A ROBOT submarine glides stealthily towards the coast before launching dozens of small drones into the air. Individually, these drones can鈥檛 do much damage, but as a swarm they are hard to defend against. They can carry explosives or electronic jammers capable of knocking out a radar system or other sensors.
This is the plan for LOCUST, the US Navy鈥檚 low-cost, swarming technology, which has just been revealed in Pentagon documents.
The project will probably use Coyote drones made by the US defence firm Raytheon. Each has a foldable tail, propeller and wings, which pop out as the craft is fired from a tube-shaped launcher.
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Coyotes weigh 6 kilograms, have a 1.5 metre wingspan and can fly for 2 hours at 100聽kilometres per hour on battery power. They can carry different weapons depending on the mission.
These drones are relatively inexpensive, with the whole swarm costing less than a standard missile. And losing a few members of the swarm isn鈥檛 a big deal, as the rest of the pack can carry on their mission regardless.
In a demonstration on land, 33 of these drones were launched in 40聽seconds. The craft are set up to autonomously fly in formation and an operator can control and co-ordinate them as one.
Bigger boats
The latest phase of the project aims to work out how to knock out聽defence systems and radar by聽launching a swarm from an autonomous underwater robot.
This idea isn鈥檛 totally novel. There have been test launches of聽drones from small robot submarines, but larger robot submarines under development could launch bigger swarms. Boeing鈥檚 Echo Voyager submarine, for example, is 16 metres long with a 9-metre cargo bay. In theory, it could carry several hundred of these drones.
The US Navy already flies some drones from its conventional submarines. The BlackWing, developed by California-based AeroVironment, is another small tube-launched aircraft, used by submerged submarines to spy on targets ashore or at long range. It has been in use since 2017.
Using a robot submarine for a drone swarm launch is cheaper than using a ship or aircraft and, of course, there are no people on board who could be injured if it is聽attacked, says Robert Bunker at聽the Strategic Studies Institute in Pennsylvania.
The biggest advantage, though, is stealth, he says. To launch the drones, the submarines won鈥檛 even have to come to the surface.
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While the drones in a LOCUST swarm may act as missiles with small explosive warheads, there may be better ways to use a swarm, says Bunker.
He suggests that rather than relying on explosives, some of the聽aircraft could carry jammers or聽spoofing devices to confuse radar, pulse weapons to disrupt electronics, or other means of making radar ineffective without necessarily destroying it.
In the current phase of development, LOCUST swarms will be launched from the air and the ground at the US Marine Corps聽Warfighting Laboratory in Virginia and tested for jamming communications.
Then, next year, the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Florida will work on underwater launches that target the swarm on air defences.
