The U.S. Air Force relies on more than 5,000 aircraft to give it unmatched dominance over every other competitor on earth. The U.S. Navy, for its part, counts on more than 3,700 aircraft and 273 deployable battle force ships, which constitute the largest and most technologically advanced sailing branch in the world.
This much is true — no country can possibly hope to challenge the United States with military means on a global scale and win. But key to America’s global strength are huge air and naval bases which are vulnerable to being overwhelmed and destroyed by swarms of precision-guided weapons in a limited, regional war.
The Navy also cannot expect its ships to survive if they come under attack by sufficiently large numbers of cruise missiles and ballistic missiles of the kind now fielded by China. While better protected from missiles than bases, the current breadth of U.S. technology and doctrine cannot compensate for this weakness.
The result is that the Pentagon must radically rethink its missile defenses, or risk serious losses in the opening hours of a future conflict. But according to a recent report, the solution could be lots of futuristic lasers, guns and electromagnetic weapons that can engage enormous numbers of incoming missiles at relatively short ranges.
In the middle of June 2015, a U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter took off from an air base in Alaska and flew over a military training range at 430 miles per hour. On command, something burst from the fighter’s flare dispenser — a drone roughly the size of a soda can and weighing just one pound.
The tiny, orange- and black-colored robot fluttered toward the ground trailing a parachute. After a few seconds, the ‘chute separated from the drone, the robot’s wings — which had folded into the body for compactness — extended outward. An inch-wide propeller began spinning, propelling the diminutive machine forward.
Automation is at the heart of the Pentagon’s ambitious “Third Offset Strategy,” launched last year with an anxious eye on advances in Russia and China. “China’s investing heavily in robotics and autonomy,” said the father of Offset, Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, “and the Russian chief of General Staff, [Valeriy] Gerasimov, recently said….quote, ‘in the near future it is possible a fully robotized unit will be created capable of independently conducting military operations.’”
So there’s no question that robotic combat is coming. The question is how much input humans will still have — and different countries will take different approaches. After reporting, talking, and thinking on this topic for the past three years at Breaking Defense, I see three stark alternatives emerging. Call them Skynet, swarms, and centaurs:
What happens when a swarm of slow, low-performance drones attacks a modern warship? With defense systems able to knock down supersonic cruise missiles and fast jets, small drones ought to be a turkey shoot. In fact, the situation plays out very differently.
The U.S. Navy is a leader in the area of swarm warfare, the threat has been analyzed in a number of papers from the Naval Postgraduate School analyze the threat. Some of these are classified, but a 2012 paper by Loc Pham, “UAV Swarm Attack” is open and makes uncomfortable reading.
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Dr. Lee Mastroianni, LOCUST’s project manager, believes the whole swarm can be made cheaper than a missile, and at $1.2 million for a Harpoon anti-ship missile he may be right. Locust is currently based on $15,000 Coyote drones. Of course these carry a much smaller warhead — but accurate targeting may be more important than the size of the warhead that hits. Knock out a ships’ radar, and it is a sitting duck for other weapons.
Mastroianni plans to have the his first swarm of 30 drones flying next summer.
The UAV Swarm Attack study highlighted the weakness of current defenses against swarms of drones. Timothy Chung, a scientist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, is looking at defensive swarms to take out the attackers. His project’s official name is “A System-of-systems Testbed for Unmanned Systems Swarm versus Swarm Development and Research,” but Chung calls it “Aerial Combat Swarms.”
Chung is staging a contest for swarms of small drones carry out simulated battles as a way of evaluating tactics and technology. His basic scenario is a 50-versus-50 encounter in which the Blue defenders attempt to stop Red attackers from getting through. Nobody knows much about drone-versus-drone combat yet, especially on this scale. How much autonomy do the drones need? How can the swarm commander stay in control in a fast-moving action? How do quality and quantity balance out in battling swarms?
The U.S. Army has for the first time tested swarms of consumer drones during a major military training exercise and determined the low-cost technology is at a stage where it could be used offensively.
Off-the-shelf drones have brought what was previously complex and expensive technology into the reach of consumers, and the military was curious to see how much of a threat that might pose.
So it brought consumer quadcopters and octocopters to the Network Integration Evaluation war games that concluded earlier this month at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, and Fort Bliss, Texas.
During the exercise, which is used by the Army to help evaluate new technology, the drones were deployed as a swarm to simulate a threat. Later, the Army expanded the trials to discover whether it might be able to make use of the same technology.
DARPA is seeking innovative solutions that will expand the knowledge base and design capabilities for the Gremlins program. The goal of the Gremlins program is to demonstrate safe and reliable aerial launch and recovery of multiple unmanned aircraft, with traceability to an objective system capable of employing and recovering diverse distributed payloads in volley quantities. Gremlins will also explore the operating cost advantages of limited-life, reusable systems. The objective of Phase I is to conduct system architecture and design trade studies to develop a conceptual Gremlins objective system design, analyze and trade aerial launch and aerial recovery techniques, develop operational concepts, and inform demonstration system design and planning for future phases. Phase II will continue design development and risk reduction activities culminating in PDR and Phase III will proceed to a compelling flight demonstration. Refer to the two attachments, "DARPA-BAA-15-59," and "Appendix A - Cost-Proposal-Spreadsheet - DARPA-BAA-15-59" for complete details of the BAA.
Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Assistant Professor Timothy Chung met with members of NPS’ Advanced Robotic Systems Engineering Laboratory (ARSENL) during a field exercise at Camp Roberts, Aug. 27. Members of ARSENL flew 50 autonomous UAVs breaking their previous record of 30, set just five weeks ago.
“I’m very proud of reaching our goal of successfully flying 50 autonomous UAVs simultaneously,” said Chung.
The 50 UAVs were launched and flown autonomously in two “sub-swarms” of 25 UAVs each and guided using ARSENL-developed swarm operator interfaces. The UAVs performed basic leader-follower cooperative behaviors and exchanged information amongst themselves via wireless links.
“This project came from the notion that quantity is a quality,” said Chung. “It’s like trying to play a game of tennis against an entire 5th grade class. If they were are all lobbing tennis balls across the court, it would be very hard to defend against them.”
In the past, each aircraft would be operated by a single person, which makes for a very large footprint with many moving parts.
One of the most important jobs for an air force is suppressing enemy air defenses. It means hacking, jamming or otherwise blowing up radars and anti-aircraft missile sites — often during the opening stages of a war.
Now a new project from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency envisions a near-future strategy using a cargo plane converted into a missile and drone-packing mothership — all commanded by an F-35 stealth fighter.
