The Pentagon has been testing swarms of low-cost surveillance and attack drones engineered to jam enemy air defenses, blanket areas with small sensors or function as attack weapons, DoD officials said.
Using fast-developing computer algorithms for autonomous flight engineered to prevent mini-drones from crashing into one-another, the swarms are intended to perform a wide-range of strategically relevant missions.
The Pentagon’s once-secret Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), aimed at harnessing promising technologies for nearer-term development than most acquisition programs, has already launched these drones from F-16 and F-18s numerous times in testing.
The mini-drones, called Perdix, are government designed yet built with commercial off-the-shelf elements. William Roper, who reports to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter as the Director of the Strategic Capabilities Office, said the effort was showing promise for possible near-term combat advantage.
“They are expendable and fly low as a surveillance asset. You can have a lot of them for a saturation approach. Saturating has an advantage over the thing it has to defend against. Its defender has to take more time and money to defend against it,” Roper told a small group of reporters.
While Roper did not wish to openly discuss the particular sensor technologies used by Perdix, he did explain that they could be quickly launched from an aircraft’s flare dispensers.
“If you go and walk around a fighter jet to pop trunk there is not a lot of storage in a fighter but the one place you can fit an expendable is in the flare dispenser because a flare is an expendable. There is a place that it sits in a canister and there is a button that makes them dispense,” Roper said.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-militarys-ultimate-weapon-almost-here-the-swarm-18173
