Killer 'Bees': We Know Why the U.S. Navy Wants Deadly Drone Swarms

Joseph Walsh

Technology, Americas

A powerful weapon.

Key point: Drones are cheap and can be mass-produced, allowing the Pentagon to get more bang for taxpayers’ bucks.

The Navy is in a position to create a concrete definition of what swarms of unmanned vehicles (UxVs) can do for the future of mine countermeasures (MCM). Some advantages are ready to be applied while others are still on the horizon. The Naval Surface Warfare Center, Panama City Division has invested in the development of swarming-based technologies for MCM and has developed swarming algorithms that allow otherwise standalone systems to collaborate by dividing up tasks, such as surveying potential minefields, and many of these algorithms are specifically designed to optimize the division of labor. Those optimizations are only the tip of the iceberg for what can be done to improve future naval MCM capabilities. The Navy of the future might have:

• Swarms that neutralize mines, rather than attempt to detect them

• Swarms that could lead a ship safely through a minefield in a fraction of the time it would take to clear the area

• Swarms that spread out over a minefield, “sniffing” for specific sonar or chemical signatures in the water, in the same way that animals or insects cooperatively search for prey

• Swarms made up of existing MCM systems, using minimal resources to neutralize a minefield with a “divide and conquer” approach

• Swarms that identify and defeat swarm-based mines