EDITORS' PICK|17,255 views|Aug 26, 2020,05:07am EDT

The U.S. Navy Plans To Foil Massive ‘Super

Swarm’ Drone Attacks By Using The

Swarm’s Intelligence Against Itself

David HamblingContributor
Aerospace & Defense
I'm a South London-based technology journalist, consultant and author

The Navy is developing offensive and defensive tactics for “Super

Swarms” of up to a million drones.

While million-drone swarms may be many years away, attacks with

hundreds or thousands of drones are much closer and “large-scale
adversarial swarms” are already an “imminent threat” according
to Isaac Kaminer, an engineering professor at the U.S. Naval
Postgraduate School who is an expert in the subject of swarming and
counter swarming tactics. Kaminer’s work suggests that stopping a
swarm is not simply a matter of throwing enough missiles or bullets
at it; instead, the swarm has to be outsmarted. And his team is
setting out to discover how a swarm’s intelligence can be used
against it.

Countering Super Swarms of thousands of drone[+]

US NAVY

In 2016 Kaminer was working on developing tactics to protect a

‘high-value naval asset’ (an aircraft carrier) from a swarm of
small unmanned boats. It’s a real threat — Iran’s Revolutionary
Guard has long worked on swarming tactics for small boats against
large naval vessels. More recently, Houthi rebels with Iranian
assistance have deployed remote-controlled boats packed with
explosivesagainst tankers and other targets, making kamikaze boat
swarms a more immediate prospect. It soon became apparent such an
attack would not happen in isolation: the robot boats could be
supplemented with swarms of small unmanned aircraft and unmanned
submarines.

In Kaminer’s defintion, a ‘Super Swarm’ is one which has

overwhelming numbers and can include multiple modes: air, surface and
subsurface threats. Future unmanned craft may even switch between
modes, like the U.S. Navy’s own Flimmerand Flying Sea
Glider prototypes, which could fly to a target area and dive into
the water to become submarines, or approach underwater before
executing a pop-up attack.

Super Swarms represent both an opportunity and a threat for the U.S.
Navy, and Kaminer’s work covers both defensive and offensive
operations. The Navy is already a leader in offensive swarm
operations, with its LOCUST drone swarmdeveloped by Raytheon. The
key for both is how the swarm is controlled. Current drones are
piloted remotely by humans; this becomes impossible with more than a
few drones, both due to the demand for personnel and bandwidth
restrictions. Instead, the swarm will need to control itself.

“A swarm with 10,000 or more drones must have extremely high levels
of autonomy,” says consultant Zak Kallenborn. “No human being
could handle the amount of information necessary to make decisions.“

Most solutions to the challenge involve swarming algorithms, which

work in ways similar to flocks or birds of swarms of insects seen in
nature. If every member of the swarm follows the same few simple
rules, the swarm can maintain cohesion without units colliding with
each other. Similar rules allows insects colonies, from mound-
building termites to foraging bees, to work effectively as a team
without any central controlling intelligence.

A mumurmation or flock of starlings; thousands of[+]

DAVID HAMBLING

The swarm can be defeated by taking advantage of its internal rules

– if these can be figured out. For example, an entire swarm whose
members all have a collision-avoidance rule can be ‘herded’ by a
few outsider drones, or may be fooled into running into each other.
If the members of the swarm are all programmed to attack what they
see as the highest-value target in range, then they can all be
decoyed into attacking the same dummy.

“A targeting error could generate cascading errors throughout the

entire swarm,” says Kallenborn.

However the challenge is figuring out the algorithms that govern an

attacking swarm about which nothing is known. Kaminer’s previous
work on such “xSwarms” has explored how to figure out the
internals of a swarm’s operation by observing its movement and how
it reacts to intruders. He believes sending in agent provocateur
drones will provoke reactions that can be analyzed and exploited.

The Navy has also laid the groundwork for swarm vs. swarm tactics, in
a study on Air Superiority via Decentralized Swarming Tactics and
Autonomous Pursuit employing a fleet of small drones to develop
tactics against multiple attackers. This built on the
earlier Service Academies Swarm Challenge hosted by DARPA in 2017
in which three teams competed in an aerial version of Capture the
Flag with swarms of 25 drones on each side. Perhaps unsurprisingly
given their history in this area, the U.S. Naval Academy won that
one.

Post-game analysis at DARPA’s 2017 drone swarm[+]

DARPA

The biggest challenge internationally appears to come from China,

which is developing swarming capability as a means of asymmetric
warfare, in particular to neutralize the U.S advantage in aircraft
carriers. A lineup of Chinse combat drone systems spotted by
satellite last year included not only various large drones such as
the Sharp Sword stealth drone and the Wing Loong Reaper-alike, but
also at least two groups of smaller swarming drones. No details are
known about these swarms.

A future Super Swarm attack on a naval force is likely to take place

at speeds that no human can follow, with attacking and defending
forces attempting to work out each other’s algorithms, exploit and
outmaneuver them in real time, over, on and under the water
simultaneously. The question is what are the best tactics in such
combats, and what matters more out of speed, agility, firepower,
brains, or sheer numbers? That’s the sort of crucial question that
the latest phase of Navy research will address.
This type of robot-wars future is not inevitable. Kallenborn has
previous argued that some types of drone swarm under
development have sufficient destructive power to count as Weapons of
Mass Destruction and could be limited by international law. And this
would include the type of Super Swarms the Navy is studying.

“A swarm with 10,000 or more armed drones absolutely should be

classified as a weapon of mass destruction,” says Kallenborn.

While existing laws might go some way to controlling such weapons,

the legal framework needs strengthening. In particular, Kallenborn
believes the U.S. needs to formally take the position that large
swarms of autonomous lethal drones should be considered WMD,
and current international discussions on lethal robots need to move
forward.

“The opportunity to develop global norms and treaties around drone

swarms and other autonomous weapons is now, “ says Kallenborn.
“Collective limits on the number of armed drones in a swarm would
reduce the risk to civilians and national security.”

Commentators are still chewing over the significance of last

week’s human-versus-AI AlphaDogfight result. However, if Kaminer
and Kallenborn are right about the potential of swarms, such
dogfights will soon look as antiquated as duels in biplanes.

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David Hambling

Author of 'Swarm Troopers: How small drones will conquer the world,' following cutting-
edge military technology in general and unmanned systems in particular. New science

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