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New Dimensions of Swarm Warfare

#1609

27

July 15, 2016

By Sanatan Kulshrestha

"They were coming at us like bees". "We would kill one lot and then more would
appear. It was the most amazing thing." Lt Col Twitty, Commander 3rd Battalion
15th Infantry, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraq, 2003.
Swarms in nature have always intrigued humans because individually the animals or
the insects do not appear to have intelligence but in a swarm, they are able to move as a
cohesive intelligent formation capable of taking actions befitting an intelligent life form.
Some of the worlds largest swarms in animal kingdom include mosquitoes, Argentine
Ants, Christmas Island Crabs, krill, springbok, and locusts. Peter Miller, in Swarm
Theory[1] brings out that swarm intelligence works because of simple creatures
following simple rules, each one acting on local information and also that, a smart
swarm is a group of individuals who respond to one another and to their environment
in uncertainty, complexity, and change.
The use of swarms in warfare has been observed for over 2000 years, some examples
include:
Battle of Alexandria Eschate, 329 BC Scythians mounted Archers,
Battle of Carrhae, 53 BC Parthians mounted Archers
Battle of Khambula, 1879 Zulus Dismounted light infantry armed with spears
Battle of Britain, 1940 Air Battle of Sept 15, 1940 British single-seat Spitfire and Hurricane fighter Aircraft
Battles for Objectives Moe, Larry, and Curley, Baghdad, Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2003 Iraqi and Syrian
light infantry.

Swarming has also been looked in to by US Military institutes in academic studies and
war games. RAND has studies by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Swarming and the
Future of Conflict, 2000; Sean J.A. Edwards, Swarming on the Battlefield: Past,
Present, and Future, 2000; and Sean J.A. Edwards, Swarming and the Future of
Warfare, 2005. In the last document, the author has opined that:
Swarming occurs when several units conduct a convergent attack on a target from multiple axes. It involves
pulsing where units rapidly converge on a target, attack it, and then disappear.
Swarming is of two types, one where units arrive on a battlefield as a single mass, disassemble, and attack

the enemy from many directions, and the second, where the dispersed units converge and attack without forming a
single mass.
Five variables are essential for a swarm attack to be successful these are, superior situational awareness,
elusiveness, standoff capability, encirclement, and simultaneity.

A new approach to achieve coordination amongst a system of large number of simple

robots has emerged during biological studies of swarms in nature as well as during
applications of Artificial Intelligence in to mechanical swarms it is called Swarm
Robotics. Ant robots are swarm robots that communicate via trail of markings, for
example, heat, odor, light, chemical substances, and transceivers.
Microbots is a generic term applicable to very small robots spanning robots of sizes
from, small robots (<100 cm), minirobots (<10 cm), milirobots (< 1 cm), microbots (<1
mm) to nanobots (
Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms, Symbrion[2]. This project is funded by the European
Commission. It is inspired by the biological world. Its aim is to develop a framework in which a
homogeneous swarm of miniature interdependent robots can co-assemble into a larger robotic organism for problem
solving. It has its roots in previous two projects called I-SWARM and SWARMROBOT.
3D printing of microbots[3]. Engineers at Harvard have developed an ingenious layered folding 3D printing
process by which it is feasible to mass-produce robotic insects. The size is <2.5 cm in diameter and <0.25 cm in
height. Many such pop up microbots can be printed from a single sheet.
Kilobot[4] (Self-organizing thousand-robot swarm). Another project undertaken by engineers at Harvard
aims at providing a simple platform for enactment of complex behaviors using 1024 small robots or Kilobots. It has
been heralded as a stepping-stone in development of collective artificial intelligence.

All of the above projects and many more on similar lines have been funded by military
R&D agencies including DARPA. All have military applications as is evident from the
fact that the U.S. Military is looking at incorporating roles for swarms in its
transformation programs[5]. These swarms of intelligent UGVs, UAVs, and UUVs are
intended to sense, recognize, and adapt to the changing situation. The sensor networks
will be self-aware, self-healing, and self-defending.
In October 2015, US Army tested swarms of commercial off the shelf drones for
applications in the military. Barry Hatchett of the Army's Program Executive Office for
Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation stated, It has been proved that consumer
[drones] can be used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, distraction
tactics and, in the future, the ability to drop small munitions."[6]
In a landmark trial, this year the US Navys Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology
(LOCUST) program aims to have thirty drones flying together without having to be
individually controlled, maintaining separation safely like a bird swarm. The operator
would be piloting the whole swarm as a single unit instead of controlling individual
UAVs. The trial would have far-reaching impact upon future of swarm warfare in the

US armed forces.
The day is not far when the battlefield would graduate from ISR microbot swarms to
weaponised microbot swarms carrying new age explosives delivered ingeniously into
the enemies heart. The technology would leap frog to provide counter swarms as also
counter-counter swarms. The era of the small and many appears to be dawning on the
battlefield.
I need a stealth bomber thats going to get close, and then its going to drop a whole
bunch of smalls some are decoys, some are jammers, some are ISR [intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance] looking for where the SAMs are. Some of them are
kamikaze airplanes that are going to kamikaze into those SAMs, and theyre cheap.
You have maybe 100 or 1,000 surface-to-air missiles, but were going to hit you with
10,000 smalls, not 10,000 MQ-9s. Thats why we want smalls.[7]
Burdine, USAF

Colonel Travis

The Author is Senior Fellow at New Westminster College, Vancouver, Canada. Views
expressed are personal.
References
[1] http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/swarms/miller-text/1
[2] http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/85478_en.html
[3] https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2012/02/new-mass-production-techniquerobotic-insects-spring-life
[4] http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/08/self-organizing-thousand-robotswarm
[5] US Armys future unit of action UA, US Navys After Next, and US Air forces
Global Strike Force programs.
[6] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2999890/robotics/us-army-testsswarms-of-drones-in-major-exercise.html
[7]http://www.businessinsider.com/air-force-wants-swarms-of-small-kamikazedrones-to-defeat-missiles-2016-5?IR=T

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