The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is exploring the future U.S. use of autonomous drone swarms against high-tech adversaries under the agency’s Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms (AMASS) program.
Responses to a broad agency announcement (BAA) last November are due Feb. 10.
“Today, our peer-state adversaries could invade their neighbors with little warning given their time-distance-mass advantage,” the BAA said. “Adversary A2/AD [anti-access/area denial] bubbles with sophisticated air defense, indirect fires, precision weapons, and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities would severely limit Joint Service and Coalition operations under the bubble. Engaging highvalued targets from outside the bubble poses its own challenges. Long-range precision guided weapons are limited in number, expensive, and require detailed targeting information.”
“Subsurface operations would be possible in a maritime environment, but submarines would certainly be put at risk,” per the BAA. “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) would offer an alternative to manned platforms entering the A2/AD environment, but current unmanned platforms require frequent or constant communications, which may not be possible in real-world scenarios. The services and coalition partners are making significant investments in artificial intelligence and autonomy to enable UAV, USV, and UGV platforms to function independently in A2/AD environments, but have yet to achieve the large-scale, dynamic autonomy necessary to be effective against a peerstate adversary’s A2/AD capabilities.”
DARPA said it has budgeted $78 million for an upcoming award to the winner of AMASS.
“The current vision is that low-cost swarms with diverse sensors and kinetic and non-kinetic effectors would primarily be pre-positioned forward and launched remotely, providing rapid response, and adaptability to overcome the adversary’s time-distance-mass advantage,” the BAA said. “This technology will provide Combatant Commands with a solution to the A2/AD threat without putting forces and high-valued assets at risk. Reestablishing joint operations and air superiority will enable Combatant Commanders to fully utilize all available assets to defeat or deter adversary aggression.”
AMASS is to demonstrate how DoD will be able to use thousands of autonomous drones against adversaries.
Last year, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), then the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and now its ranking member, touched on the possible use of such drone swarms by the U.S.
In light of the number of global threats and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ambitions of Russian President Putin, Smith said that the U.S. needs to bolster its allies on NATO’s eastern flank with military technology and invest in systems that are affordable, numerous and survivable–such as drone swarms (Defense Daily, Feb. 24, 2022).
“To me, the way those threats have emerged comes down to two words–information and survivability,” he said. “Our ability to move information and get it to the people who need it most instantaneously and protect it is key to being successful in warfare. And the second thing is, ‘What is a survivable system?’ The swarm of drones issue brings this home. A swarm of drones can get into areas that an aircraft carrier or F-35 can’t. Think about that for a second. We spent all this money–certainly on the F-35 and other things–trying to come up with a platform that’s going to be more survivable. That’s the whole point of the F-35, but there are air defense systems that are going to make it difficult for the F-35 to survive that a much cheaper swarm of drones can penetrate.”
Using lessons from the Skyborg, Loyal Wingman, and DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) programs, the U.S. Air Force is to move out on fielding a significant combat drone force, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said last year. (Defense Daily, Feb. 7, 2022).