How US Navy Red Sea Drone Defense Influenced Pentagon Swarm Tactics
by Kris Osborn, President Warrior
The combat realities in Ukraine and the Red Sea continue to drive accelerated Pentagon action to engineer and deploy a new generation of paradigm-changing drone technologies. The potential drone threat to US forces has in recent years grown exponentially for a number of key reasons, as inexpensive small drones are easy to acquire and increasingly easy to “arm” with explosives and other kinds of weapons such as EW.
Ukraine has shown that small drones, such as the US built Switchblade Kamikaze, have been able to track and decimate tanks in substantial quantities by loitering and then essentially transitioning from “surveillance” to kinetic attack. The drone threat is substantially compounded by a simple question of numbers, as drone “swarms” substantially change the threat equation. A single drone or airborne explosive, operating at medium or low altitude, can be tracked and intercepted or jammed with reasonable success.
The swarm threat, however, is intended to essentially “blanket” an area with ISR and “overwhelm” or “test” enemy air defenses. The concept of operation is as clear as it is simple, as drone swarms can simply include far too many targets for most countermeasures to defeat. Even if a “proximity” or area fuse is used to disperse fragmentation across an area to destroy more than one target, massive volumes of individual drones operating in a swarm formation are likely to enable continued attack.
Sheer redundancy is the concept of drone swarm threats, enabling ISR and attack to continue in the event that many drones are knocked out or disabled.
https://warriormaven.com/news/sea/how-us-navy-red-sea-drone-defense-influenced-pentagon-swarm-tactics
