Drone Swarms – A Future Threat to Armed Forces?
With the exponential growth of Space-Air-Ground integrated network, swarm robotics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), more and more countries have been moving towards a technology which enables a single pilot to control multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at once – the drone swarming technology (Chen et.al., 2020a:278). Inspired by swarms of insects, drone swarms are built of multiple units of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are able “to self-organise, to collaborate, and to complete multiple tasks together” (Joyce, 2020). This was largely influenced by military drones becoming more sophisticated and advanced, i.e. much smaller, lighter, cheaper and more jam-resistant, as they are capable to operate at low and medium altitudes. Consequently to these developments, drone swarms are now deployable both for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), offensive and defensive missions as they have greater ISR and longer range and endurance.