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Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Fighting Swarms With Swarms

DARPA managed to get a drone swarm past a crucial test. How will our infantry at the bleeding edge cope with an enemy who has that capacity?

What we build an enemy will build in some fashion eventually:

The U.S. military’s strategy for winning the next major war is to throw a bunch of highly autonomous, deeply interconnected drones, jets, ships, and other things at the enemy. But this massive, coordinated strike across air, land, sea and cyberspace is sure to run headfirst into electronic warfare defenses designed to disrupt the networks that make it possible.

This week, officials with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced that a series of tests at Arizona’s Yuma Proving Ground had shown that live and virtual drones could work together, with high degrees of autonomy, to complete missions even when their communications and GPS were under heavy electronic attack.

We're nowhere near the hoped for networked capability, but the drone swarm piece can arrive much sooner.

I'm worried that our already overloaded foot infantry can't carry around equipment capable of shielding them from an enemy drone swarm.

That's why I advocated a combat air patrol drone swarm to defend our infantry. It won't rely on the forward grunts who have ground enemies to face. Why add such a difficult air defense task to an infantry platoon?

And with more emphasis being placed on training, leading, and equipping our infantry, the infantry will be an increasingly expensive asset that needs protecting from enemy drone attacks.