’s second-busiest airport, London Gatwick, shut down for 30 hours after 100 drone sightings nearby. About 1,000 flights were canceled or diverted, affecting 140,000 passengers.
No one was charged in what officials called a deliberate, sophisticated attack, but no-fly zones around U.K. airports were expanded from 1 kilometer to 5 kilometers.
The U.S. military employed UAV swarm technology more than 20 years ago in the early stages of operations in Afghanistan. U.S. special operations forces adapted swarm concepts using multiple drones, each controlled by an individual operator, for coordinated assaults on targets, the Rand Corp. reported in February 2024.
The U.S. and its Allies and Partners continue to develop swarm technologies. In 2022, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) demonstrated a swarm of more than 150 drones controlled by a single operator and projected that, within five years, an AI-enabled swarm may include up to 1,000 drones, according to the Rand report. The intent is to deploy sufficient numbers of drones to overwhelm anti-aircraft defenses. In the U.S., as the Replicator initiative illustrates, the DOD is shifting some of its unmanned systems focus to swarming, expendable drones rather than more complex legacy drone programs. The U.S. Army, for instance, is assessing capabilities for swarming, medium-size uncrewed aerial systems to alert human operators to high-priority threats.
DARPA also is developing a system to integrate medium-range, air-to-air missiles onto drones that would be dropped from aircraft. The LongShot drones would extend the range of missile strikes against adversaries’ assets. The U.S. Navy’s new UAV, the MQ-4C Triton, went aloft in September 2023, providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to the 7th Fleet in the Indo-Pacific, according to National Defense magazine.
Lasers and microwaves
Defense forces also must prepare to counter drone assaults. As Tokyo’s 2022 Defense Buildup Program stated, the Japan Self-Defense Forces “will expeditiously develop capabilities to deal with small, unmanned aircraft, etc., by non-kinetic means through a combination of directed energy weapons such as high-power lasers and high-power microwaves.”
High-energy laser systems defeat drones and missiles by emitting a narrow beam of energy to intercept the incoming threat. High-powered microwaves create a cone of electromagnetic interference to disable a target’s electronics. The U.S. should invest in both to provide a layered defense against drone swarms, Army Gen. Michael Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command, testified before the U.S. Congress in March 2024.
Both systems have strong attributes but also limitations, according to a Congressional Research Service report in August 2023. Potential advantages include deep magazines, low costs per shot, fast engagement times and graduated responses.
Lasers also provide an ability to counter radically maneuvering missiles and can perform other tasks including monitoring targets and jamming electro-optic sensors. Potential drawbacks include being limited to line-of-sight engagements; encountering atmospheric conditions and turbulence; and confronting shielded targets or highly reflective material.
Potential advantages of microwave weapons include the ability to generate waves at different frequencies and power levels to disrupt targeted systems while leaving others unaffected. They can have broad effects, destroying a wide array of electronic systems; provide nonlethal applications; and limit collateral damage.
Disadvantages include range constraints because microwaves cannot be as tightly focused as lasers. They also could potentially damage friendly systems and be less effective against countermeasures like shielding that can absorb electromagnetic radiation.
In Ukraine, troops described to The New York Times a back-and-forth dance where one side gains a technological advantage, only to see the edge short-lived when the other side catches up.
Vikram Mittal, an associate professor in the U.S. Military Academy’s systems engineering department, described the drone warfare dynamic. “There is an inherent challenge in counter-drone technology. The commercial drone market is advancing rapidly, and counter-drone technology is often lagging behind it. As drones develop new capacities, they can be used for mission sets where counter-drone systems are ineffective,” he wrote in an October 2023 essay in Forbes magazine.
Indo-Pacific partners are addressing that challenge. The U.S. Army, for instance, is experimenting with prototypes of its directed energy, mobile, short-range air defense system in which infantry carrier vehicles are outfitted with 50-kilowatt laser weapons.
Australia is buying transportable lasers designed to shoot down lethal enemy drones. The contractor, AIM Defence, said the technology can burn through steel and track and shoot down a drone traveling at
100 kilometers per hour, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.
Self-governed Taiwan, facing increased coercion and other gray-zone tactics by the PRC, is poised to test a prototype 50-kilowatt laser weapon, the Taipei Times newspaper reported in 2024. The system will be mounted on armored vehicles for use against missiles and UAVs.
“We must ensure the PRC leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, ‘Today is not the day’ — and not just today, but every day,” Hicks, deputy secretary of the DOD, said in December 2023. “Innovation is vital to how we do that.”
