Introduction In a July 2020 report , New America identified 38 states with armed drone programmes, 11 of which had used armed drones in combat. [1] Twenty-eight more states have programmes in development. [2] Global exports enable the rapid proliferation of drones, as states share drone technology with others. The US, Israel, and China have been the largest exporters. [3] Iran has also helped non-state allies—Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthi rebels—acquire drones. [4] The expanding, broad commercial drone industry and simple do-it-yourself ingenuity have also helped the Islamic State and various lone-wolf actors acquire and use them. [5] Single drones are increasingly being integrated into collaborative drone swarms. Precisely defined, drone swarms are “multiple unmanned systems capable of coordinating their actions to accomplish shared objectives.” [a] [6] These are proliferating quickly as well. Armenia, China, France, India, Israel, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, and the US all have drone swarm programmes under development. [7] In May 2021, Israel became the first state to use a drone swarm in combat, collecting and relaying information on Hamas militant locations for follow-up attacks. [8] In most cases, the drone swarm consists of homogeneous, aerial drones, such as the 103 Perdix drone that the US Strategic Capabilities office launched out of three F/A-18 Super Hornets in January 2017. [9] Others, such as Elbit System’s Torch-X, integrate diverse ground and aerial vehicles. [10]
Authors
- Attribution
- Zachary Kallenborn, “A Plague on the Horizon: Concerns on the Proliferation of Drone Swarms,” ORF Issue Brief No. 743 , October 2024, Observer Research Foundation.
- Pages
- 20
- Published in
- India
Table of Contents
- Introduction 3
- Issues Around Drone 4
- Swarm Proliferation 4
- The Demand for 5
- Drone Swarms 5
- Cheap mass 5
- Limited operator requirements 5
- The Demand for 6
- Drone Swarms 6
- Distributed complexity 6
- Broad military applications 6
- The Demand for 7
- Drone Swarms 7
- Fears of remote warfare 7
- Reliability questions 7
- The Demand for 8
- Drone Swarms 8
- Dealing with adversarial action 8
- Infrastructure and support systems 8
- The Supply of Drone 9
- Swarms 9
- The Supply of Drone 10
- Swarms 10
- Combatting Proliferation 11
- Combatting Proliferation 12
- Conclusion 13
- Endnotes 14
- Endnotes 15
- Endnotes 16
- Endnotes 17
- Endnotes 18
- Endnotes 19
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