"Wrong bees" do not produce honey, but they sting painfully
Unmanned aircraft will experience a real boom today. The developers are working both on improving the characteristics of the drones themselves and on the tactics of their use. One of the promising directions is the implementation of the concept of flock, or swarm application.
With the increase in the characteristics of combat drones with the use of high technologies, in addition to the development costs, the UAVs themselves turn out to be expensive: their cost is comparable to the price of manned combat aircraft, or even exceeds it. At the same time, drones are very vulnerable to the actions of air defense and electronic warfare (EW) of the enemy.
As an alternative to multifunctional expensive drones, the concept of simultaneous use of many cheap and small devices operating as part of a single group is proposed. Several tens or hundreds of drones working together as part of a single plan will inevitably saturate the airspace over the combat area. Some of them will be shot down, but the rest will hit the set targets.
Reducing the dimension of drones leads to their less visibility. Along with the use of radio-transparent or radio-absorbing materials, this will make it difficult both to detect a flock of drones and to point weapons at them.
The low cost will allow drones to be produced by hundreds and thousands and used for swarm attacks. This task is quite solvable, since modern UAV subsystems can be quite cheap. Systems implementing this approach are called swarm or pack systems – due to the obvious analogy with how a pack of wolves hunts for prey. Or, on the contrary, how a flock of birds avoids an attack, disorienting the aggressor and making his attack ineffective.
Drones belonging to such a flock must interact with each other to perform a common task. Theoretically, a swarm of drones could function as swarms of bees displaying collective intelligence.
Developers should offer solutions for organizing joint piloting in the flock, preventing collisions in the air, distributing tasks between drones in a changing environment, as well as ensuring the reconfiguration of the group in case of a change in its composition – the loss of drones or, conversely, the addition of additional ones.
The "division of labor" in the group can also work to reduce the cost of individual UAVs. Some of the drones may just be false targets. The other part is to perform intelligence functions. The third is to carry weapons.
The distribution of functions in solving tasks between small, inexpensive and numerous platforms can provide better adaptation while accelerating maintenance cycles. Monofunctional devices are cheaper and faster to develop and put into production. Combined, they form easily formed groups of different dimensions, most suitable for a specific task.
It is assumed that swarms of UAVs will solve not only the task of suppressing enemy air defenses. Swarms can be effective in searching for enemy artillery, in urban warfare, and in counterterrorism operations.
Work on the creation of swarming unmanned systems is being carried out, in particular, by the United States, Israel and China. At the same time, China plays the first violin in this trio. Developments on this topic receive substantial investment support in China.
Work on the group use of UAVs has been underway in China since 2020. In particular, the Chinese Academy of Electronics and Information Technology (CAEIT), a subsidiary of the Chinese state corporation China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, is engaged in them.
Presumably, as part of the swarm, Chinese developers are using CH-901 kamikaze drones. This is a tactical class vehicle with a length of 1.2 m and a maximum take-off weight of 9 kg. It is launched from the launch tube. The flight takes place at a distance of up to 10 km from the operator at altitudes of 100-1500 m. The duration of the flight, depending on the load, is from 40 to 120 minutes. The company does not provide data on the CH-901 warhead, but at least a high-explosive fragmentation variant can be assumed.
In 2020, a group of UAVs were tested, the launch was carried out from a multi-channel launcher on the Dongfeng Mengshi chassis. Drones can also be launched from air carriers, for example from helicopters – Bell 206L and Robinson R-series helicopters are involved in the tests.
China is the first in the world to implement the concept of a swarm of combat drones-multicopters. It implies the possibility of a group strike on the enemy with various swarm configurations, and the swarm has very high flexibility of use and the degree of survival. The swarm will include drones with four (MR40) or six (MR150) propellers, each of them carrying reconnaissance equipment (including radar) and aviation ammunition. A swarm of multicopters can operate in a network-centric environment. Its radius of action is approximately 30 km, within this radius, targets of any type are almost guaranteed to be destroyed.
A swarm of drones can create a reconnaissance and strike complex: a launcher for 12 UAVs is placed on the chassis of an armored car: four reconnaissance "Sula-30" and eight kamikaze "Sula-89" with a 2-kilogram warhead.
The military-industrial complex of the People's Republic of China allows to produce mastered samples of equipment in almost any quantities. Private companies can also produce drones. This will allow the PLA to have tens of thousands of combat drones only, and much cheaper than their Western counterparts.
In China, they are working on simplifying and automating the control of UAVs. They can be controlled by people who are unfit for combat service, but who are good at computer skills. Drones will be able to perform an increasing number of functions autonomously (including takeoff and landing). In the future, it is planned to use artificial intelligence up to the creation of fully autonomous combat systems.
Despite the positive results of the experiments, all these results are intermediate. Today there is not a single swarm drone system adopted for service. For the further implementation of the concepts of interaction of drones in the group, many issues need to be resolved. Among them: configuration management of a group of drones; distribution of tasks; definition of the hierarchy of management; flight control of a group with individual trajectories. H
Vasily Ivanov